Sumo Wrestlers Can’t Become Ballerinas: Meditations on Culture and Whether Culture Does Indeed Eat Strategy for Breakfast

2,000 years ago, Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the ruler of the Persian Empire, who summoned a group of Greeks before him: “Since they cremate their dead, the king wonders, ‘What would it take for them to eat their dead fathers?’ The Greeks balk at this question, explaining that no price in the world would be high enough to turn them into cannibals. Next, the king summons a group of Callatians, known for eating the bodies of their dead. He asks, ‘What price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire?’ The Callatians beg him not to mention such horrors!”

This story shines a spotlight on how different cultures can be. A “copy and paste” of cultural traits from another organization or team may actually cause organ rejection and leave you in a worse position than when you started. Could a professional athlete excel in another sport that requires completely different traits? Could a professional sumo wrestler, who has to eat about 10 times what the average adult needs to consume, compete professionally as a ballerina, who has to train eight hours a day for six days a week?

Michael Jordan, arguably the best basketball player of all time, had a foray into professional baseball. And while he might not have been as bad as most people seem to say he was, he almost certainly would never have been in contention for a top 100 Major League Baseball spot. AOL/Time Warner, described as “the worst merger in history,” saw culture as widely to blame, with the president of Time Warner, Richard Parsons, saying: “It was beyond certainly my abilities to figure out how to blend the old media and the new media culture.”

As Jack Welsh, one of the greatest CEOs of all time, says, “You can do a thousand spreadsheets on acquisitions, but if you don’t get the culture right, the numbers might look good but ... the deal is going to fall on its face.”

           As a rejoinder to the April 2016 edition of Harvard Business Review titled, You Can’t Fix Culture. Just Focus on Your Business and The Rest Will Follow, as well as my deep dissatisfaction with HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture, the below is an attempt to wrap my head around capital “C” Culture. To do so I will rely on what the great Rudyard Kipling called his six honest serving men: “I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.”

These questions—like a transmission in a car—will help you, your team and your organization convert effort into impact; while also avoiding burnout and redlining. So without further ado, let’s get off to the races.

Question One: What is Culture and what are some good, bad & ugly examples?

The HubSpot Culture Manifesto[1] describes Culture as “A set of shared beliefs, values and practices.” I would add that Culture is the sum of individual behaviors that take place across an organization. The common behaviors, language and jargon, ways of working—the how work gets done. To emphasize the power of words and common language at Amazon, the phrase “disagree and commit” is described by Jeff Bezos as “the single best business phrase for building a culture of a company,” because it allows a team to unite and move forward.

           It is important to acknowledge that what sits below behaviors are mindsets—the thoughts, beliefs or feelings we have. Picture an iceberg, with behaviors visible above the surface and mindsets below.

Whether it’s Steve Jobs with his “reality distortion field,” Napoleon telling his soldiers “There shall be no Alps!” or even Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, our perceptions—what we believe is possible—can play a large role in what we end up achieving. In many ways, our beliefs determine reality. The way we interpret things changes how we see the world. So mindsets do matter! Imagine a workplace where employees encourage, accept and provide positive and constructive feedback to others regardless of where they sit in the hierarchy; and the mindset that sits below this could be that while providing feedback—especially to others more senior—can be difficult, it is critical in helping them and the organization achieve their full potential.

Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund manager in the world with $160 billion under management, is a great example of this mindset and behavior, summed up well in the LinkedIn Article An employee slammed hedge fund giant Ray Dalio in an email. Dalio loved it so much, he talked about it in a TED talk. This employee wrote the CEO an email that said, “Ray—you deserve a D- for your performance today in the meeting … you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have been that disorganized.” Ray’s response was to say, “Isn’t that great? That’s great. It’s great because I need feedback like that.” While this Cultural trait might not be everyone’s cup of tea, just like cremation might not be, it has been effective for Bridgewater Associates.

