The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read
My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV):
1. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to figure out how to position and leverage individuals.
2. Actually, genuinely, caring about your direct reports goes a very long way towards solving a lot of culture problems but...
3. Dev Managers need to put a lot of effort out into their teams to drive change and it is often (most of the time?) not returned. Your biggest enemy is not active sabotage, it's apathy at all levels of the organization. I started pushing for some specific cultural-ish changes about this time last year and, while I was given passive approval & support and lots of latitude to make change, it has been physically exhausting. If I was in an organization that didn't even give me this much freedom it would have been exhausting and pointless.
4. A Dev Manager can make localized changes when not all teams want or can reciprocate, but I'm not convinced yet that the requisite firewalls you need to erect aren't ultimately harmful in the long run. It is a very delicate balance.
In the end my take-away is you need space and time to make any meaningful change, and even that is limited by the crushing inertia of the organization. For me personally it has been physically consuming and I have 6 month & 1 year goals, plus an overall 3-year plan that I'll either complete in the coming year or look for an new opportunity elsewhere.
This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off.
I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book.
Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in 3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't.
For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before.
This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you do so.
"This makes me wonder whether a good way to make needed change as a leader when there is no obvious crisis is to artificially create one so that people get on board…"
Yes.
You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken.
As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just continue floundering, wasting money and time. You have to wait until it's completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me to take it over?" and not have interference.
I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like agent provocateur stuff.
"Turn the ship around" is one of my favorite books too; most leadership books follow the same formula- everything is broken, the consultant arrives with a magic fix, and voila! Unicorns start flying.
"Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked the approach.
A very honest, no BS book. Highly recommended
To some extent, I'm no longer curious about "leadership" ideas about organisational culture.
I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale.
Maybe motivation/attitudes can be improved and a naval hierarchy can work better, but this is not the typical issue in corporate culture.
I'm curious about structural answers. A lot of culture comes down to how success and failure work. If a company culture is bad at risk-taking and internal entrepreneurship, a "culture of openness" can't fix it.
To get genuinely failure tolerant and opportunity seeking, organisations need to structure for successes and failures.
How are resources really allocated in the company? How are successes and failures really determined and what are the real ramifications.
So... (a) organisations need some formal/mechanical processes governing the pertinent decisions: resources and goals. Formal processes can be examined more honestly and biased to (or against) risk.
(b) If you really opportunity-seeking, risk taking culture... then you need "money-where-mouth-is" mechanics. It doesn't need to be fully "market-based," but someone needs to be throwing themselves behind opportunities because they think that they'll be successful.
The problem that runs through both Google (eg) and the naval ship is a culture of "do enough, and no more." The solution is usually to raise the "enough" bar somehow... motivation, discipline. That works when what you want from employ/organisations is "enough."
If you want more than enough, I think the structure needs to change.
“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”.
Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity…
Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than “X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.)
It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless statement.
All good points, although "rather than just punishing, he spent 8 hours discussing with his team"...? There needs to be less punishment as methodology out there, but an eight-hour discussion IS a form of punishment in my book. And for everyone else, too.
This book has had the single biggest influence on how I motivate and lead engineering teams[1]. It's an easy read, and the main thought on delegating decisions down hold very well for software engineering, and on how to create a culture of high-autonomy, high-performance.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-...
I've worked at all sorts of companies but it's actually been the same company over and over it's the broken top down hierarchy mixed with control dramas and disempowerment where initiative is punishable and the only way to get ahead is to strike a deal with some kind of clique at the expense of the client
It's refreshing to know this book exists and I'll certainly look it up but I have zero hope for so called corporate culture because it's lemmings all the way down and lead follow or get out of the way is blocked by some callous know it all opening their yawning pie hole to dish out googlisms
Here's the "Non-Bullshit Book on Culture" book this post discusses:
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet
Also here's a great speech given by the David Marquet (with drawings!) on the same topic:
Is it very narrow minded of me to think that, even for HN, recognising "culture" as "company culture" demonstrates a very blinkered view of the world?
The fact that headline points out that it's not bullshit makes it sound like bullshit.
When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?
I had my hopes up, but this is about Team Culture (not Culture)
Does anyone have book suggestions on leadership and management which aren't just pop-business BS?
This book explained a lot about a boss of mine. Ex-military, tried to run our department like a battalion, took pride in "battlefield repairs" of code, never let anyone think for themselves or contribute.
Only communicating through superiors...Micromanaging at its best, it was an all-out terrible way of doing things.
Wonder if anyone on here has read Ben Horowitz's latest book on culture "What You Do Is Who You Are"?
I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over the top so far...
wishfully, I read this as a "Book on the Culture". Does anyone know of such a thing, aside from the actual Iain M Banks novels?
I will definitely read this book. I recommend Leadership is Half The Story.
https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership-Co...
as @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice on historical / biographical books.
For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.
@ianmiell awesome post. Part of the issue: The word “culture” does not fully describe the intentional “Org OS” choices that need to be made to optimize how people can better work in a knowledge economy. https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/
There's a really great animation done on top of a talk by David Marquet which summarizes the book, I believe.
I recommend The Rise of the Creative Class.
people need to be told what to do loop people wait do only what they're told; people need to be told what to do; if people don't have to be told what to do, exit; end Deming made this observation 50 years ago.
Some good pirate ship techniques in a Navy submarine.
leader-leader only works if the commitment and incentives are relatively uniform.
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