Thread by @evanlapointe

Please take a minute:

Part of marketing is slapping a label on yourself so people can understand what you are. Without that label, you might be confusing.

So I’m slapping a label on myself. I’m a culture guy. You want to talk about culture, follow and @ me.

A few thoughts:

1. Culture is more definable and tangible than most realize. It feels nebulous but culture creates consistency for why we work and how we work. If you don’t answer those 2 with massive intentionality, people are just going to make it up, and their improv is going to be shaky

2. You can have a great culture “around the work” and still have a terrible culture “in the work”. It’s great that you do habitat builds and walk in the pride festival, but people might still hate their jobs and bosses and think their colleagues are self-centered or morons.

3. Your company’s purpose is not about vision or mission. Those are fax-machine-era culture technologies. Mission and vision and goals are often self-centered. Your purpose is your *role* - why the audience loves you. If the world doesn’t like you, you’ll get written out.

4. Product is the center of your company. Period. Sales, marketing, customer success, CX are the clothing that product wears when it goes into the world. And most products are scrawny little bodies with asthma and allergies to air and contact with humans.

5. The purpose of teams is first intelligence, then production. Speed, quality, and avoiding mistakes are a function of intelligence. Productive, unintelligent teams paint themselves and others into corners. Many managers and leaders will need to flip this around in their minds.

If you want innovation, good teams, good output, to stop making so many mistakes, and to stop creating short term solutions with heavy long-term maintenance, you need to be working on culture, not ops. These are culture concepts, not operational ones.

Finally:

Please share this now if it resonates, talk about it with your team, ask questions. I do not tweet for promotion. For me, Twitter is what I do for free so I can meet the people who are going to change the world. Inaction is the enemy of change.