Untitled Masterpiece

Untitled Masterpiece

I devour popular business books like they’re my kids’ Halloween candy.?And with the same results.

[Tumbleweed rolls by]

Now that I’ve firmly established my intellectual authority, here are some reflections on how to write a masterpiece on business culture.


Our Three Appetizers

First, I think we can all agree that celebrating successful companies and inspirational leaders is the writing equivalent of filling your entire back yard with rakes , destined to crack you in the face with the sting of survivorship bias and fundamental attribution error.??

I’m looking at you Good to Great .

Second-- and I probably should have started with this-- we can all agree that popular business books are pulp fiction, more for entertainment than advice.?No need for a highlighter when you’re reading in bed, unless it’s to google the executives’ names with “where are they now” nostalgia.??

“She got the CEO gig??Good on her!”

“He’s in… [single. finger. typing.]... prison!?Called it!”

Third, we can agree that we’ll want lots and lots of pragmatic, illustrative, colorful examples. But note that when we’re picking our business cases, we should promise the world-- promise future generations…our children really-- that we won’t use the same three stale examples that literally every other business writer in history has used:

1. Blockbuster laughing at Netflix.

2. Blackberry laughing at the iPhone.?

3. Everybody laughing at Steve Jobs.?

The honorable mention here is the 1986 space shuttle disaster.?Enough with the o-rings already.?NASA moved on two decades ago.?Business writers should too.

Oh and Kodak.?Poor Kodak.?If we have to read one more account of their having built the first digital camera... while pregnant... with twins... in a horse drawn wagon on the Oregon Trail.... two centuries before Instagram....??

We get it.

Exec Summary: let’s agree that the world needs fewer “success” stories (as entertaining as they are... once aged) and more failbooks (which are unavoidably and deliriously hilarious)--?Wally-Lamb-level dumpster-fire business cases that elevate what are essentially self-help books to the rank of classic literature.


Multiple Meat Courses

Ideally, any masterpiece on business culture would start with a framework: here’s how you set the table for culture-- because no one ever uses dining metaphors.??

Here’s how you serve the tiniest appetizer ever (the cultural POC).??

Here’s how to ladle the mystery soup (the cultural pilot).?

Then the main course (cultural adoption at scale): filet mignon wrapped in vegan bacon (just to send a mixed signal).?

And then [BAM!] dessert!?No joke there as we don't joke about dessert.?Ever.


Dessert

The book’s piece de resistance: for each course of the meal, we list some companies with people waaaay smarter than us that messed up their meals.?Royally.?With a capital R.?Like the Queen Elizabeth of fails .

For example:?

Did you know that Jack Welch once failed to smoke pork belly long enough and GE’s entire Aviation Division got trichinosis???

Me neither. But I’d buy that book!?

Did you know that Steve Case used the wrong mushrooms for his gazpacho, causing the fever dream we call the AOL-Time-Warner deal?

Pre-ordering that one.

Did you know that Jeff Bezos called every cut of beef that was shipped free to his house a Prime cut??[Now, *that* is a quality Dad joke.]

I could go on forever.

Did you know that Jamie Dimon bought Bear Stearns?

Here -- just take my money.


Sample Text: A Riverside View While Dining

Employees need clarity-- or so the thinking goes.?They need simplicity.?A compelling vision.?A north star.??

Who would disagree with that?

So... we use the cultural language of “[value] first”… as in “we put our people first” (an emphasis on fairness, diversity, and respect for the individual)?or “innovation first” (stressing experimentation, thoughtful risk-taking and agility/failing-fast) or “data first” (grounded in metrics and quantifiability, KPIs and OKRs). The most common one during my lifetime has been client first, a focus on exceptional service, value for money and empathy-driven design thinking.?

And recently-- to differentiate their companies-- some leaders have turned their cultural volume up to 11 by replacing the word “first” with “obsessed.”?Which makes for great pitch decks but gets me a little queasy.?Because business comms should never flirt with mental health words.?(But that’s another book entirely.)

[By the way, if it were up to me, we’d all go meta: a Culture First culture.?An homage to Bob Loblaw… for the four of us who loved Arrested Development.]

*The* question to ask is: why are there so many [value] first cultures to pick from-- each with its own books, communities and consultancies??The answer: because each one is compelling in its own right.?

