Lots of executives I talk to at fast-growing companies are obsessed with numbers.
Numbers -- of customers, offices or countries -- are important. But numbers are only half of the story in a scaling company. The other half: Narrative.
Huggy Rao defines the focus on your footprint, or the numbers that define your company as you scale up, as fighting the air war. The question of the company's culture -- what actually happens as customers and employees interact -- is the ground war. He is professor of organizational behavior at Stanford.
"What allows your footprint to thrive is the mindset, an action orientation," he says in a lecture he gave as part of his massive online open course, Scaling Your Venture Without Screwing Up. "You need to fight the ground war, too."
I'm taking the course offered by Rao and Bob Sutton, professor of management science and engineering, based on their book, Scaling Up Excellence. Last week, the lectures were about the trifecta -- illusion, impatience and incompetence -- that leads executives into clusterfugs.
This week, the duo offers practical advice on how to develop the mindset of your employees so that they do the right thing when nobody is looking.
Sutton and Rao encourage executives to think narratively. If you have the right mindset, you don't have to worry as much about the hierarchy.
He suggested asking two questions to help develop the mindset: What is sacred? and What is taboo?
To Rao, the questions about what is sacred and taboo and what is the company's mindset help the executives and employees develop a company's story.
"Stories are fantastic coordination devices ... a substitute for structure in a scaling company, " he says.
A strong company story also helps people focus on a cause larger then themselves. One of the tar pits a scaling company could fall into is having employees who don't listen to evidence at all.
"People suffer from delusions of uniqueness," says Sutton in a discussion of how rigorously companies should try to replicate their culture, processes and environments as they scale up, or how much freedom to give the farflung offices to differ. "People think they're so special and so unique that they should be able to do what they want."
People are unique -- but if you can give them a story that helps them focus on a cause larger than themselves, they may be able to lose the chips on their shoulders and make decisions that put the company's interests first.
So, taboo and sacred. The essence of these questions is what does no one question at the company? (At a news organization, I think the answer is accuracy.)
At Airbnb, Rao says, what's sacred is the idea that "What's mine is yours." And what is taboo? "Hoarding."
That mindset applies both the customer and employee experience.
And it's supplemented by the three words that help flesh out the company's mindset, or the way it and its employees approach building the company:
Solve.
Play.
Go.
Again, the attitude of the company's business -- it enables people to rent space in people's homes temporarily -- matches its function.
Airbnb's words also point to Rao's next concrete tip, which is to use verbs, not nouns and adverbs, when you are developing your company's mindset and mission statement. Don't use deadly dull words like "problem-solving" or "collaboration."
How does this play out at Pinterest?
What's sacred at Pinterest is, "We put pinners first." A pinner is an employee or a customer.
The mindset is about collaboration:
"We knit," Rao explains. "We all have different skills, we all have different specialties ... but we have to knit together these specialties in a different way.