           William Rehnquist said, “I may not be able to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Culture is similar. But there are indeed some tools used to measure Culture, and I would recommend picking one to baseline where you are and how you compare with others. As the great management thinker Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” These measurement instruments will not meet the same level of scientific precision as say a blood test—they are probably closer to the Apgar Score, a method to quickly summarize the health of newborn children against infant mortality by checking their heart rate, respiration, skin color, muscle tone and reflexes. This determines whether extra medical care is needed (one minute after birth and again five minutes after birth). The score is out of ten (a sum of five criteria that scale from zero to two). Dr. Virginia Apgar, who created the score in 1952, was able to link the scores to infant mortality. “The lowest-scoring babies had a mortality rate of 14%, compared to 0.13% for the highest-scoring babies.” The Apgar score has been credited with saving millions of lives.

Nonetheless, similar to Rehnquist, I would argue that we intuitively know good, bad and ugly Cultures when we see and experience them. Be it toxic individuals in leadership positions, high turnover, low morale, high levels of bureaucracy—you often don’t need an assessment to know where you stand. Even the way people carry themselves—how tall they stand, how well they dress, how energized they are—can be a proxy for Culture.

There are good, bad and ugly Cultural traits in all organizations and teams, and many organizations don’t stand the test of time. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company has fallen fast, “from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently,” with nine out of ten Fortune 500 companies in 1955 no longer in the index. Organizations put up as darlings one minute can be gone the next. Consider Atari, a cautionary tale summed up in the NPR podcast episode titled Total Failure: The World’s Worst Video Game, where the creator of the game stated, “E.T. was more of a symptom. The same ambition, arrogance and hype that made the game a flop ultimately doomed Atari to collapse.”

Remember the Aesop fable The Lion, the Ass, and the Fox: Learn from the Failures of Others. A lion, fox and ass are all hunting together. They gather a huge amount of food. The lion asks the ass to divide the food. The ass divides the portions equally. This angers the lion, and he kills the ass. The lion then asks the fox to divide the food. The fox wastes no time; he quickly gives a huge heap to the lion and keeps a small portion to himself. The lion asks the fox, “Who taught you to divide so fairly?” The fox replies, “I learned from the ass.” Learn from watching others.

Question Two: Why does Culture matter and why should we care about it?

In The Godfather, Part 1 (voted by some as the greatest film of all time), protagonist Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, states when talking about the need to kill the corrupt police captain, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” While it’s no doubt an incredible scene, I would put it to the reader that you cannot decouple “business” from “personal.” You cannot segment what you do—whether that’s making money in the context of a business or creating some sort of value in the context of a public or social sector institution, from how you do it—the way you run the organization to achieve this outcome. This is what Jack Welsh described as “the numbers” and “the behaviors.” They are essentially two feet on the same person, the yin and yang, the gin in the Campari.

For those who still believe Culture is the “soft, fluffy, nice-to-have HR stuff” and gets in the way of making money, I would argue that you have Culture, whether you notice it or not, whether you invest in it and emphasize it or not. The Glengarry Glen Ross “Put that coffee down! Coffee’s for closers only. Do you think I’m f*#@ing with you?” school of management might not feel like Culture. But it is. These are specific behaviors that are taking place that aggregate to form Culture. The question then becomes, Are these effective behaviors that are unlocking the full potential of the individuals within the organization? Like soil in which plants can either flourish or struggle, your Culture can be rich and full of nutrients to help individuals, teams and the wider organization grow, or it can be barren and nutrient-poor.

Adam Smith, the patron saint of capitalism, talked about the need to be “loved” and to “be lovely,” as well as the importance of earning “honest income” and not taking advantage of others. Smith would never have been a proponent of some of the darker traits of unfettered capitalism, such as the Pinto fiasco that saw Ford weigh the costs of deaths, injuries and car damages resulting from a defective fuel system to be far less (~$49.5m) than a recall and $11 design change per car (totaling $137m).

