Building A Culture That Works: The CEO As The Cultural Epicenter. Editor’s note: Peter Levine is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He has been a lecturer at both MIT and Stanford business schools and was the former CEO of XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix in 2007. Prior to XenSource, Peter was EVP of Strategic and Platform Operations at Veritas Software, where he helped grow the organization from no revenue to more than $1.5 billion, and from 20 employees to over 6,000.
Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @Peter_Levine. As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important. The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture. Foster an environment of open communication and the organization inherits a culture of open communication. Dysfunction Despite the best intentions, companies often become culturally dysfunctional. Stemming dysfunction Steering change. How Dave Goldberg of SurveyMonkey Built a Billion-Dollar Business and Still Gets Home By 5:30 PM. B- environment merits B- effort by David of 37signals. Managers who complain about slacking staff without examining their work environment are deluded. Being a slacker is not an innate human quality, it’s a product of the habitat. Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on).
The problem is that deluded managers expect unreasonable returns from their investment. They think you can get the best from people by thinking the worst of them. If you want star quality effort, you need to provide a star quality environment. A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. So ration your will and determination. Everyone deserves to work at a place that inspires them to give their very best. (Like this? When culture turns into policy by Mig Reyes of 37signals. A fine line exists between spelling out company culture and inadvertently engraving it as policy.
Culture offers your staff the company blog’s “publish” button 24/7 so that they can write when their own iron is hot. Policy forces topics and a posting schedule to chip away at the company marketing quota. Culture inspires your programmers to discover typographic rhythm and scale in their free time. Policy puts a “lunch and learn with designers” meeting on your calendar at 12:00 PM. Culture nurtures pet projects so that they grow into everyday company tools. Policy steals 20% of your staff’s work hours to gamble on forced research and development. Culture does. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner: Treat employees like adults, and you won't have leaks.
With 1 billion user "endorsements" and counting, Jeff Weiner explains the secret behind LinkedIn's red-hot streak. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the 3,500 iPads he just gave employees.) LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner with Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Adam Lashinsky at last night's Fortune Brainstorm Tech dinner. Credit: Jessi Hempel/Fortune FORTUNE -- Why doesn't LinkedIn (LNKD) suffer from the same news leaks as companies like Yahoo (YHOO)?
As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner put it simply at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech dinner in San Francisco last night: It's all about transparency. Weiner knows what he's talking about. Instead, Weiner argues to treat employees "like adults" and be completely transparent. MORE: Outsourcing the algorithm of love The strategy seems to be working. LinkedIn leaks are few and far between. MORE: How Chillingo picks winners in mobile games Don't expect that kind of innovation to stop. Silicon Valley’s most important document ever. Google People Operations: The secrets of the world’s most scientific human resources department. Courtesy Google. A few years ago, Google’s human resources department noticed a problem: A lot of women were leaving the company. Like the majority of Silicon Valley software firms, Google is staffed mostly by men, and executives have long made it a priority to increase the number of female employees.
But the fact that women were leaving Google wasn’t just a gender equity problem—it was affecting the bottom line. Unlike in most sectors of the economy, the market for top-notch tech employees is stretched incredibly thin. Google fights for potential workers with Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and hordes of startups, so every employee’s departure triggers a costly, time-consuming recruiting process. Then there was the happiness problem. Google calls its HR department People Operations, though most people in the firm shorten it to POPS. So in 2007, Bock changed the plan. Google’s lavish maternity and paternity leave plans probably don’t surprise you.
What makes a good engineering culture. Manage Creativity in Your Company by Dedicating Time. Like most businesses, 37signals has more ideas than it has time to develop them. Even at a workplace as unstructured as ours, the usual concerns simply make it impossible to follow through on every promising notion. What if it didn't have to be that way? What if everyone was given a stretch of free time to work on whatever he or she wanted?
What kinds of ideas would bubble up? In June, we decided to find out. For the entire month, we set aside all nonessential product work (everything besides customer service and keeping our servers running) and allowed people to work on whatever they wanted--new product ideas, features, business models, whatever. At the end of the month, people would present their ideas. Most people spent the first few days of June acclimating to the reality that they were on their own. Pitch Day was July 11. Mig, a designer, and Jeff, a programmer, went next. Of course, now comes the hard part--deciding what to do.