Building Company Culture
Hayagreeva Rao
Stanford University
Course Overview
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Why People Operations?
•
Core processes of the organization
•
Core processes underlie agility and adaptability
•
Scaleable
•
Different processes “spike” and become important at different points of the scaling
arc (e.g. teaming to reinvention)
•
FARTHER Framework
Course Objectives
●
To inform, illuminate, and inspire you about people operations as your venture
scales
▪
Inform you of cutting edge practices
▪
Illuminate social science mechanisms underlying people operations
▪
Inspire you to do more
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
FARTHER Framework
Objectives
•
•
•
Provide an overview of the FARTHER framework and how it applies to a specific
company
Define what culture is and how to translate it into mindset
Discuss how to create a culture that is connected with the experience of the
customers
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Culture & Mindset
Culture: Aspirational values internalized and absorbed by employees of an
organization so that each has the mindset that reflects the culture of the organization.
Culture resides in a mindset.
Mindset: What individuals in an organization have and believe. How individuals
process information, what they deem as high/low priority, and how they actually
organize.
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Rite-Solutions Case Study Objectives
●
●
●
How do we align the employee value proposition and create a culture that allows a
firm to deliver on customer brand promise?
Rite-Solutions case as a ‘handrail’ for us to think about people operations
Premises:
▪
Employee value proposition is a talent brand. Just as an organization has a
customer brand, there is a talent brand.
▪
An organization’s culture is the basis for an employee’s brand experience
▪
The talent brand has to be connected with the customer brand
Rite-Solutions: Talent Brand
Rite is a
life engine
Efficiency
Project Work
Idea Generation
and Evaluation
Excellence
Team Work
Engagement
Talent Brand
Expansion
Core Experiences
Customer Knowledge Entertainment
Communication &
Mutual Fun
as Productivity Tools Community
Fun
Innovation
Customer Fixation
Community
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Core Competencies
Core Values
Rite-Solutions Culture: FARTHER Model
Finding
People
F.E.W (Hire
for fit)
Engaging:
Life engine
and not mere
job !
Prophet to
innovator
roles
Reinventing
We want to
be a life
engine for
employees. So
mutual fun
Aligning:
Measures create
interdependence
between guideposts.
Employee ownership
via stock options.
Profiting from
innovation
Real time
feedback:
Hacking:
Savings
Bonds and
Bow Jones
Teaming:
organic
assembly
volunteering
Easy to post an
idea or volunteer,
or express an
opinion
Mindset Consists of Three Behaviors
1.
Caring
§
2.
Sharing
§
3.
Colleagues and customers
Ideas, resources, credit
Daring
§
Take risks
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Why Companies Lose Their Way
•
Prioritize daring over caring and sharing
•
Fail to translate their values into actions
•
Executives don’t spend enough time defining what is bad and what is
impermissible
FARTHER Framework Summary
●
The FARTHER framework is a good diagnostic framework that details all of the sub
processes that form the muscles of people management in your startup
●
Each element spikes at different times
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Teaming
Objectives
●
Share ideas that you need to think about as you compose your founding team
●
Discuss some guidelines on how to use teams in your organization as you scale
●
Identify ways to manage teams effectively
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Allocating Equity
•
•
•
Allocating equity equally amongst the founders can be problematic if unforeseen
circumstances arise in the future
Most important thing when founding a team: Don’t allocate founder equity at
one time
Founding team needs to have a prenup or misunderstandings will arise
§ Founder equity: Allocate part to founders, earmark part for activities
§ Norms: Clearly spell out the sacred and the profane
Knowledge and Functional Diversity
Knowledge Diversity: Diverse experiences working in diverse functions
● Expands the bandwidth of the founding team, notice more, process more, less
likely to have blind spots
● Promotes innovation and creativity
● Flexibility and holism in thinking
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Fast vs. Far
•
•
•
•
•
Need game plan
▪ Speed matters
▪ Others might want to go far, disrupt an entire industry
Think about who you need in your founding team to help you go fast and go far
Go Fast: Easy when people have worked together and have diverse knowledge
Go Far: Knowledge diversity is super important
Beware of co-founders that are vulnerable
Founding Team Composition Wrap Up
•
•
•
•
Allocate some equity and earmark for activities
Have a prenup, equity and operating norms for organization
Knowledge diversity
Mindful about going fast or going far
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Multiteam System
•
•
•
Organizations are multiteam systems
Component teams all working together with the other teams to execute a project
Typically has more than two teams, sometimes up to hundreds of teams working
together on various components of a large project
▪
Examples: SaaS organizations, disaster relief, emergency care
What Makes a Team?