So whether you’re like Richard Branson, who states that “Fun is at the core of the way [we] like to do business ... fun is the secret of Virgin’s success,” or an exceptionally detail-oriented, customer-focused business like The Oberoi Group, a luxury hotel chain where the temperature of the tea is kept consistent and staff members meet nightly to go over each guest’s individual preference and history at the hotel, you have a Culture.

We know that heart attacks are 20% higher on Mondays (unless these Mondays are public holidays, of course). According to Gallup, only one in three employees are fully engaged at work. And engagement matters, with one study finding that engaged, activated employees are three times more likely to take initiative and go above and beyond to make continuous improvement suggestions and recommend the organization to a friend. We know that there is more we could do to bring Freud’s belief that “Love and work … work and love, that’s all there is … love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness” to life. We know there is value being left on the table.

Ultimately you want a coherent Culture because it can help people across an organization get work done more effectively, efficiently, safely and sustainably. A winning culture can unleash the full potential of people and prove that the sum is worth more than the parts. Think about the fact that the women’s 400-meter world record is 47.6 seconds; and the women’s 4 x 100-meter relay is 40.82 seconds. Four athletes operating effectively as a team can perform 20% faster than one athlete going it on their own.

           Moreover, I would argue that a lot of great achievements that seemed like individual feats were actually team efforts. Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute mile in 1954, had a number of pacesetters supporting him in the race, not to mention his coaching staff. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon took over 400,000 engineers, scientists and technicians working together (not to mention the financial resources of about $152 billion in today’s dollars). Sir Edmund Hillary reaching the peak of Everest would not have been possible without Tenzing Norgay and a small army of Sherpas.

As Rudyard Kipling stated so well in his poem The Law of the Jungle, “For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” And if Kipling isn’t enough, Ray Dalio outlines in Principles: “You have to make two things great—the culture and the people. If these two things are great [your] organization can navigate the twists and turns to get you where you want to go.”

Question Three: Where does Culture come from?

An experimenter put five monkeys in a cage. A bunch of bananas are placed on top of a ladder within the cage. A monkey spots them and begins to make haste up the ladder, only to be sprayed down by the experimenter, who also sprays all the other monkeys. They sit there cold and drenched, until another monkey, unable to resist the temptation, tries to get to the bananas. This monkey is also sprayed, and once again, all the others. When another monkey tries to climb the ladder, not wanting to get sprayed, the other monkeys stop him and beat him up. New monkeys are added to the cage and old ones removed, until no monkeys will go near the ladder even though they themselves never experience getting hosed. Even if the conditions change and the monkeys no longer get hosed, the behavioral norm has become entrenched.

In your own work environment, there is likely a range of entrenched behavioral norms that might not be serving you, your team or the wider organization. While you might not get hosed, there are probably consequences for going against these norms.

There are parts of Culture that can be documented and formalized; whether through a Culture manifesto (made famous by the Netflix one); the corporate statements (purpose, vision, mission, values); or competencies (key behavioral norms) built into the formal performance management system. However, a lot of Culture is developed by informal behaviors. Jack Welsh says, “But the [person] that kills every organization is the jerk who delivers the numbers without the behaviors … and you give a promotion to the right people that people see as role models that are doing the right thing, behaving in the right way, that is worth a thousand speeches. Where if you promote a jerk, you can write and you can communicate with every technology in the world but nobody’s going to believe you.”

Chief of the Army, Lieutenant-General David Morrison, said in response to a scandal involving misconduct, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” The words said or not said, the actions taken or not taken, the activities prioritized or deprioritized—the ways of working that are incentivized and disincentivized aggregate up. 

Question Four: Who matters when we think about changing and embedding Culture?

There is a saying that the fish rots from the head. The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success (a book Bill Ackerman used to energize investment in the disgraced Valeant Pharmaceuticals, now named Bausch Health Companies Inc., stating that CEO Mike Pearson could have made the top 8) might have you convinced that the CEO is the most critical individual in an organization. But there are other perspectives to consider.

