Company Culture: An Asset

What is it that separates companies apart from each other? Is it the products they sell, or the services they offer? Is it the price that brings large amounts of customers coming back day after day? Or is it something beyond that- something that once it catches on, takes on a life of its own and starts to spread like wildfire.

Something that becomes so influential, people are willing to pay any price to be a part of and to have the next great thing from that company. So what is it that makes some companies have an almost cult-like following? It is company culture.

Business is people. When people like a particular company, they are happy to do business again and again with them. When the customer can relate to the company and the culture that it has created that is when the magic happens. People will pay higher prices when they know and trust the company. Great examples of this that stand out are Apple and Starbucks. Both companies provide products and services at a premium, yet they continue to win in the marketplace.

What makes good Company Culture?

We all have companies that, in our minds, are absolutely great. And we have all read about companies that are out-of-the-box in how there company operates, compared to their competition. Are these companies that seem to enjoy an employee-centric view over a strict, business-minded focus, creating publicity stunts?

In actuality, these companies do more business than their competition because of the fact that they are truly employee-centric at the core. These companies have stepped up to a level above their competition. They have purposely and strategically set themselves apart in order to beat out their competitors in the marketplace.

How have they done this? They have used the power of people to create a thriving internal company culture, so influential, that it has grown outside of the company and has connected with its target market.

It is a culture that has been envisioned by the founders that, when put in place, will boost productivity, excite its employees, and generate a fan base of customers and clients willing to do business with this company over and over again.

This is no easy task. It takes great ambition and determination as well as a strong vision to make this a reality. However, it can be done. And the companies doing it are great examples to follow. In the book, Mavericks at Work, authors William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre give great insight to company culture through an interview with Cranium’s Grand Poo Bah, Richard Tait.

To outsiders, Cranium’s offbeat titles and homegrown vocabulary may sound forced, hokey, even off-putting. But for Richard Tait this vocabulary is vital to the company’s business strategy and operating success. “Every great company has a distinctive culture,” Tait says, “and every culture has a language, a shared sense of values. We’ve established a culture in the company that is impregnable. We defend it, we rally around it, we refine it. And as part of that culture, there is a vocabulary.

The authors then take it one step further, stating, “If what you think shapes how you talk, the logic goes, then where you work should reflect how you think as well.”

The authors describe the headquarters of Roy Spence’s ad agency, GSD&M, located in Austin, Texas. Here is an excerpt from the book, Mavericks at Work.

Spence and his colleagues are true believers when it comes to the power of disruptive business ideas, and their beliefs are evident the moment you arrive at the GSD&M offices. The strikingly original facility, called Idea City, has become a defining landmark of the Austin business scene and a source of fascination among business commentators around the world. Nothing about the place is standard-issue office building. The three-story, 137,600-square-foot headquarters is overflowing with offbeat art and wild décor. There’s also a movie theater, a classic diner, and a bookstore.

But the most telling aspect of Idea City is that it is actually organized as a city-on the theory that the energy, diversity, and barely controlled chaos of urban environments produce the most exciting ideas. The complex is divided into districts, each of which has its own personality. There’s the Financial District,where the agency’s business types congregrate. There’s Greenwich Village, where the agency’s creative types work. Each major client gets its own neighborhood, sort of an immersion zone for the company’s products, personality and purpose. There are War Rooms, Hot Shops, Idea Teams-ways of describing how and where people work that are unique to GSD&M.

In the middle of it all is the Rotunda, the town square through which the 540 residents of Idea City pass on a daily basis. And on the floor of the Rotunda, written in concrete, are the values that animate the agency: community, winning, restlessness, freedom and responsibility, curiosity, integrity. These words appear in plenty of other places at GSD&M headquarters as well-the building is overflowing with visual reminders of what makes the agency tick.

Some people wear their hearts on their sleeve. Why does GSD&M carve its values into the floor? ”It sounds hokey, but it’s not,” explains Spence. “People understand that these values are not temporary. They are literally etched into the concrete of the town square. Those values are the common drivers of our purpose. People want to work at companies that know what they stand for. Everybody at this company knows what we stand for.”

- excerpt from Mavericks At Work

A Branded Culture

There lies a great opportunity for service-based companies to build their brand by continuing to grow internally. As the example above from Mavericks At Work clearly shows, having the brand of the company go down to the smallest details will create a more powerful presence in the marketplace, unite the members of the organization, and create a strong support base of both clients and fans. The more that a company can have a cosistent brand, the better position it will be in.