We are Commitment Culture
Culture, quantified
We all know companies have different cultures, but have you ever seen a framework to quantify that culture?
Well here's one such framework: Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups - California Management Review
Tl;dr this study follows 200 startups for 10 years, identifies their cultures, and tracks their performance, ending with some findings about what types of cultures perform the best.
Here are the dimensions they use to define company culture:
And while there are 36 possible permutations (/distinct cultures) in practice only 5 were common, which they called: Star, Engineering, Commitment, Bureaucracy, and Autocracy.
A la Conway’s law, each culture has its own 'personality' and will behave differently. Here’s my own narrative description of each: (theirs is on page 12 but the language is a bit dated)
Star: “Hire the smartest people and get out of their way.” Commitment: “1+1 = 3. Give a shit about each other. No assholes allowed” Bureaucracy: “Process for everything. Google” Engineering: “Hire experienced nerds. Let them run everything” Autocracy: “You work, you get paid.”
Like most clickbait Enumeration articles I’m sure there are many other ways you could delineate company culture. But this framework is expressive, and that’s all we need. And here are some fun findings Commitment cultures are the least likely to fail
Commitment cultures were the fastest to go public
Stars had the biggest market cap (but also the highest turnover)
My favorite insight here is that there are competing strategies to get value out of your employees. One way is to hire the most talented/experienced people and squeeze them for productivity, then replace them when they turnover (Star culture). Another (Commitment) is to hire for fit, grow those people, and retain them forever. Both work for the company, but as an employee, which would you prefer to work for?
"Ever look at some company getting it right and think, “How did they hire all those amazing people?” I’ll tell you how. They grew them. And they retained them. And that attracted more great people"
Popularity
Personally, I suspect that Star culture is popular and considered to be the most likely to succeed not because it is the most effective framework, but because there is a lack of skill to build the commitment culture companies. I think it’s easy to squeeze your workers. It’s hard to help them grow. Like… I feel like we just destigmatized talking about mental health a few years ago, and we still have a wage gap and short (4 month) mat/pat leave. But it’s getting better. And as this status quo advances, commitment culture will get easier to pull off.
Us
A company of commitment is what we want to build. This is the impact we want to have We’re best at leading that type of company, based on our priorities, skills, and previous experience. These companies tend to survive. We want to survive.
~Lyon