•
•
Rule #1: The team needs a definite project where it can make a difference
A team is an organization that has defined deliverable, defined problem to solve
where team members need to work well together in order to develop a new
product
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Teaming Coordination
Coordination: A particular kind of understanding; the ability to work well together
•
Easy predictability allows people to seamlessly work together
•
Need common ground for communication to be successful
•
Coordination is helped when there is common representation of a problem
•
Coordination is improved when there’s synchrony, team members are in sync,
working in a pattern or rhythm
•
Better coordination leads to better cooperation
To amp up coordination, teams need to:
•
Reduce representational gaps
•
Create synchrony
Using Agile to Improve Coordination
•
Agile creates synchrony and coordination through the time-boxing of activities
•
Scrum: Scrum master is responsible for decomposing projects into sprint planning
(or weekly targets), sprint activities, sprint review
•
Product owners are the ones responsible for specifying customer requirements
•
Teams with a certified scrum master:
▪ Increase the ability to coordinate and do projects quicker
▪ Can do better when they have team members who are diverse in terms of
knowledge and also have familiarity with the team’s history of tasks
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Teaming Cooperation
Cooperation: The willingness to work well together
Felt Accountability: People have a sense of ownership and obligation that’s deeply
felt, and they will automatically cooperate better
How to increase cooperation in teams and also improve coordination?
Allow employees to choose their own job titles to showcase their unique personal
strength. Coordination can improve because titles create common representations and
allow the team to sync up.
Teaming Composition
•
•
How many team members on a team?
▪
5 is the optimal number
Who should be on a team?
▪
Knowledge diversity, each person should have different functional
experiences
▪
Mix novices and experts together
▪
Mix optimists and pessimists
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Atlassian Case Study
•
Think about how the company uses teams to innovate regularly
•
Pay close attention to how teams are organically formed, the problems they
tackle, and how ShipIt Days work
Atlassian Case Wrap Up
•
•
•
Teams solve different problems
Customers are involved to evaluate the demos made by the teams
Pay close attention to how teams are composed, their size and the fact they work
under very sharp time constraint
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Teaming Summary
•
A team has to have purpose, clear goals, clear deliverables — all of which
activate felt accountability
•
Multiteam system has many teams, so think about what connects the teams
together, what brings the teams together, and how information is circulated
amongst the teams
•
Inter-team coordination, not just intra-team coordination
Finding People
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Objectives
•
Share broad hiring considerations
•
Examine hiring practices in the U.S. Navy SEALs
•
Discuss takeaways from the Navy SEALs case study
Finding People
•
•
•
Finding people is the most important thing for startups seeking to scale at the
earlier stage
Hiring is not just important at the beginning stage, but throughout an
organization’s life history
Hiring is source of new ideas, new DNA, new variation
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Broad Considerations for Finding People
•
•
•
•
•
Smarts matter: Need people with intellectual ability and firepower
▪
Fluid intelligence (breadth, adaptability, intellectual flexibility) vs. crystalline
intelligence (depth, subject matter expertise)
▪
Ask yourself what kind of intelligence you need and why
Conscientiousness: Conscientious people do the right thing, they do more and go
above and beyond the call of duty
Curiosity: As organizations change and scale, employees need to change too
Helpful: Organizations are a team sport
Do you want to go fast or go far?
U.S. Navy SEALs Case Study
•
•
Objective of case study:
▪
Understand how the U.S. Navy uses a particular way to screen and select
candidates so they have the right mindset
Think about the following questions as you read the case:
▪
How does the U.S. Navy recruit SEALs?
▪
How do you find Navy SEALs to do complex jobs?
▪
What’s the most important weapon of a SEAL — body or mind?
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Caring, Sharing and Daring in Navy SEALs
Why put people through the grueling training process?
•
Once you put someone through a powerful ritual, they realize they have overcome
great obstacles. If they are still interested after the obstacles, it shows they are
committed and it means they care.
•
Many of the tests involve sharing. If you slack, the burden will be felt by others.
•
Going through the selection gives the Navy SEALs enormous confidence to dare, to
take risks when they are on a mission.
Job Design
•
•
What is the job you’re hiring people for?
