Grains of Gold

The best way to shape culture is of course to focus on hiring the people who will ultimately make up that culture. Yet this is often overlooked, replaced with corporate values, slogans, and mission statements. It took billions of years to create and define all of the world’s great cultures — through failure after failure — so it is with arrogance alone that we executives think we can create and define one for our company. To be blunt, cultures are not created or defined by executives; they evolve around the people who make up a company.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

Management in most organizations is blind for the waste of information work that is happening before their eyes, deaf for the cries from employees about stress and frustration, and apparently paralyzed in their abilities to drive necessary changes. The next manager that approaches me and asks for a business case deserves a punch in the face!

Millions of highly paid MBAs and researchers scattered throughout corporate America, Europe and Japan spend a vast amount of their time cutting and pasting between Excel and PowerPoint when they’re not managing inboxes bulging with low-priority email. These PowerPoint decks are e-mailed and e-mailed again for editing, which results in multiple copies, the introduction of version control errors, mutually contradictory edits, and delays due to late-arriving contributions. This process screams for improvement.

40% of college students and 45% of young professionals would accept lower-paying jobs if they had more access to social media, more choice in the devices they could use at work, and more flexibility in working remotely. More than half of the college students surveyed indicated that if an employer banned access to networks like Facebook at work, “they would either not accept a job offer from them or would join and find a way to circumvent.

I know a lot of companies with impressive mission statements. But there is a real difference, all the difference in the world, in the effectiveness of a mission statement created by everyone involved in the organization and one written by a few top executives behind a mahogany wall…without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.