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I once created an entire civilization.
Since this was in the days before SimCity, when Pong machines arrived with great fanfare at the local Foodland supermarket, you'd be right to guess that this was a homework assignment for my high school anthropology class (yes, that high school where I was classmates with that famous guy).
The class split up into two teams, each charged with inventing a culture from scratch. Once we figured out what our society was all about (money, sex, power, religion and art thrown in for good measure), we had to make artifacts from our culture and bury them in a pit. We then dug out each other's stuff and tried to figure out the other team's culture.
Thirty years later, I have to confess that as cool as the idea was, all I remember about the exercise is that each team got the other's culture colossally wrong. Anthropologists of the world, with all due respect, I know you're just giving it your best guess.
It's no surprise really - both creating a culture and dissecting a culture are ridiculously difficult tasks (nothing is simple when human beings are involved). Still, as the founder of one company and an investor in dozens of others, I give a lot of thought to the topic.
It's one of the reasons why research field trips are so much fun - they are the grown-up equivalent of being knee-deep in dirt, on a quest to find evidence that will confirm or refute our thinking. Where once I asked, "Are they cannibals or pacifists?", I now ask, "Do they worship the god of growth or the god of cash flow?"
Our latest field trip
Last week I took a train to Amish country with Senior Research Analyst Brad McGill. On our way to yet another Armstrong World Industries (maker of ceiling tile and flooring products) on-site visit, we rolled by tidy farms with laundry hanging on clotheslines in the sun and spotted teams of horses plowing the fields as buggies trotted by.
New Armstrong CEO Matt Espe used to run a former portfolio holding of ours (IKON), so we knew he was the real deal - smart, effective and capable of transformational change. Big changes are underway at Armstrong as it emerges from a lost and dark decade of asbestos litigation and bankruptcy, and we wanted to see for ourselves how things were going.
Espe talked about how he walked into a once proud, 150-year-old company that had been overcome by analysis paralysis and the aftermath of a painful bankruptcy. While the management bench had a lot of talent, the culture had become timid: endless meetings; presentation decks that were 100-slides long; managers carting around binder upon binder of backup data to justify all the actionless analysis.
I butted in on this discussion about the old Armstrong by saying, "I can still see the old culture in your bathrooms." I often say stuff like that and people think I'm weird, but Matt Espe was willing to cut me some slack and listen.
"There are no less than seven instructions/commands/exhortations in your bathroom. I've never seen anything like it, so I even took pictures." Whoever is in charge of bathroom signs in Building 501 has clearly not gotten the memo that output is as important as process.
There's more. The posted speed limit on the corporate campus is precisely 17 miles per hour. The speed limit at the entry of the resilient flooring plant is 12 miles per hour. I spotted another sign for 4 miles per hour. That kind of precision and analysis applied to non-revenue generating parts of the business shows misspent energy (not to mention the cost of custom-made signs).
I would argue that the true signs of culture are not found within a hundred yards of the C-suite of offices. They live in the far-flung outposts - in the bathrooms, the parking lots and in other places, deep, deep down within an organization.
