To Build a Strong Culture, Create Rules That Are Unique to Your Company

Ben Horowitz, the high-profile venture capitalist behind some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing startups, is out with an intriguing book, called What You Do Is Who You Are, that emphasizes the power of culture, rather than technology or money, as a driver of business success. One of his most intriguing insights is that powerful cultures are built around what he calls “shocking rules” — rituals and practices that are memorable, so “bizarre,” that people inside the organization “encounter almost daily” and that people who hear about them wonder why they are necessary.

Horowitz’s argument is as simple as it is powerful: You can’t create something unique and compelling in the marketplace unless you first create something unique and compelling in the workplace. Truly great organizations work as distinctively as they hope to compete.

That’s why Tom Coughlin — head coach of the New York Giants from 2004 to 2015, whose fanatical attention to detail on the field helped his team win two Super Bowls — insisted that his players arrive at meetings five minutes before the scheduled start time. If they arrived on time, they were officially considered late and subject to a fine. It was called “Coughlin Time,” and it set the rhythm for the whole organization.

It’s also why Jeff Bezos insisted for years — even as Amazon was growing by leaps and bounds — that desks at the company “were built by buying cheap doors from Home Depot and nailing legs to them.” Of course, a company with tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue could pay for elegant desks for its programmers and executives. But this shocking rule reminded everyone that “We look for every opportunity to save money so we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.”

The moment I encountered Horowitz’s argument in support of shocking rules, I realized that it explained so many of the fascinating, colorful, one-of-a-kind practices at so many of the high-performing organizations I’ve studied.

Detroit-based Quicken Loans, the hard-charging financial-services company that began as a digital disruptor, is now the largest originator of home mortgages in the country. Its culture is obsessed with a non-negotiable rule: Every customer phone call or email must be returned on the same day it is received — even if it arrives minutes before an employee is about to leave. “We are zealots about this,” Dan Gilbert, the company’s founder, told new hires at a training session I attended. “We are on the lunatic fringe.”

In fact, Gilbert gave every person at the meeting — literally hundreds of them — his direct-dial extension and told them: “If you’re too busy to” return a customer voice mail, “I’ll do it for you.” Why such fierce attention to this rule? Because one of the key competitive principles at Quicken Loans is that “a sense of urgency is the ante to play,” and this rule brings that sense of urgency to life. It’s Dan Gilbert’s version of Coughlin Time.

Years back, I immersed myself in the colorful (and highly successful) world of Cranium, the Seattle-based maker of board games that reinvigorated a tired category of family entertainment and produced some of the most iconic titles of the last several decades. Everywhere I went — whether I was hanging out with products designers or the IT staff or the CFO — everyone would question whether a particular product, or process, or meeting was CHIFF.

What’s CHIFF? It stands for clever, high quality, innovative, friendly, and fun, and it was an ethos that was meant to infuse every aspect of how the company did business — from its games to its hiring process to its meetings to how the offices were designed.

Importantly, CHIFF was more than an abstract ethos. I met a full-time senior executive whose formal title was “CHIFF champion.” Her job was to examine every ritual, practice, and process at the company and make sure it lived up to CHIFF standards. Moreover, employees had the right to question and object to any part of organizational life that they believed fell short of the standard. “This doesn’t feel CHIFF,” they’d say, or, “Can’t we make this more CHIFF?”

Truth be told, when I left Seattle, I rolled my eyes about all this CHIFF chatter. As an outsider, I didn’t understand why this acronym had such life-and-death importance inside the company, and why it was a daily part of life there. Eventually, though, as I got to know the culture at Texas A&M, one of the country’s truly distinctive universities, I realized that my discomfort was more evidence of the power of shocking rules.

Students at Texas A&M don’t abide by business versions of “shocking rules” — this is a campus, after all, not a company — but they have so many colorful rituals and traditions that they would give Harry Potter and his classmates at Hogwarts a run for their money. Here’s one small example. Upperclassmen and alumni often pepper their conversations with the term “Whoop!” — which is how the school’s many different “yells” (fight songs and other expressions of rah-rah spirit) often end. But students are not allowed to say “Whoop” until they begin their junior year, and violations of the rule are frowned upon.

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