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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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      “Culture” is the “miasma“ of management theories.

      4 replies 11 retweets 80 likes
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    2. Nick Pinkston  🌐‏ @NickPinkston Sep 21
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      Replying to @vgr

      Disagree - I think it's easy to understand if a culture is broken and understand how to change it. It's actually just really hard to actually change it.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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      Replying to @NickPinkston

      That last clause means you don’t understand how to change it, and your idea of how it’s broken is a just-so theory that doesn’t work. What looks like “broken culture” is nearly always referred pain from something else invisible. “Culture” can’t actually break. It’s not a machine.

      2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
    4. Nick Pinkston  🌐‏ @NickPinkston Sep 21
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      Replying to @vgr

      In smaller orgs, the major issue is the board / C-suite not wanting to make hard choices: ie do a layoff + replace a lot of managers and start performance mgmt on ICs to turn the culture over. That's not an understanding problem, but a power/buy-in problem.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    5. Nick Pinkston  🌐‏ @NickPinkston Sep 21
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      Replying to @NickPinkston @vgr

      Culture can "break" as in get dysfunctional. The questions are: Are your values / org systems still valid for your current mission/strategy? Are you actually hiring people / running things according to these values? It's pretty straightforward to know these things actually.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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      Replying to @NickPinkston

      You're describing certain problem diagnosis and solving behaviors that work for you in "culture" language, but it doesn't mean that's the "correct" way of thinking about them. It's a conceptual UI that works for you. IME it's a bad one that creates a cognitive tax.

      2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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      Replying to @vgr @NickPinkston

      As in believing in miasma theory might still lead you to do effective things like isolating yourself form others to avoid catching a disease etc. It's just inefficient and may not work if things don't coincidentally line up.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    8. Nick Pinkston  🌐‏ @NickPinkston Sep 21
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      Replying to @vgr

      Can you make that concrete?

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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      Replying to @NickPinkston

      Sure, thinking in terms of values is not the only way to align current mission with functional capabilities. There is more than one kind of effective hiring-for-fit approach than looking for "cultural" alignment (eg. "who can get the currently bottlenecked projects unstuck").

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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      Replying to @vgr @NickPinkston

      Ie the "culture eats strategy" type delusion is a two-step conflation. 1. Step 1: confusing a set of behaviors that seem to work with the ONLY set of behaviors that COULD work 2. Step 2: confusing that set with the preferred abstractions you use to understand it

      10:51 AM - 21 Sep 2020
      2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
        1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 21
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          Replying to @vgr @NickPinkston

          Like, I often use the OODA/Blitzkrieg model as the basis for consulting. Depending on how you look at it, the "pieces" of that theory could be interpreted in a "culture" way or not, depending on the personal preferred style of the executive.

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        2. Nick Pinkston  🌐‏ @NickPinkston Sep 21
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          Replying to @vgr

          We agree that the "culture eats strategy" thing isn't right, but strategy must have a sufficient culture to be able to work. However, having culture fit with strategy != good execution, the right team, etc., but it almost always drives those things.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        3. Nick Pinkston  🌐‏ @NickPinkston Sep 21
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          Replying to @NickPinkston @vgr

          You very much can still have good culture-strategy fit, but still fuck up the execution. Though it gets recursive as the "right strategy" should be taking into account all starting conditions of the org, including its culture, team, capabilities, etc.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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