Think of jobs as two groups of tasks:
▪
Star tasks
▪
•
▪
▪
Great upside for organization if done well
Examples: Getting customers, increasing revenue, developing new products
▪
▪
Reduce downside for organization if done well
Example: Minimize bugs when writing code
Guardian tasks
Separate star tasks and guardian tasks if you can
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Job Design
Hiring for Firm
•
Schrep’s tests at Facebook:
▪
Three dimensions:
o Ninja: Sheer ability. E.g. Coding ability, diving ability
o Jedi: Problem solving ability — overcoming obstacles
o Pirate: Think outside the box? Risk taking?
•
Allocate 100 points across each of these dimensions for each job in your firm,
then test for them
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Indirect Measures
•
•
•
Companies want to get a good sense of who the candidates are, so they use
indirect measures
Think very carefully for your important jobs the unobtrusive indicators you can use
Don’t interview in an office — go on a walk or go to a coffee shop
Employee Referrals
•
Use your own employees as referral sources
•
Employees likely know people similar to themselves, so it will be easier for the
referrals to work with the existing people
•
Reward given if referral turns out to be a high performer
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Try Before You Buy
"We employ, on average, only one in every seven people who contact us looking for a
job. The teams in our shops are the backbone of what we do so it's incredibly
important we find the right individuals to join them. As a potential new recruit, you'll
go on an 'Experience Day', where you get the chance to see what working for Pret is
really like. We check you out and you check us out. As many people as possible get to
meet you and the whole team has a say in whether you join us.”
- Pret-A-Manger
OCEAN Framework
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Layoffs
•
•
•
An organization is defined by the people who are hired and by the people who get
fired
How you fire and when you fire matter a lot
Retain the right kind of people: Do they match your startup as you scale?
Finding People Summary
•
Your job is not just to judge people, but think of ways of helping them
•
You want who you hire to succeed
•
Smart, talented people go where they feel wanted and needed, not where they are
going to be judged
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Alignment
Objectives
•
Discuss how to use alignment to improve coordination
•
Share how to use alignment to enhance cooperation
•
Explain how incentives can be used to ensure there is proper alignment
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Aligning to Improve Coordination
•
How do you coordinate a company that is scaling? Think about the story that
animates the organization.
•
Stories are short, memorable, spreadable, and stickable
•
If all employees understand the story behind the organization, coordination
becomes easier
•
Trust is essential for coordination
Story as a Source of Coordination
Negative Emotions
Positive Emotions
Strong
Emotions
Aggression Zone
Focused on external
threats. E.g. Economic
crisis, competitor, etc.
Pride Zone
Weak
Emotions
Resignation Zone
Need to turn organization
around. E.g. BP: Slam the
clam; BA: Putting people
first
Comfort Zone
Use story to intensify
emotion, take people to
Aggression Zone
E.g. Institute for Health
Improvement
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Coordination Wrap Up
•
Think about the story you want to create for your organization
▪
If there’s a threat, focus on it
▪
No threat, go to the Pride Zone (easier to sustain)
▪
Think about pride and anger
▪
Look at DNA of people hired
•
Stories matter a lot at the organization
▪
Help to arrest confusion
▪
Make sure everyone has a common background
Aligning to Enhance Cooperation
•
Don’t overemphasize incentives all the time
•
Breed Felt Accountability — tug of obligation and commitment
•
Incentives often thought of as money: Goal is to use money as a tool to get people
to do things
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Money as Tool
Low Psychological
Magnitude
High Psychological
Magnitude
Low Economic
Magnitude
Much ado about nothing
Great bang for the buck and
for persistence (immediacy,
reversibility, recognition
unanticipated) – Zappos,
Intuit
High Economic
Magnitude
Little bang for the buck
High-powered incentives
Two paychecks at a bank!
Designing Incentives
•
•
•
When designing incentives, ask yourself:
▪
Are you getting enough bang for the buck?
▪
Are you making sure to marry economic magnitude with psychological
magnitude?
As organization scales, think about things in the high psychological magnitude
and low economic magnitude quadrant
Motivation has two aspects
▪
Steering wheel: Goals A, B, C; steer in a particular way to goal A
▪
Juice: Persistence, are you more likely to put effort day in day out?
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Performance Alignment Requires Different Levers!
Potential
Blocks
Solution
Lever
To contribute
Uncertain
Purpose
Communicate
values
Reshape Purpose
To do right
Pressure or
temptation to
abuse
Specify Rules of
the Game
Define Red Lines
To achieve
Lack of
focus/targets
Measurable
targets and
incentives
Rethink Targets
To create
Fear of risk
Forums for
dialogue
Don’t make smart
people dumb!
