Can Culture Really Eat Strategy for Breakfast?
Edition #118
The ContraMind Code
Introduction
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Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Cubic Millimetre Of Brain Mapped In Spectacular Detail
In this fascinating article in Nature, researchers shared their findings on what they found when they mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail.
Here are some interesting findings from this research:
What can you find in one-millionth of the whole brain, and what does it look like? It contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses—the connections between neurons—and incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data.
The researchers discovered unconventional neurons, including some that made up to 50 connections with each other.
The team also found pairs of neurons that were near-perfect mirror images of each other.
This research can help gain a deeper understanding of how the cortex works and could offer clues about how to treat some psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.
It can help to decipher the inner workings of the human brain.
Read the entire article here.
Dr. Joy Buchanan On Understanding Economics Through Experiments.
In this conversation in the Inductive Economy Podcast, Dr. Joy Buchanan, Associate Professor at the Brock School of Business at Samford University in Birmingham, talks about:
Her take on Tyler Cowan’s view on the GOAT of economics.
What does it mean to be a student of the experimentalist school of economics?
The differences between a project-based path and a prestige-based path of learning.
The connection and impact of intellectual property and wealth creation.
What drives the training needs of the future?
You can also listen to the entire episode here:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the Future of AI.
This conversation between Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Emily Chang of Bloomberg provides some great lessons on:
What are the challenges a leader goes through irrespective of the size and scale of the company?
How an onslaught of a technology disruption can impact even the greatest companies and their leaders—especially in this case, how AI has impacted or will impact Google in the future.
How a leader needs to react and handle important moments of transitions and change, as well as elements of risk-taking on some of the experiments or bets a company makes.
Companies and leaders have to factor in failures and, more importantly, how leaders need to handle the failures of these experiments or expectations of the market.
How, in the light of some setbacks, leadership styles will come under intense scrutiny.
Markets are unforgiving when it comes to leaders, and past successes of leaders don’t really matter. How leaders react to and handle these criticisms makes a big difference.
Strategy and execution are equally crucial as a culture for companies, etc.
Just click on the above video to watch this conversation.
Can Culture Really Eat Strategy for Breakfast?
In the last few months, many important happenings have made this question pertinent and relevant: Can culture really eat strategy for breakfast?
First is the selling of GE’s Leadership Centre, Crontonville Campus, the continuous onslaught of Open AI on Google’s predominant position, Twitter’s now famous or infamous acquisition by Elon Musk and subsequent lay-off of the employees, TSMC’s delay in getting its factory off-the-ground in the US, Nvidia rise to the top, Intel’s fall from being on the top of the semiconductor business etc. Let’s take companies closer home in countries like India - Byju’s fall from grace of being a happening unicorn to a toxic work culture, expected slower growth of IT services industry - What do these happenings really indicate?
Over the last three to four decades, the tech industry has been a frontrunner in transforming the culture of working in corporations. Much has been written about the Google Work Culture or the famous Intel Credo—‘Only the Paranoid Survive’—and how the tech industry has pioneered a new culture that is prevalent across industries now, not just the tech industry today. Before the tech industry, the likes of GE redefined work culture, and campuses like Crontonville played a role in grooming their people into future leaders.
The question really is, if all these were so great, why are many of these companies facing a challenge today? Going forward, many new emerging young companies will face this problem, too—what was once the darling of the media and markets will become the target for all the problems and pains in the future.
There is a need to forget the noise around and focus on the core:
Most companies become complacent in near-monopoly situations. They throw-up so much of cash during their heady growth days, that it is spent on ‘Things of Vanity’ and the splurge goes unnoticed till the cash generation becomes a problem.
Most of the time, strategy can be boring. There is no big breaking news, and the relentless focus on execution — internally and externally makes it not so newsworthy. Some of the decisions are not visible in the near term but have a lasting impact in the long term, even after the leader or people who put the strategy in place may have left the organisation. There is a need to stay away from dancing to anyone’s tune!
‘Employee chatter’ can incredibly affect the company, and many companies tend to lose focus and fix the ‘tip of the iceberg’ rather than the ‘bottom of the iceberg’. Often, for employees, ‘seeing is believing’ around what is going around them. They want to reduce ‘Uncertainty’ in their lives and tend not to have an accurate picture of reality.
MIT Sloan has done an interesting comparison called the Culture 500 of different companies across industries by taking some of the rankings and comments in Glassdoor. These findings can provide some learnings by comparing companies across industries and the tenure of their founding. However, they don’t represent the true reality, as strategy has to be measured over the long term and not the near term.
Strategy is the ‘true’ test of any company’s competitive advantage over the long term. What companies and leaders need to weave into strategy is all the stakeholders’ ability in the company to ‘Face The Reality’. Handling reality is not easy, as people don’t want to discuss them at the table. They want to ignore it or assume it will disappear, but it does not. It questions the leader’s past credibility and decisions, and also there’s a flight of talent to ‘newer safe zones’ where uncertainty is perceived to be lower. Finally, rewards, recognition, and growth are not linear and cannot be a continuous upward curve. ‘Timeless Good-to-Feel’ work environments are not for real. Companies and people working there must factor for these disruptions. Does it require an alternative compensation or hiring or reskilling model to factor for these disruptions because industrial-world factory employment models don’t work anymore? This is an excellent question to ask yourselves.
Finally, strategy is tough, long-term, boring, and often uncertain and may need continuous rejigging; company culture must also reflect that.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
The brain is an incredible network of networks.
Leadership is a rough path with its own highs and lows. Prepare for it.
Strategy and culture have to be aligned for long-term viability and success.