One of the world’s largest private equity firms, The Blackstone Group (and Sandy Ogg, former Chief Human Resources Officer at Unilever) say it is the critical 2% in the highest value generating or enabling roles of the organization. For Gallup’s It’s The Manager: Gallup Finds That The Quality Of Managers and Team Leaders is The Single Biggest Factor In Your Organization’s Long-term Success, it’s the manager (usually about 15% of an organization). If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, you might think it’s closer to 20-25% of an organization. Or the late and great Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, who required every employee to take Intel’s course on effective meetings. So is it just one person—the CEO—is it everyone in the organization, or is it somewhere in between?

I don’t think there is a definitive answer to this one. If the CEO (the captain of the ship) is not supportive or does not believe in the importance of a winning, effective Culture, it is arguably worth placing your efforts elsewhere, given that putting resources against improving Culture has opportunity costs. However, with CEO buy-in, I would look to focus on the critical few. While the Pareto Principle is important here, I would be even more focused on using Price’s Law—which takes the square root of the total employees in an organization or members of a team and states that approximately half the value is coming from those individuals. So in an organization of 100 employees, it would be 10 individuals; 1,000, it would be around 30. This phenomenon plays out in a range of fields, as Malcolm Gladwell states: “When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme; a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.”

So where can one find these critical few? I really like the pirate metaphor—you have a ship full of captains, crew, passengers, pirates and castaways as representative of the employees in an organization or team. The critical few—your captains—are usually your most influential individuals. Some of them will sit in your most critical value-creating roles (e.g. leading sales for one of your most strategic products). Others might not be high in the formal organization hierarchy, but own the “water cooler”—the influential individuals that others go to in the organization to understand what’s really going on and express their true sentiment. However, once you have formally engaged this group of captains, you do need to engage the managers and people leaders—and yes, ultimately Culture comes down to every team member. Even if there is just one toxic team member, one “pirate” who tries to sink the ship—it can hold the whole group back. 

Question Five: How can you change and improve Culture?

Peter Drucker once said: “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try instead to work with what you’ve got.” These are profound and provocative words. Drucker is not saying do not focus on Culture or look to improve it, but rather don’t try to fundamentally become someone you’re not. A company can never be an exact replica of Amazon; a team can never be an exact replica of The Dream Team (the 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team, described as the greatest sports team ever assembled). We can, however, understand Cultural traits and bright spots from the best organizations, teams and individuals, and look to adopt these. Moreover, we can look to understand our unique strengths and emphasize them. Below I’ve outlined five areas of focus that one might find helpful when it comes to improving Culture.

Diagnose – Holding up the mirror in a meaningful way at least once a year to understand how effective your Culture is, what strengths and weaknesses you have and how you’re trending over time and against others is a powerful exercise. We already discussed that measuring Culture can be more like an Apgar Score—an aggregation of metrics—but there are many tools you can utilize. In addition to a quantitative measurement, qualitative feedback from focus groups and interviews can be powerful. However, these should really only be reinforcing what you probably know, and also provide you with a stronger evidence base and a more granular approach for how you can think about interventions.

Moreover, being slightly off in one’s understanding can result in ending up in a completely different place from what might have been intended. A plane flying 1% off course can very quickly end up in a different country than intended.