Alignment Summary
•
•
•
Stories matter!
Stories align people
▪
When people share a common story, all of them have common ground and
can predict each other’s behaviors
Using incentives effectively ensures there’s proper alignment
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Hacking
Objectives
•
Explain what hacking is and why it’s essential to an organization as it grows
•
Discuss ways to hack and how to do it effectively
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
What is Hacking?
Getting rid of rules, metrics and other things that are either obsolete or impede
initiative and cooperation
“Hacking is like mowing the lawn. You've got to do it
very regularly. It’s not a one and done thing”
-Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Ways to Hack
Hacking can take a variety of shapes and forms:
•
Hack meetings: Decrease the number of meetings
▪
E.g. Cancel an existing meeting if you want to make another meeting
•
Hacking to catch up on problems you haven’t been able to solve
▪
E.g. Hacking at FB: Call a hackathon and pull an all-nighter to solve a
problem
•
Give incentives for people to subtract, not just add
•
Brand reimagination
Brand Reimagination
•
•
Ask people on your team to imagine they come from different companies (e.g.
Tesla, Amazon, Uber, etc.) to join your company and have them reimagine your
company
Using their new perspectives, ask how they would reshape, redefine, restructure,
and simplify your organization
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
AstraZeneca Case Study
•
Is AstraZeneca properly positioning or branding its simplification campaign to get
employees to buy in to the effort, without making them worry that they are going to
simplify themselves out of jobs?
•
How can Subramanian verify that simplification is happening, without creating a
complex reporting and tracking bureaucracy? How can she ensure best practices are
shared from unit to unit?
Hacking Summary
•
•
•
Organizations need to hack and subtract regularly
If you don’t hack, you pay an invisible tax
As you scale your organization, pay close attention to subtraction and make sure
to reward people who subtract, not just those who add
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Real Time Feedback
Objectives
•
•
•
Explain what real time feedback is and why it’s important to an organization’s
health
Discuss how feedback is used in performance management
Provide a framework for giving real time feedback
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Feedback and Feedforward
•
Real time feedback is immediate, concrete, and helpful
•
Feedforward gives employees information that can help them do better
immediately
Real Time Feedback Check-In
Check-In
-
What am I (or you) doing well?
What do I (you) need to do less of?
What is confusing me?
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Feedforward in the Context of Performance Management
•
•
Feedforward is super lightweight, super easy and you want it to be helpful
▪
Not used to decide on raise
▪
Helps employees move quicker and better
▪
No just boss to employee; can be customer to organization, peer to peer,
department to department and so forth
Give real time feedback and then move to feedforward
Radical Candor
Care Personally
H
Ruinous Empathy
Radical Candor
L
H
Manipulative
Insincerity
Challenge
Directly
Obnoxious
Aggression
L
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Source: Kim Scott
How to Engage in Radical Candor?
Feedback has to go through three stages:
1.
2.
3.
“Huh?”— Surprised, a bit of discrepancy, not sure what it is
“Aha!” — Insight, recognition
End with “Haha!”, you laugh because you have digested
Crisis Text Line Case Study
•
Nancy Lublin does not think of her non-profit organization as a fundraising
operation as much as a product
•
It’s all about the product, what the product does for the volunteers (the counselors)
and what it does for the texters (the customers)
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Real Time Feedback Summary
•
Real time feedback is all about helping, not about judging people:
▪
How do I help someone do better?
▪
How do I make this person bigger?
▪
What do I make this person care more about?
▪
What do I make this person share more about?
▪
How do I make this person dare more in their work?
Engaging
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Objectives
•
•
•
•
What is engagement?
Discuss Macey and Schneider’s Engagement Framework
Discuss the three elements of mindset to create engagement
Provide context and a simple way of thinking about engagement in organizations
What is Engagement?
•
Engagement is the holy grail of organizations
•
No engagement = Employees have fired you as their leader
•
Think of engagement as:
▪
Traits of people you recruit — what to look for
▪
Psychological states — what states to create
▪
Behaviors that generate a variety of outcomes for organization
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Macey and Schneider’s Framework for Engagement
1.
2.
3.
Psychological traits that amp up engagement
▪
Look for people who are conscientious, who are proactive and take initiative
Psychological states that embody engagement
▪
Commitment: How committed are you to your organization?
