today | ISSUES 36 ENSTO TODAY 1/2016 ensto A Company of Stars look at “we” versus “I” cultures by industry. Is Goldman Sachs a “we” in investment banking? Yes. Is it a “we” versus all other companies? Probably not. You’ve got to look at the peer set. But, to be honest, many companies are “I” cultures. There is a cross industry trend to build stronger company cultures, and you see more companies moving to becoming “we” – as opposed to just an assembly of free agents. I think if you become global you have to be more consistent. There is pressure to share best practices, to seamlessly execute across time zones and regions, which is easier to do in a “we” culture. “We” cultures have lower turnover, higher customer retention rates. There are many benefits. But there are negative attributes, as well. “We” cultures sometimes behave like clubs and a dynamic industry can kill them. I think there are probably more benefits to a “we” cul-ture than there are negatives, and this is what CEOs are seeing. A number of companies are now saying that their business units do not own talent, that the top 50 or 100 people are corporate assets and we invest in them as such – because if a business unit can own them they won’t share them with anyone else. Changing a culture isn’t easy and it’s a decade transforma-tion. I always tell CEOs that if you want to change the culture, I assume you’ll be gone before you see it transformed. Someone else will finish your work. Even though people realize high-values, high-performance, strong cultures are important, it’s harder to do in publicly-traded company cultures, because the tenure of the CEO is so limited. The CEOs won’t be there to see it if they don’t perform at the same time they’re building the culture. That’s why I think partnerships and privately owned compa-nies might potentially have a stronger effect in some industries, because they can take a long-term view, not only in developing the people but developing the cultures. et You’ve written that “a company that offers its valued employees a convincing counterargument to the prevailing superficial and formulaic thinking about portability stands to gain a great deal.” Are there some great examples of this we can learn from? A company that has communicated its values well? It could be any other value – it doesn’t have to be the “we” culture. You have to offer the value and then to communicate it. The Employee Value Proposition, also called internal mar-keting, was popular a couple of decades ago, but over time these resources have gone into customer value propositions. We spend a great deal of time communicating our values to our customers. I think we don’t do as good of a job of actually communicating our values to our employees. When CEOs of companies complain that they’re actually managing free agents or butterflies – people who jump from one company to another – I always ask CEOs if the best people who work for them actu-ally know how much value they create. Because it’s not enough to create value. You have to commu-nicate it, as well. Goldman Sachs, Google, GE, McKinsey all do it. My employer, Harvard Business School, does it well. The more successful you are the more likely it is that you believe you control your own destiny. So just as we communi-cate value to customers, I think the next trend is to communi-cate your value to your employees and your best and brightest or they’ll go somewhere else. Don’t assume they get it, because most of them will not.
EnstoToday 2016 No1 / ENG
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