Joy & Competitiveness & Culture

I keep a notecard on my desk. It says “Bring Joy.”

I wrote it a few years ago after reading an article about Steve Kerr and the Warriors. Kerr has had a blessed basketball life – playing under two of the very best coaches of all time in Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson. But the most impactful advice he got before he started coaching did not come from them. It came from Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Carroll told him that the plays he drew up wouldn’t matter. The only thing that would matter would be the culture he would set for the team.

Kerr decided that the Warriors culture would be built around two concepts: joy and competitiveness. What an amazing articulation. It gives me goosebumps. It represents everything I would want in a culture. Hence the notecard.

Now here’s the thing. That might not be true for you. You might want a culture defined by rigor and excellence. Or attention to detail and collaboration. All of those people sharing the Michael Jordan video from Episode 7 of the Last Dance where he got choked up talking about winning?¹² Maybe they would want a culture that’s defined by winning at all costs.

Talking about culture is easy. Living it is hard. But I think at least part of the reason it’s so hard to live is because people often don’t take the time to rigorously define it.

Before we get to some thoughts about how you might go about defining your culture, we should talk about why culture is important.³

Earlier in my career, I thought young people talked about strategy and execution being important and old people talked about culture being important. I actually think they are both true. It’s just a timing difference. The thing that matters right now is the strategy and the execution. The thing that matters in the long term is the people who are setting that strategy and driving that execution. In my mind, the culture determines who self-selects to be those people over the long-term. So if you care about the people who will make the strategy and execution decisions in the moment beyond right now, you should care about culture.

I think of culture as the unwritten contract with your team. Here’s what matters to us. Here’s what will endure even if everything else changes. You should only put things in it that you will honor no matter what. With that in mind, I think it makes sense to only have one or two of these things.

So how do you pick those one or two things? I am no expert, but here are some thoughts you might consider:

1. Authenticity isn’t enough. These should be things that you believe with religious intensity.

   Startups are so hard. You will be tested. You will question everything. The only things that will endure are those principles that you feel in your soul. What does this mean? Think about Amazon. They have fourteen leadership principles. They are all really good. I’m sure Bezos loves all of them. But I bet he would die on the hill defending just one. That one — customer obsession — defines Amazon’s culture.

2. Accept that a rational person could disagree with your highest cultural value.

   A lot of people talk about shadow personality traits. My simple brain takes this to mean that your personality can manifest in good ways and bad ways. This will be true for cultures too. You want your culture to be defined by performance? Great. Some people will say you’re cold-hearted. That’s ok! If you want to take this a step further, ask yourself if you’d be fine if some potential team member didn’t join because they don’t like the shadow application of your culture. I don’t know Frank Slootman. But my suspicion is that he would be ok if someone doesn’t come to Snowflake because they are nervous that the performance orientation bleeds into cold-heartedness.

3. Ask yourself what behavior you’ll defend — maybe even be begrudgingly happy about — when a culture carrier overdoes it.

   What will you defend even when it has pissed someone off? What is the behavior, that even if taken to an extreme, will simultaneously bother you and make you shake your head with a touch of admiration? When one of my children loses his mind over losing a board game, I, of course, correct him and tell him he needs to lose with grace. But, as ashamed as I am to admit this, I am secretly sort of proud, too.

4. If you’re a founder, ask yourself - “If you had to pick a CEO to replace you, what is the one belief that they have to share with you?”

   Patrick Collison asked Dylan Field and Tony Xu this at Base Camp, our annual event where we go camping with our founders. What an incredible question.⁴ However you would answer it, I would bet that belief represents your culture pretty well.

When defining your culture, there is an enormous temptation to cater to everyone. It feels so good in the moment to say things that people want to hear. It feels like the right thing to do to address engagement survey feedback and tell the team you are going to make it better.

But in my experience, those commitments won’t be honored in the long term. The sheer difficulty of building a company will ensure that the only values that will survive are the ones that you’d rather shut the company down than change. The true culture will reveal itself to the team.

Thinking rigorously about what defines your culture allows you to tell your current and future teammates the truth about what they are getting into. It’s an incredible show of respect. And however you end up defining your culture, having a foundation of trust and respect is a pretty good start.