Post 2 - Culture
I could never have imagined on March 20th when I packed up my desk in NYC the amount of resilience and perseverance that would be required from my team in the crazy days and months that followed. The past ten months have been a test for every company to navigate a period of unprecedented uncertainty.
I’m proud to say that my colleagues rose to the challenge and I attribute that to the culture we consciously set out to create.
Early in Collective[i]’s existence we defined five core values around which we would build our culture. We deliberated and debated what was most important until we reached a consensus on what were the five core values that would govern our recruiting and hiring process and guide our operations. These values are included in the first (and every) step of our new employee on-boarding process and something we routinely point to as a north star. As a leadership team we use them to make decisions, evaluate partnerships and judge success. Here they are:
At Collective[i] We:
Are curious
Are direct
Strive for the extraordinary
Deliver
Succeed together
Little did we know how important these words would be. Our curiosity led us to find opportunities in uncertainty. Our directness enabled us to operate 100% remote. Our quest for the extraordinary led to dramatic improvements in our technology. Our commitment to deliver kept us in sync and we kept our promise to succeed together, as a team.
The people who make up the Collective[i] team are ambassadors for our culture and are what has enabled us to withstand immense pressures. We operate in a highly competitive, fast moving sector and one that shows no indication of slowing down. Skills are important but so is culture and collaboration. The core of our business is based on our community and the subset of that community, the Collective[i] team, is stronger now than it was a year ago.
All of this has me thinking about culture as the real secret sauce behind successful companies. In the early days of Overstock, we had a young, smart and hungry management team. We cared about being great, getting the best out of our teams and we measured everything. Perhaps most importantly, we put the team above ourselves---a win for one was a win for all.
When you consider the devastating dot.com recession of 2000 and the success of Overstock in not only surviving those tough times but successfully going public through today, there's no question the culture we built in the early days was a big contributor to the twenty plus years of Overstock’s success. That doesn’t mean there weren’t bumps along the way, but because of the culture we built, there wasn’t a challenge we couldn’t overcome.
Fostering a sustainable culture is easier said than done. In fact, it’s one of the things that make Collective[i] so unique. There are only a handful of companies whose culture falls into the category of what I would consider truly great. Netflix is infamous for its culture deck and Reed Hastings has set the bar for what is a great culture. It’s not only the values that matter but a leadership team that reinforces them and embodies them over and above anything else.
Zappos is another example. I didn’t know Tony well, but well enough to feel the power of his loss because of the leader he was. You knew from the first meeting he cared about people and had the guts to challenge them to care about the business. One of my favorite examples from Zappos is how they identify employees that believe in the mission and vision and are not just there for a paycheck. At some point during their training they are offered a ‘bonus’ of $2,000 to quit. It’s not an insubstantial sum over a short term, but for anyone who truly believes in what Zappos is doing it’s not the short term they care about….and that’s exactly why Zappos does it. Anyone who is willing to take advantage of a short term payoff at the expense of long term value is going to make the same kind of decisions for your organization and more importantly for other members of the team.
Whether it’s Collective[i], Overstock, Netflix or Zappos, culture is the silent motivator. It’s something that requires engineering as much as software does, shared buy-in by employees and leadership like Reed’s and Tony’s to nurture. There isn’t one winning culture nor is it transferable from one organization to another. And yet when the stars align, it’s what sustains us through tough times and leaves lasting legacies.
