#04: Can you give us $150 Million Dollars?

The following piece written by Brinton Johns brings to attention the importance of culture and values and ethics rather than immediate growth and expansion which ultimately may lead down a road to alienation and chaos. It made me think more about the difference it makes to focus on a top-down perspective with companies and organizations, and perhaps how setting the tone initially with culture and morals, one step at a time, can guide employees, partners, and customers to journey down a clearer, more constructive, and more worthwhile path to higher well-being and success. Thanks Brinton!

-Amanda

(From Brinton Johns)

“Can you give us $150 million dollars?”  

Before we’d even exchanged business cards, this was the question from a young CFO of a hot pre-IPO tech company.  

“Me personally?" I deadpanned.  "No.” 

“My company? Maybe.”

“Okay, good.” he said. “We’re only offering meetings to a few folks at this conference.  It’s a secret that we’re even here.  To go further with us, we need to know that you can invest at least $150.”

“Tell me about your culture,” I countered. 

As it turned out, the young company took pride in NOT focusing on building culture.  The CFO went on a bit of a tirade around too much focus on culture among peer companies.  “We expect you to work hard, stay late, get your $*#! done — and if you’re lucky, we’ll throw you a greasy burger sometime around 8 in the evening.  Working for us is less like working for Google and more like working on a Wall Street trading desk.”

From his perspective, their product was so good and their network effect had become so strong; the last thing that mattered was culture.  Instead, they focused on pushing growth as fast as possible, in as many markets as possible, all the while making sure they developed strong products in-house so that their “partners”, which they spoke of with disdain, could not control them in the future.  

Although the company came in as the darling of the ball, from my perspective the management team seemed to be comprised of jerks pushing employees down a short road to burnout.  What I heard was the risk of alienating employees, alienating partners, alienating customers in their hard charge, bull-in-the-china-shop quest for domination.  Turns out, the company was less than a year away from a culture implosion that still threatens its existence. 

Needless to say, they didn’t get money from us.

A month before this meeting I sat at a user conference where a different CEO laid out his “100 year plan” for the company to a group of almost 5,000 customers, employees and investors.  Now I’m all for the long term, but 100 years?  When you think that far into the future, what are you left with? You guessed it, a set of guiding values wrapped up in the preservative of culture.

I walked out of the "special" meeting with the hot startup thinking about the stark contrast between what I'd just witnessed and that meeting the month before.  I tried to imagine what the startup might look in 100 years.  

Here's the thing, if culture is the institutional embodiment of character, then character is often a function of the tone set at the top. What does the culture of your company tell you about it's character?

Brinton Johns:      brinton.johns@gmail.com      

After 17 years at Janus Capital, I'm taking a sabbatical.  While at Janus, I served as an analyst, portfolio manager and team leader to an incredibly talented group of technology analysts. My biggest joy is to grow.  My second biggest joy is to watch others grow and play some small part in that growth.