Culture Archetypes: People-first Culture

People first is about encouraging people to grow and evolve. It’s about people. I was talking to Eduardo Elsztain, who spoke the first day. And I was talking about this, and he said, "We're a people first organization." He was just realizing that. He was saying, "I basically have people that are loyal to me and to my brother, and those that are loyal, I respect and I trust and I take care of them. And if they are underperformers, we give them a second chance. And it's based on trust. And it's based on history and loyalty, and giving people an extra chance and investing in developing them. So the typical mindset of a people first culture is: they are underperforming, I'm going to give them another chance. What do they need to become good performers? An achievement culture is: they're underperforming, good-bye. Get rid of them, find someone else. So that is the tension. And that's why it's so important that you choose how you want to play your game. So there's a lot of equally spread benefits across the organization. You don't see huge offices. The symbols are: we're all equal, we all work together. A lot of the Internet boom was very much like a people first thing. We're all in this together, we share the wealth, we either win together, or we lose together. That was very much the energy. Maybe many of them were lacking achievement culture, but they were really focused on people wanting to work together and do things together. A lot of training, a lot of issues at work and we really need to understand. We really care, we really want people to be happy. That is a people first organization. What you need to do is believe in diversity and giving equal opportunity to people and trust. And the deal breaker is distrust, I mean distrust, and believing that people cannot evolve, cannot learn, cannot grow. Some people say if they're bad, they're bad. Nothing's going to happen, nothing's going to change. Don't come with that crappy thing of investing in ...

Channel: Stanford ECorner Video Length: 2m 24s Date Found: Thu, Nov 05 2009 6:17 PM Category: Business Date Produced: Tue, May 01 2007 12:00 AM View Count: 0