Digest – Once you’ve reviewed both the qualitative and quantitative results of the diagnostic, it becomes important to review in the context of your strategy (where and how you plan to win in the market). Based on where you want to end up (vision), how you plan to win (mission) and why you want to do this (purpose), it is worth reviewing the key behaviors (some call these values, others competencies, others both) you want to emphasize as part of how you want to run the organization. Take assessment of what others are doing—what positive and powerful Cultural traits could you take and improve upon? Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Destination – Once you’ve reviewed your key behaviors, it becomes important to think through what you need to actually do to improve your Culture. Given that Culture is an aggregation of all employees, you will need to reach everyone. This is where the “critical few” will come into play as key infrastructure. However, a few top-down “big bets” will be important, mixed with a range of business unit, division or geography specific initiatives, and then some bottom-up, individually driven changes. If these changes are not impacting employees’ day-to-day work, then I would raise the question of what return-on-investment they will have. This will need to be a balance between decentralized diversified bets with focus. Jack Ma, one of the richest people alive, says, “If there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one, just focus on one.”

Once you’re set on what you plan to do, ensure your plans are prioritized, resourced properly and a detailed, granular plan is developed that can be reviewed on a weekly basis. As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” And we all know that “No plan survives first contact with the enemy (Helmuth van Moltke).” Still, the benefits can be in the exercise itself rather than the precision of the actual plan. A funny story about Miroslav Holub’s Brief Thoughts on Maps provides a great illustration of this idea:

“The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland. It began to snow immediately, snowed for two days and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered: he had dispatched his own people to death. But the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps but of the Pyrenees.”

Decide – Once you have a plan, it’s time to get off on the right foot. There is a bad joke that highlights the importance of deciding to move forward: “Five frogs were on a log, and one decided to jump off; how many were left? The answer is five, because deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things.” Deciding which quick wins you will go after, in particular which sacred cows you will take out, will be important. If employees don’t see visible and material signs of change, it will be harder to convince them to get on—or remain on—the bus. These symbolic changes can often be hard, but they can be signals across the organization that this is not just corporate speak or lipstick on a pig. As the great self-help guru Dale Carnegie once said, “Action breeds confidence … go out and get busy.” Take action that is visible and ensure that this gets memorialized. Let’s not assume everyone saw or heard about the change. As Nobel Prize-winning writer and critic George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Determination – Improving and changing Culture requires reaching some sort of Escape Velocity. Aristotle once said, “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” In a similar vein, disciplined implementation is often not the shiny, interesting, dare I say sexy object—and thus can easily be deprioritized. As Atul Gawande says, “Discipline is hard—harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”

However, just making a few minor, superficial or short changes will not be sufficient. A half-baked, around-the-edges approach to implementation runs the risk of not working, and in some cases, causing more harm than good.

Question Six: When should you review an organization’s Culture?

Culture is often seen as a nice-to-have, “We’ll get to it when we have a chance” thing. However, I would suggest that kicking the can down the road on this is not a good idea, as emphasized in Aesop’s fable The Ants & the Grasshopper, in which a starving grasshopper begs the ants for food because he didn’t have time to store any as he was “too busy making music [money].” As you think about the annual budgeting process, I would also think about spending ~1 month doing a diagnostic of where you are when it comes to Culture and what changes are required; another ~2 months on detailed planning; and then the remaining ~9 months of the year getting after it.

Conclusion

One of the thousands of great thoughts Peter Drucker had was: “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.” We know that changing behaviors is difficult. Six out of seven heart attack patients don’t change their behavior despite their life being on the line. Jordan Peterson references a study in 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos where only one third of patients actually follow the full course of medication prescribed by a doctor.

While hard, change is possible and arguably necessary. It will require leadership. It will require more than just tinkering around the edges; as the great poet Charles Bukowski said: “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start ... It’s the only good fight there is.”

Questions to Noodle On

·      How do you define Culture?

·      What are the best books /articles you’ve read on Culture?

·      What organizations do you think have the best, worst or ugliest Cultural traits?

·      What have you seen work (or not work) when it comes to changing and improving Culture?

(All views are mine and not those of McKinsey and Company)

[1] If your organization does not have a cultural manifesto, I would highly recommend you develop one. These can be a powerful and energizing way to align people across the organization around what the organization is and is not. Netflix, HubSpot, Asana and Hootsuite are all great examples to look into.