Category Archives: Culture

Core Values

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Whenever you start a new endeavor, you need values to guide you.

When I first led NSNO, I struggled with this.

Fortunately, NSNO’s leadership team, in addition to coaches like Nancy Euske, helped me get better. Maggie Runyan-Shefa and Jenny Katz were invaluable.

In case you too struggle with this, here’s some of what I’ve learned:

Creating Core Values

Core values should be created *after* you have a mission and strategy.

Why?

Because core values should be a guide for how you need to think and act in order to execute a strategy that will help you accomplish your mission.

If you get this sequence wrong, your core values will probably be nice things that have nothing to do with how you need to behave in order to accomplish your specific mission.

After the values are named, associated behaviors that are specific to the organization should be detailed. People should know what it means to live your values out at your organization.

For a start-up, core values should be iterative. Set them at the outset, but revisit them often, and solidify them around a year in (or when you nail down your strategy).

Living Core Values

Modeling: This is the most important thing. Humans learn by watching the behavior of others. If you are a leader, everyone will be watching you all the time and they will learn how to behave.

Induction: The CEO (or someone in leadership) should meet with all new hires to discuss values. The leader should discuss why the specific values were chosen; tell stories of individuals who have exemplified the values; give specific examples of where organizational decisions have seen values in tension; and talk about specific instances the organization (and the leader) failed to live out the values.

Feedback: Managers should give informal (most important) and formal (scheduled and specific) feedback on whether or not team members are living out values.

Promotion and Firing: People who consistently violate values should never be promoted. If a person cannot change, the person should be fired. No one person is ever more important than the values. If this is the case, you don’t have values. You have suggestions.

The Constitution and The Bill of Right apply to every citizen. The values are more important than any individual.

An organization should be no different. It is a society in and of itself.

Project Management: Leadership owns the modeling of the values. But someone else should own the process, and this person must be someone who gets it. This person should create a calendar of events (check-ins, weekly meeting, annual meetings, celebrations, performance reviews, etc.) that are layered upon value activities (examples of historical people who have modeled values, shout-outs for recent modeling, articles that get to the heart of a value, etc.) and objectives (deepening understanding of values, modeling of values, feedback on values, debates on values in tension, open vulnerability on value failures, explaining major organizational decisions based on values).

Changing Core Values 

Core values should be reviewed when a strategy is changed, when there is a crisis in culture, or when there is new leadership.

It’s About Balancing Control and Empowerment

Core values are so important because they control how people behave when no one is watching (which is most of the time!) and they empower people to change the organization (and the world!) for the better by guiding their risk-taking, initiative, and ownership of the organization.

It’s Hard

I went from and “F” to maybe a “B-” in terms of leading through core values. It’s crazy hard. There are so many leaders that I admire that are better than me at this.

I’m better at design than project management, which makes it difficult for me to execute with a small team.

And the above is surely flawed.

It’s just my best explanation of my current understanding of core values.

Lastly, the truism is true: a culture will form whether you create it or not so you better create it.

Managing Humans is a Form of Cultural Evolution

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I’m reading: .

The book is good, but it feels overly long, and I don’t know if I will finish it.

The main premise of the book is that accumulated cultural wisdom drives much of human progress.

For example, if you were dropped off in the middle of the Amazon, you would probably die because you are not a part of a culture that has developed the knowledge necessary to survive in this environment.

This may seem obvious, but it is still profound.

We survive not only because of our individual intelligence but also because of our collective intelligence, and our collective intelligence is often narrowly tailored to the environment of our birth.

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Here is how Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, describes their organization:

We’re relatively conventionally organized. There’s always a temptation to reconceive the nature of humanity and social structure; you should really try to discourage that inner voice. First, think about all the risks you’re taking in your business. The standard ways of organizing a businesses are empirically sufficient for creating Google, Facebook, etc. Do you really want to add your novel organizational ontology as an additional business risk factor? Second, you’re not going to be very good at anticipating the problems with any alternative that you might conceive, since — chances are — many of the future problems are ones you won’t have encountered before.

Here is Sam Altman in the Startup Playbook:

One mistake that CEOs often make is to innovate in well-trodden areas of business instead of innovating in new products and solutions. For example, many founders think that they should spend their time discovering new ways to do HR, marketing, sales, financing, PR, etc. This is nearly always bad. Do what works in the well-established areas, and focus your creative energies on the product or service you’re building.

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Managing humans is a form of cultural evolution.

Over time, we have figured out ways to organize humans to accomplish great things.

When I helped start NSNO, I had no idea how to manage humans. Luckily, great people on our team taught me how to do this.

I also read a lot of books.

Now, whatever the endeavor, I take the time to create: goals, a strategy, core values, vehicles for individual feedback, and systems to monitor overall progress.

Of course, I don’t do this perfectly, but I always do it.

Humans have evolved to manage other humans in a manner that, when done well, can be inspiring, meaningful, and lead to great things being accomplished.

As such, I don’t try to reinvent the human management wheel that has been created by our human ancestors.

My marginal units of energy are most often spent on (1) human management execution; and  (2) product innovation.

I try not to bother with human management innovation. You probably shouldn’t either.

Rather, you should focus on product innovation.

In our team’s case, that means spending energy on trying to figure out how society can best deliver an excellent education to all children.

We have a long way to go, but early results are promising:

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Where Do All These Hard Working Adults Come From?

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work hard

From Jordan Weissmann at Slate:

“Work-life balance isn’t really America’s strong suit. We spend more hours on the job than most other developed countries. We don’t get much vacation time, and we don’t even use all of the vacation days our bosses do give us. And as economists Daniel Hamermesh and Elena Stancanelli tell us in a new working paper this week, we’re unusually prone to working nights and weekends.”

So two things are apparently true:

  1. American students don’t work hard (most forcefully argued by Whitney Tilson).
  1. American adults work too hard.

It seems odd that we want kids to work harder and adults to work less. I would have expected the opposite.

Then again, most policy commentators are adults.

Some assorted thoughts:

  1. It is unclear to me that American students work less hard than students in other countries (save for students in South Korea). I’ve seen conflicting evidence.
  1. My guess is the three primary drivers of work habits are culture, institutions, and incentives – though there is clearly much interplay between these drivers.
  1. We are a large country: the dominant cultures, institutions, and incentives vary across our population.
  1. But for students, the incentives seem pretty clear: doing well in school leads to earning much more money.
  1. If American students are in fact working less, I’d probably point to culture and institutions (note that many effective charter schools try to reverse these cultural and institutional trends).
  1. For adults, it seems different: I would point to incentives (money) and institutions (mission and profit driven companies with comparatively fewer labor regulations) as the drivers of hard work, with societal culture pushing one way or the other depending on one’s dominant cultural group.

Anyways, I don’t really have many strong opinions here. And I haven’t really worked out the above thoughts into a cohesive argument of any kind. And it’s Saturday.

I was just struck by the odd existence of two pieces of conventional wisdom: we are a nation of lazy children and hardworking adults.