▪
Involvement: To what extent are you involved with your organization?
▪
Empowerment: You feel comfortable taking responsibility, you feel
comfortable exercising authority
Behaviors that reflect engagement and express engagement of employees
▪
Go above and beyond the call of duty
Three Elements of Mindset: Caring, Sharing, Daring
•
•
Mindset is how we process information, what we do with it and how culture
manifests itself at the level of the individual
Each of the three elements of the mindset embodies felt accountability — people
feel motivated to do something, have the ability to do it, and can account for their
behavior
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Caring, Sharing and Daring
•
Caring: Caring about the lives of the customers and employees
▪
What are the attributes we need to look for?
▪
What’s the psychological state we want to generate?
▪
What kind of behaviors do we want to create or foster?
•
Sharing: Share ideas, resources, mistakes, authority
•
Daring: Taking risks
▪
The most important predictor: What is the cost of a mistake? The bigger the
cost of a mistake, the lower the amount of daring.
▪
Reduce the cost of a mistake: Create low-risk prototypes
▪
Elicit daring behaviors from a variety of individuals
Suggestions to Increase Caring, Sharing and Daring
•
Analyze your engagement survey. How many of the questions map onto caring,
sharing and daring?
▪
Minimize jargons
•
Examine how you interview candidates in your organization. What kind of
questions do you ask in an interview? How many questions have to do with
prospective recruit’s experience of:
▪
Caring and being cared for
▪
Sharing and benefiting from sharing
▪
Daring and being in an organization that enabled daring
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Engaging Summary
•
Caring, sharing and daring are interdependent
•
All three elements are needed
•
You need to not only monitor each element, but continually replenish them as
your organization becomes bigger and larger
Reinvention
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Objectives
•
•
•
•
Examine Greiner’s framework to understand how organizations get reinvented
Provide guidance on how to think about reinvention by drawing on your
understanding of the FARTHER framework
Discuss the problems of de-energizing and destabilizing effects of friction
Share six simple ways to combat friction in organizations and demonstrate
leadership
What is Reinvention?
•
Reinvention is not replication or doing more of the same
•
Pivot: A revision of hypothesis
•
Not a one time thing; continually reinvent as you scale
•
Organizations that don’t reinvent become obsolete
•
CEOs often lead from a position of not knowing and as a result pay attention to
emotions as sources of information
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Evolution and Revolution: Greiner
Reprinted with permission from "Evolution and
Revolution as Organizations Grow” by Larry E.
Greiner. Harvard Business Review, May 1998.
Copyright 1998 by Harvard Business Publishing;
all rights reserved.
Friction
•
Friction is a big problem confronting organizations
•
Core challenge of leadership: Make the right things easier, the wrong things
harder, and without driving people crazy
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
“Only three things happen naturally in organizations:
friction, confusion, and under performance. Everything
else requires leadership.“
- Peter Drucker
Lesson 1: Friction, Like Cholesterol, Can Be Good or Bad
•
Bad friction can erode initiative. Loss of initiative leads to turfism and silo-laden
behavior, which can atrophy cooperation.
•
Good friction can build commitment, serve as a brake and allow for
deliberation.
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Bad Friction: Work As A Grind
Lesson 2: Visible and Invisible Sources of Friction
Positive Value
Negative Value
Visible
Invisible
FEATURE
ARCHITECTURE
BUG
DEBT (TECHNICAL AND
ORGANIZATIONAL)
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Technical Debt
Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels
Customer’s View
Developer’s View
Organizational Debt: People, Structure and
Culture Compromises
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Lesson 3: The Bad Friction Epidemic
•
Collaboration overload: “Knowledge workers spend 70-85% of their time
attending meetings (virtual or face-to-face), dealing with e-mail, talking on the
phone or otherwise dealing with an avalanche of requests for input or advice.”
- Rob Cross and Peter Gray, University of Virginia
•
The bigger, older, and richer an organization gets — on average — the worse it
gets
The Fatigue is Especially Damaging
•
When things that ought to be easy to do become hard, it not only wastes
people’s time, it leaves them feeling exhausted, impatient, and meanspirited
•
One antidote: More frequent breaks lead to deeper thinking and more
compassion
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Six Ways to Combat Bad Friction
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Framing
Subtracting
Executive presence
Focus on handoffs
Grease people vs. gunk people
Retire debt
Framing
•
Adopted NASCAR “pit stop” analogy for equipment changeovers, no longer seen as
“breaks”
▪
Changeovers went from 14 to 8 hours
▪
Cascaded excellence to other teams
▪
Production from 684,000 syringes to 1,026,000 filled per week
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Subtracting: It’s Like Mowing the Lawn
•
Subtraction and other “friction fighting” methods at best, create only temporary
victories
•
There is no “one and done”
•
Hacking mindset needed. Rewarding subtraction!
