Culture
A few years back I was attending the yearly strategy workshop of my employer at the time,
along with all my other colleagues. We were divided into groups of six to nine people and tasked
with, among other things, coming up with an approach to enable innovation within the company.
One of the people in the group I was in, relayed his story of why he left his previous employer,
the local telecom giant, over the same thing. He told us how this company asked all their
employees to propose projects,…
We have all heard the saying, and I am willing to bet that most of us have even said it to
others, or inserted it in a presentation. Yet I realized that, while everyone seems to
understand this on an academic level, none of us seem to understand it intuitively. In
particular, we are very bad at understanding the full effects of culture, or taking it into
account when we are making decisions on a day to day basis. And above all, we wave culture
away, thinking that our strategy will overcome any…
These days I find myself in regular discussions about company growth, primarily with startups that are getting traction
and now need to step up to the next level. The discussions typically cover all the usual scaling topics, but
until recently pretty much ended there. About 2 weeks ago, however, I had once more such a discussion, but
this one went beyond the scaling challenges, and moved on to a different kind of growth: maturity. This is quite analogous
to human growth, where only part of the…
