Monday 7th October 2024

Topics:

• Senior leaders tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the culture of their organization.
• CEOs for example love to talk about their corporate values, which is often nothing more that a list of cultural talking points that are not enforced.
• In reality, an organization is made of of many sub-cultures, which often operate in a radically different way to each other.
• Such competition can in fact be very healthy, as that can lead to innovations.
• Friction in an organization is good. Too much comfort kills innovation.
• Furthermore, a team or a department having the freedom to express their own unique culture is also healthy.
• If you enforce the same culture in your organization, the net result will be a mono-culture that will be devoid of innovative thinking.
• Rather than trying to get everyone aligned around such a mono-culture, you should align around goals instead.
• Culture is a framework, but goals are the destination.
• Your team can be misaligned around culture, even having competing sub-cultures, but misalignment around goals is fatal.
• Your job as a leader is to point your team towards their north star, then let them figure out how to get there.
• Direction is more important than velocity: going fast in the wrong direction is useless.
• Steady progress in the right direction is more desirable than that.
• Our history is full of examples when conflict drove rapid innovation, through necessity.
• You have to strike a balance of course, but in simple terms no conflict can lead to no innovation.
• Cultural conflict is fine (how we do things), but conflict on strategic goals is not (what we are building).
• If you spend too much time trying to have the perfect utopian culture, but neglect strategic goals, your organization will fail
• Media I am enjoying on this week:
  • Slow Horses season 1.

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techleaderpro-2024-week-40.mp3

File details: 8.6 MB MP3, 5 mins 59 secs duration.

Title music is "Hidden Beyond" by Aiyo, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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