“Armeetingeddon Has Landed”
The day that Dropbox eliminated recurring meetings.
- Drew Houston
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Meeting Guidelines at Dropbox
•
“Be conservative with meeting invites.” Invite only key stakeholders, not “spectators.”
▪ A cap of three to five people is recommended for decision-making meetings
•
“Every meeting must have an owner.”
▪
Cancel meetings that lack a clear owner who keeps it on track
“Schedule meetings if (and only if) other methods of communicating won't cut it.”
•
▪
Consider whether another forum, such as email or a chat, can accomplish the same
result
•
Employees invited to meetings are encouraged to ask "Do I really need to be here?”
•
"If you find yourself on your phone or laptop during a meeting, that's a good sign that
you're neither deriving nor contributing value to the meeting and it might be worth
reconsidering."
Executive Presence: From Hippo to Elephant
•
All organizations have problems: Silence may reflect a cycle not necessarily of
fear, but a cycle consisting of feelings:
▪
Powerlessness
▪
Helplessness
▪
Hopelessness
▪
Meaninglessness!
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
From Hippo
To Elephant
Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash
Photo by Nam Anh
on Unsplash
Mouth/ears ratio!
The executive who was
“all transmission, and no reception.”
Red Flags: Diagnostic Questions
1.
How much does the top dog (or a few stars) dominate the talking time? Does he or
she let you or anyone else get a word in edgewise?
2.
What is the ratio of questions that people (especially the top dogs) ask versus
statements they make?
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Focus on Handoffs
A negative effect of adding more people and silos — jobs become more
narrow and specialized, information is lost about people and problems,
bottlenecks occur, errors and delays mount.
Classic hand-off problems:
▪ Nurses and patients
▪ Firefighting crews and forest fires
▪ Design to manufacturing
Grease People vs. Gunk People
Lori vs. Larry: Similar position, similar tenure, same organization
Lori prides herself in using the rules and systems to help get things done in the
easiest possible way; she knows how to bend and even ignore them for the greater
good.
Larry is a “Rule Nazi.” Rule enforcers impede speed and agility.
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Retire Debt
Make concerted effort to retire debt, be it technical or organizational
AstraZeneca — Simplifying Business
•
•
§
§
A group of 40 employees saved the company 2 million hours in 2017 through
streamlined operations, more efficient processes, new technology and
improved ways of working.
Goal: Create time to…
Improve the lives
of 4 million more
patients
Complete 400
more early
phase trials
Achieve 26
more late
phase trials
Give employees
back an hour
each week
Source: AstraZeneca
Noun Project Icon Credits: Heart created by creative outlet; Check list by Arthur Shlain; Flask by Gabriele Malaspina; Time by LAFS
Combating Bad Friction Wrap Up
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Keep the 6 lessons in mind to hack and seriously think of combating friction in
your own organization
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Accountability consists of “account” and “ability”
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Eliminate bad friction if you want to boost ability
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Reinvention Summary
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As organization reinvents
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You need new skills; bring new skills through finding new people
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Create new metrics of performance measurement to align people better
Scaling is not just scaling the organization, but also the people within
CEOs also need to scale
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Revise, rethink, reimagine
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CEO can’t afford to be a hippo: Big mouth, small ears and eyes
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Be an elephant: Big ears, huge trunk, small mouth, formidable
memories
Course Summary
Copyright © Stanford University 2020
Course Summary
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As you scale, consider which of the FARTHER elements to emphasize, where to apply
them and how
Inspect how healthy are the elements of the FARTHER framework in your organization
as it grows, if you are thinking of buying an organization, thinking about being
acquired, or going to IPO
People operations are the foundations on which we build product, on which we add
customers and on which we get the financial outcomes we seek to pursue
The most important thing is to build organizations that make the right things attractive
for people to do, the wrong things hard for them to do without driving people crazy
Leadership is a series of actions to help others become bigger and better and people
operations is one pathway to do that
Copyright © Stanford University 2020