Book 291 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: VC vs. CC - Venture Capitalist vs. Culture Capitalist!

Book – An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Part 1 of 3)

Book Description:

Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations. This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone.

Reflection:

Peter Drucker, the business management guru, has a famous saying, “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”.

VC’s have known this secret for decades. Anyone can have a great idea, and a lot of people can take that idea to maybe even build a great product or service out of it. However, if you want it to become a “unicorn” someday and generate massive returns for a venture capital firm, you have to build an amazing culture for that to become a reality.

Hence the sentiment that culture eats strategy for breakfast.

I’d lived the powerful feeling that culture in the workplace can bring during my time at Angie’s List as we grew from a tiny start up to a publicly traded company. While the product was great, I think everyone that worked there knew the real secret to our meteoric rise and it was the unique culture that had been crafted by our fearless leaders. It was the most electric experience I’ve ever had in my professional career and something I will never forget. To this day, I still have more close friends from that experience than every other job I’ve ever had in my life combined.

And then, it all collapsed almost as quickly as it had begun. From the day we went public, everything changed, and in retrospect was the beginning of the end of that incredible culture. As the business goals slowly shifted from its people to its public investors, the culture slowly went with it, and that was that.

With that transformational experience imbedded in my subconscious, I always knew what the idea of culture eats strategy for breakfast looks like, but I still didn’t believe that you could ever truly start a culture like that unless you had an incredible product to start it in the first place.

That was my paradigm as I tried to launch my first software company. Have a great idea, build a great product, and then bring in the culture when you have product market fit. Solve the business challenge first, and then culture second.

Made sense to me…and that is how I proceeded until the day I met my daughter on March 15th, 2020.

After Emilia passed away 40 days later, nothing really mattered to me at all in this world anymore, especially not trying to start a company. I just wanted to figure out how to find purpose again in this world and understand why I was still here, and my daughter wasn’t.

As I slowly emerged from the rubble of my life with the guiding hand of my daughter, I came back to this world with a different perspective and goal in life, and that was simply to do my best to live a life that honored my daughter and reflected what I learned from the way she lived in her short time on this Earth.

It was with that intention in mind that I expressed to my new co-founder of a venture to be named later, Trieu, when we first met later that year in August of 2020. When we agreed to join forces on a project, we did something a little different than most traditional “business partnerships” at our initial founding. Instead of coming together to work on a particular project, we agreed to join forces to build a world class culture first. The mission was to develop a culture with balance at its core that would help us to connect our personal values to what we created and the people we collaborated with each day. How we were going to do this was a mystery to us at this point, but we knew enough about what we wanted out of life to know that we were tired of not living life this way. So, we agreed to go down this road together and have never looked back.

Over the course of the following few months, we decided that we would spend our time trying to bring our values to life as our first step in this process. We shared, read, learned, and explored concepts and life together every singly night since the day we first met, which we still do and have no plans to stop. During this initial exploration, the vision for the culture we wanted to create slowly began to take shape little by little.

That vision ultimately came to be called ClubAny, and the culture was to be founded on the idea of Working Harder On Yourself Than You Do On Your Job (See Reflection 77 inspired by Jim Rohn’s Ultimate Library).

We literally said to each other, we don’t care about “the what” we are going to build together…we just care about staying true to this founding principle of our culture as we move forward. I’m happy to say that we’ve remained true to that to this day and will never look back.

Ironically, almost 3 years in, we’ve haven’t really produced a single “what” together of monetary value, but we’ve been building a hell of an amazing culture that has changed our lives and impacted so many others.

I give all this as context to express how over the moon shocked, I was when I came across this book about these 3 DDO’s or deliberately developmental organizations as the book calls them. They are founded with the exact principles that Trieu and I have been discussing for the past 3 years of Culture is the Strategy and that culture should be about working harder on yourself than you do on your job. I feel like I’ve finally found my people after 3 years of searching.

I was blown away by this book and eat up every minute of it. Talk about the omens leading the way. I have no idea how I stumbled upon this book, but I’m so glad that the universe connected us together. This is the way of “business” in the future and I’m more convinced no then ever.

Here is the twist that Trieu and I have been working on, all of these fellow DDO’s were started with a commerce creating business idea at its founding and then became a DDO. Our question is, what if you just created the culture first and then discovered the venture or ventures along the way to keep the mission going?

That is ClubAny!

If we are successfully, we envision a world where co-founders will come together to form a startup “culture” based on a shared values and a mission versus a particular business venture.

Maybe it will become so successful that it will spawn a whole new economy of CC’s or Cultural Capitalists that strategically invest in cultures and people and play the long game to see what for profit ventures it produces.

Wouldn’t that be something? Black Swan anyone?

Question: What would happen if we stopped investing in ventures and started investing in cultures instead?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - An Everyone Culture