But read any of that content closely and you quickly realize that whatever that first value is, the next ten are all a very close second.?No one is “client, client, client... and our people are a distant second.”??

So why write about it?

Life is less about what's first and more about finding balance-- between competing, equally-valid, equally-compelling priorities. Navigating that complexity and ambiguity-- the C and the A in VUCA -- is hard.?

The reason we love the language of [value] first is simple: it’s a heuristic -- an approach to problem solving that gives today’s employees-- many of whom still struggle with VUCA-- a practical method to get past never-ending talk-a-thons.??

Remember: a heuristic like this never guarantees the best outcome; but-- it does increase the probability of action. It also helps avoid the constant escalation of useless noise up the management chain-- the kind that frames you as passive and your team as being stuck in analysis-paralysis.

[Value] first changes that narrative to “Figure it out!?Ask yourself: what would a Client First or a Data First person do??Do *that* instead of having endless meetings; instead of using escalation as your path to action.”

In other words, calling one of your equally-compelling-but-competing values the first is just a mental shortcut to get to as-right-an-answer-as-possible as-quicky-as-possible.??

And that’s good for business.

As for the employees of tomorrow-- I’m sure that they’ll appreciate clarity as much as we do today but hopefully they won’t need it. Same with simplicity, vision, a north star.?Because the employees of tomorrow-- like many of us today-- will be adept at swimming daily in the River VUCA.


The After-Dinner Mint

The outline at the beginning of this piece-- along with the bibliography that follows as inspiration-- should get us started and keep us going for a while.??

If we start to lose momentum, we should just remember the words of Kautilya-- the author credited with writing The Science of Wealth (circa 280 BC, also called "Arthashastra" in Sanskrit)-- a treatise on economics as a specific element of statecraft... and the first business book ever.

He wrote “Revel in your mistakes, for they are yours and no one else’s.?The nobles might laugh-- the gods might laugh-- but remember that they also laughed at Steve Jobs.”


--


Bibliography: The Antacids (or Blogs to Mug for Fun and Profit)

1. The only piece I’ve written that actually makes me laugh: Inspired . Note that the comments section is the most fun I've ever had... in a comments section.

2. Some light bathroom reading on office culture:

3. Slightly more serious-- although...?let’s be honest-- some of us are not built for serious:

4. Some thoughts on engineering

5. Some reflections on coaching that make me sound like Mr. Rogers (not a bad thing):

6. Two interviews, thematically linked:

7. One podcast from American Banker on Return to Work .

8. A poster to inspire the entrepreneur in you.

9. A piece too cheesy to admit that I actually wrote it: Lessons from a Life (Long Ago) in Stand-Up Comedy ?

10.?And of course, an untitled masterpiece .

Lewis Liu

Director at BNY Mellon

3 年

As infinitesimal creatures "living" on a tiny speck of dust in the vast Universe, what are we??Why are we here??What's our purpose??Okay.. enough of that.?Your writing led me into that dark corner :)?Seriously though, everything is relative.?A bee can produce about a tea spoon of honey in its life time, which I sometimes consume with a single serving of tea.?What should we use to measure a human's life time contributions though, and, to what, for whom??I am pretty sure a bee produces honey not for my tea but for the survival of its species.?What about us human??I think I am circling back to that dark corner again..

Sudeep Kanjilal

Chief Data Officer | Chief Digital Officer | Sr Managing Director |

3 年

I can not only see the air quotes, but also hear the tone, the nuances of speech, and your posture. You write as you speak, and both are a delight ??

Great writing + brilliant sense of humor. ?? Keep doing it, hopefully a little bit more often. Maybe twice a month so we can get six posts per year? ??

Jonathan Pearl

Technology Strategist & Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Digital Transformation Leader

3 年

Always an entertaining read. The punch line for me is that we learn more from failure than success. I am not entirely sure that is what you intended to communicate but that is what I got. Oh and I did like the "Prime" joke....

Eran Zimbler

Senior Devops Engineer,CI/CD Expert, Python/Golang developer, learning rust

3 年

Great. Also funny you say about failure stories. Most sysadmin/devops stories and many of the security ones sare about the failures usually in more detail than how it was fixed.

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