Adam Bryant: The Importance of Culture in the Workplace
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Adam Bryant, the author of Quick and Nimble and the “Corner Office” columnist at The New York Times, on the critical importance of workplace culture.
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Adam Bryant:
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times' domestic bureaus.He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the Sunday Business section and on www.nytimes.com that he started in March 2009.Adam has been editing at The Times since May 2006, and was a business reporter at the paper through the 1990s, when he covered a number of beats, including airlines, aviation safety, executive pay and corporate governance. From 1999 to 2006, he worked at Newsweek magazine as a senior writer and then as business editor. Before moving to the national desk in 2010, he was deputy business editor. Adam was the lead editor of a series on the dangers of distracted driving that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Adam Bryant: By now I've interviewed more than 300 leaders and I always just listen for patterns and themes that come up during the course of the interviews. And I started hearing a lot of great insights about culture. And I heard this one expression from one of the CEOs where he said, "We want to be the largest small company in our space." And I was really intrigued by that. What does that mean? How do you do that? Obviously largest in terms of size, smallest in terms of just that start up culture feel, and it just got me thinking about culture and what it means. And the thing about culture: It's such an amorphous word. I mean if you've got ten people in front of a white board and said--what is culture--you could put 100 things on it and they would all be true because it is such a fuzzy concept.
So, the more I thought about it the more I tried to frame the question in the right way about culture. And I really framed it this way, which is: What are the biggest drivers of culture, the things that if done well have an outsized positive impact, and if done badly or not at all have an outsized negative impact? And that was really the question that framed the book. And I just went through millions of words of transcripts looking for the insights that helped answer that question. In terms of why now for this book, I really think that culture is increasingly the X factor that's going to separate companies. Because business is just moving so fast, there's so much disruption in so many industries. And you can have two companies with a similar strategy, similar backing and the one that's going to win is the one with the better culture. A lot of people don't focus on culture though because it is so amorphous. People tend to focus on strategy. They tend to focus on results because you can put the results in a spreadsheet, but culture is really the X factor that's going to drive the results, and I've heard that from a lot of really smart CEOs.
I wrote the book as really a playbook because CEOs just have so many things on their plates. They could do literally 100 different things on any different day. They're responsible for everything and kind of nothing at the same time. And because culture is so amorphous it can be hard for them to figure out well, is this a good use of my time. So that's why I really tried to frame it around the question of what are the biggest drivers so that if they're really focused on these things that they would see an impact, even if it's not super tangible, but just to know, based on the experience of hundreds of other CEOs, that this had an impact on their company.
If you're a start-up CEO you really have to be thoughtful about culture, because you're going to have culture one way or another. It's going to happen on its own and every company's culture is different. It's really the sum total of kind of the DNA of the people in your company. And the metaphor that I like to use about culture is that it's sort of like cholesterol. In any organization you're going to have good and bad culture. And just like with cholesterol you're going to have good and bad cholesterol.
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