Some books mentioned on this videocast:
- Maverick! by Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco
- The Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco
- Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, Founder of LinkExchange and CEO of Zappos
- Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux
- Joy at Work by Dennis Bakke, Founder/CEO of AES
Summary:
- Originality is often praised for its own sake. However, when it comes to things like culture, being original should be treated with caution. Most of the problems you’ve tried to solve have likely been solved somewhere else.
- Trying to reinvent the wheel for every problem is not the best idea…
- There’s a danger on the other side: cargo-culting. That’s when you take an idea/practice/etc that you’ve seen done somewhere else and just copy it wholesale without understanding how it works and what makes it tick.
- Very dangerous for culture stuff, because it looks fake. For example, you might copy 121 meetings – but without understanding why they’re there, people will feel the meetings are just some kind of pointless formality and won’t care.
- It’s important, when you copy things, to fully understand them, but it’s also important not to let yourself think you can’t copy things.
- For me, the sources that work the best tends to be books. Here’s a reading list (see above).
- First, the Semco books. They’re not very well written, but they’re very inspirational, written by Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco. He tells a lot of stories about what happened, from the trenches.
- Tony Hsieh’s book is very different, more startuppy, but written by someone who first built a business where he didn’t pay attention to culture, then realised he really cared about culture, then built a whole new business all around culture.
- Reinventing organizations is interesting because first of all it lays out a framework that can be used to talk about open organisations (fairly useful), but also looks at a dozen open organisations and extracts best practices from them. It’s a gold mine for copying, full of ideas to steal.
- Joy at Work is also a CEO first-hand account, of one of the case studies in Reinventing Organizations. An in-depth, first-person view of one of the orgs covered, gives you a better perspective on the book.