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Culture Rules!
I’m doing a presentation next week for Gartner’s CRM conference in London on the incompatibility of innovation and operations. That is, the characteristics that make for a highly innovative company – experimentation, trial and error, creativity, diversity of opinions and resilience – are fundamentally at odds with the characteristics of a company that is capable of conducting its operations in a highly efficient manner – fixed routines, process invariability, and attention to detail.
One of the most important characteristics of companies that are able to sustain a highly innovative character over many years is that they have very strong employee cultures. Toyota, HP, Wal-Mart, IKEA, Disney, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Apple Computer – you pick the firm, but if it’s shown an ability to innovate over a long period of time, while simultaneously managing its day-to-day business profitably, it almost certainly has a strong employee culture that infuses the entire organization with a sense of mission that goes beyond mere shareholder returns.
So I was struck by an article the other day in the International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/10/business/retire.php?page=2 ), about Hewlett-Packard recruiting ex-employees to VOLUNTEER to go to computer stores and other venues and talk up the benefits of HP products! Talk about a strong culture of loyal employees!
With all the talk today about “free” things being done on the Web – from open-source software to customer self-service – I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see this example of a company tapping its most loyal followers to help it do better business, without charge. In the end, these ex-employees probably get the same kick out of pitching their ex-company’s products to potential customers that any of us would get by writing the definitive entry in Wikipedia for our favorite art work, food, or engineering concept.
But the unmistakable message to businesses should be clear: CULTURE RULES!
Great Post! I think very few companies realize how important this is for "the foot soldiers"; without "The Mission" a job is just a job and a company is just a company and they become easily interchangeable. But the mission is a moat that helps you acquire and keep talent.
Right on. Very interesting example of the HP culture -employee evangelism can seem even hard to create than customer evangelism. Thanks for sharing these points.