A Riff on Sustainable Cultures

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

One of the expressions that we bantered about during the Michigan Leaders Read program last week was “let’s riff on that.” So in the spirit of expounding on something already “played,” I am going to pick up on a comment I made towards the end of my Friday posting: “are the Geeks a cult of personality or a culture of theater? For this posting, I’m going to take the focus up a few thousand feet because I’m curious about “how does one avoid a cult of personality and instead build a culture of sustainability?”

As I thought about this question over the past few days, it eventually dawned on me that such a discussion should acknowledge the work of Collins and Porras in “Built to Last.” I, however, have much more modest goals for this discussion than Messrs. Collins and Porras had for their work. They focused on what it takes to be a visionary company. I am more interested in thinking about what it takes to be a self-sustaining culture and my criteria are: does it survive the departure of its founder and any of its chief executives and is it recognizable to the imaginary time traveler? I’m interested in a more pedestrian version of “built to last.” How can you build a company that lasts 100 years and is somewhat recognizable?

First, you need the type of leaders who believe that it’s not just what the company achieves during his or her tenure but what it achieves after they are long gone. Legacy leadership, we’ll call it. Now some would say “it’s out of my control once I leave.” Not entirely true if you build the right culture.

And what is that right culture? Well, I don’t think it resembles a “cultlike culture” that Collins and Porras documented in “Built to Last.” By its very definition, “cult” (obsessive devotion or veneration for a person, principle, or ideal, especially when regarded as a fad) conveys a sense of rigidity and inflexibility. Not exactly recipes for longevity. Nor is it a culture that collapses like a house of cards. Side note: there is a great scene in the recent Academy Award-winning German film, “The Lives of Others” which illustrates this. In the scene, banished agents of the East German secret police, while doing grunt work in a dingy basement, hear about the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of them, a main character in the movie, just gets up and walks out and the others follow. A wall comes down and the culture of fear collapses like that. The gig is up.

So here is my educated guess as to what qualities, characteristics, and principles would sustain a culture (the proverbial, “it’s the way we do things around here”) over time and through turmoil:

• Creativity and innovation: the notion that new ideas are stimulating and fun
• Adaptability: Darwinism at its best
• Honest, humble self-assessment: both collectively and individually
• Customer intimacy: an obsession with “it’s all about them”
• Curiosity and questioning assumptions: the joy of “why”
• Openness to “death” and belief in “re-birth”

I suspect this last characteristic warrants further explanation. More often than not, when it comes to organizational life and death, it is less about a physical cessation and more about a perceptual existence. A culture that is not afraid of organizational death regularly asks the question “if we were to disappear today, who would care and why?” It makes no assumptions that the organization deserves perpetuity. It accepts the responsibility of justifying its continued existence by making itself relevant to others. And it does this because it knows or suspects that allowing a false self-perception to die opens the organization to a new degree of freedom of thought, perspective, and ideas. It places its trust in this freedom to spark some sort of re-birth within the organization.

So, Mr. or Ms. Leader, what would you need to say or do to imbed and foster these qualities in your organization? What do you want to leave behind? Why shouldn’t your organization exist for a hundred years?