Last week, CSUF Entrepreneurship mentor and veteran executive coach for Vistage Dave Kinnear gave a great talk on the importance of culture for any organization and how to effectively build a great culture that will grow as your business grows. According to Dave, in order to accomplish this you first need to know how culture is built and the way to do this is to understand how people develop their world view.
For Dave, it all starts with fundamental organizing principles (FOPs), which is how people interpret reality. These are foundational principles that help to determine how you view everything.
From FOPs come values. Values are more disbursed than FOPs and are how we view the world. If you think that every person has inalienable rights then that is one of your values.
Next up are beliefs/habits. Beliefs/habits are our way of systematizing how we interact with the world. Instead of using pure logic to determine how to do things beliefs/habits help us to act quickly.
Action is the penultimate link in this chain and action is the manifestation of the heuristical responses as determined by our beliefs/habits. Actions taken are not always based off of complete information but without the foundational elements from above we couldn’t act.
From actions come results, which are simply how things end up once you take action. Depending on your FOPs, the world may be an ordered system akin to a clock but the complexity of that system is immeasurably complex and your results may not always align with that viewpoint. When that happens you will understandably start to question things.
The thing about this system is that the closer you get to FOPs the less change you will be willing to make. But if your results do not align with what you expected then you will start questioning things and reassess some things. The further up the line towards FOPs you get, the harder it is to change but you will be adjusting your beliefs/habits throughout your life.
In order to build a strong company culture you need to honestly assess what your world view is and create processes in your company that align with that. If you do it right then your culture will permeate every facet of your business and will help your business grow into the kind of entity that you want. It takes work but it can be done.
At least that was my interpretation of Dave’s thesis. Dave was more eloquent in explaining this in his talk and I hope to get some clips up from his talk for our Knowledge @ CSUF Entrepreneurship series soon.
And if you would like to meet with Dave to discuss culture and how to start your business you can reserve some time at his office hours that he does for CSUF Entrepreneurship. Office hours with Dave are a good way to get started on building your innovative concept and once you are ready to get serious about launching your business you should seriously consider becoming a resident at the CSUF Startup Incubator where we help entrepreneurs go from concept to launch.
Reading posts like this and attending talks by experts like Dave are part of the formula for success but there is significantly more value with working with experts like Dave and the people at the CSUF Startup Incubator.
Here are some thought-provoking quotes that Dave highlighted during his talk that I had to include in this post:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is how Peter Drucker described culture and for Dave he sees culture as how organizations get things done.
“Values should underpin Vision, which dictates Mission, which determines Strategy, which surfaces Goals that frame Objectives, which in turn drives the Tactics that tell an organization what Resources, Infrastructure and Processes are needed to support a certainty of Execution” Mike Myatt.
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