The Company Culture Institute
Idea 2018-13: Company anti-politics intitiative
This is a continuation of the Saturday idea series.
Companies consist of groups of people who spend a lot of time together. As a result, they form cultures, just like high schools, universities, countries, and prisons.
When I was thirteen, I was in a class of only seven people with a rich culture. Just one example that comes to mind: a momentary leader would say “Ew! It stinks here! Ugh… Nasty!” And then pause, look around, turn towards a victim of their choice, and say “No wonder.” in the tone of a consternated teacher. “No wonder.” it would echo two or three times from the surrounding companions who joined in spontaneously.
“Company culture”
HubSpot is known as a company with a top company culture. Here are their 5 tenets:
Ok, noted: Your culture is focused on solving the customer’s problems, while being transparent, accountable, and finding your co-workers AMAZING. Oh, and don’t forget to lean towards long-term impact.
How is this company culture? It’s just a generic blob no other company would disagree with.
The marketing team's habit of making barbecues on the rooftop every Thursday would be culture. A widespread awkwardness around the time it takes to use employee bathrooms would be culture. A commitment to stability rather than growth would be culture. Even a tendency to complain about pay fairness would be culture. “Focus on the customer” is generic, wishful thinking that may or may not translate into culture.
Business idea: The Company Culture Institute
The Company Culture Institute (CCI) will offer comprehensive services in capturing company cultures in rich detail, both the bright and dark sides. In addition, it will consult companies looking to make a positive change in their culture.
The research arm
The Company Culture Institute (CCI) analysts will conduct research to write an initial description of company culture for each company they cover, forming a Company Culture Encyclopedia. The research will include employee interviews, as well as desk research on employer review platforms, recordings of company events, and employee social media activity. This way the CCI will form a growing compendium of much more real company cultures that is accessible as a reference for potential employees, investors and academics: Summaries are for free, detailed breakdowns are available with paid access.
The consulting arm
The CCI will offer premium culture consulting services. Top management can hire the CCI’s experts for a hefty sum to shadow departments of their company, making a detailed analysis on current culture and presenting it for review. Then, strategies are formed to influence and potentially shift culture in a desirable direction.
Sample consulting cases:
CCI Consulting could help a founder spread her ideals of female empowerment and equality, without letting the pendulum swing into discrimination of other groups.
A CEO aware of the paralyzing perfectionism in his working style could ask the CCI to help avoid this harmful trait from being passed on to the company’s workforce while making sure they keep an appreciation for high quality.
Companies coming out of a cultural crisis, such as a series of harassments shaking up the workplace, could draw on the CCI to suggest ways to heal the wounds after the culprits have been removed.
The business model should be clear (and obviously worth millions): It’s just a classic research and consulting format that works thanks to the hefty fees charged: We are addressing companies’ top ranks with a topic as sexy (using corporate speak here) as “company culture”. Let the money flow.
Breaking binary molds
The CCI’s work can help overturn toxic binary terminology. Gender may come to mind when we talk about “non-binarism” and sure, let that be a gateway drug. But there are other binary concepts that are crack cocaine to gender binarism’s marihuana.
Hard drugs of binary terminology include:
Dividing politics into left vs right. This popular “spectrum” allows for common agendas like mass imprisonment and defense spending causing hundreds of thousands of deaths to go undetected because we’re busy aligning with an imaginary side.
Dividing the globe into the North and the “Global South”. Pretending Australia is in the north and treating the rest of the south like impoverished idiots, acts as a handy replacement for those who feel the itch to be racist.
Dividing societies into Eastern and Western, and pretending there is such a thing as “Western values” to justify exclusion of certain groups of people without any political alignment from our institutions due to not being Western enough.
Dividing race into white and others (people of color), making it easier for hate to spread that distracts from the atrocities of the state. Truth is: Not a single person on this planet is white and not a single person on this planet is black.
Dividing sexual preferences into straight and LGBTQ+, which is essentially the same as the point above, but even more malleable and abusable.
Bravo. Celebrating pride only where it counts.
The CCI has the potential to help shape the culture of many thousands of companies, with large numbers of employees in sum.
If there is a trend to fight against climate change (stupidly associated with “left”), while at the same time, the average employee within that company is quite religious (stupidly associated with “right”), both environmental protection and faith are accentuated in the company culture and cultural ambassadors within the company will be trained to react aggressively if there are forces from outside that try to bend the culture into the nonsensical buckets of right or left.
Current binary narratives corrupt culture, hence, helped by the CCI, it will be easy to get people inside companies to fight such useless buckets. They don’t need to be trained in anarchism, they only need to learn to protect their unique company culture.
Back to business
There are more ways to destroy established narratives and surreptitiously take power from governments. The CCI as a business is one nice way of doing so while looking like a well-greased cog in the machine and getting the money and prestige of running a well-focused management consulting firm.
