Few companies you encounter will ever approach this level of cultural openness. You will run into lots of companies that claim they are this way. They are not. If you speak with enough people, at enough companies, you will discover that most of them think they are "above average," "very good" or even "excellent" at customer service, or quality, for example.
By definition, this is incorrect. No normal distribution can have a majority, or the vast majority of the population ranked in the top five percent, 10 percent or 20 percent of anything. And yet that is what you'd tend to find, if you asked.
Google, whatever else one thinks about the company, should be applauded, studied and emulated, as should Apple, in some key ways, when it is possible. Most companies cannot meaningfully emulate the core cultural traits of either company, of course. But that's why Apple and Google will remain such important companies.
Most will not try to emulate them, and most cannot, even if they want to. Sometimes the problem is simply that the culture of an organization matches the core tasks it must tackle to be successful. You wouldn't expect a "Google" style culture at a nuclear power plant, a telco or larger military organizations.
You would hope and expect to find it on any small software team, smaller consulting organizations and think tanks, smaller research or policy institutes, smaller marketing firms or architectural firms. Note the emphasis on small; that normally has something to do with it. Still, smallness is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite.
Lots of small organizations are not "collaborative" in the robust sense. People matter.
Merchant's full post
No comments:
Post a Comment