Phooey on Culture

Yes, I said that.

I thought, having spent most of a lifetime trying to learn the cello, that I knew what culture was. It was no big mystery, in the fifties and sixties.

Culture was sitting behind Mrs. Steenbock’s beehive hairdo on Saturday nights as the Madison Symphony, unseen but at least heard, played Beethoven. Or going to the Elvehjem and seeing oil paintings.

Well, Wal-Mart taught me many things, including what culture is.

They were, in fact not so much big as incessant on it. The company cheer was everywhere—I once organized a little spontaneous cheer at the coffee machine in the lobby. There were five of us waiting to stick in the fifty cents that the machine turned into coffee, and nobody was much doing anything. “The cheer,” I exclaimed, “we can do the cheer!” So we did.

In addition, we routinely provided the formulaic answer to the question, “¿Cómo se siente?” or “how are you feeling?” (The answer, by the way, was “Super Bien, u, ah, ayi, YES!”)

And there were people who got it, dug it, loved it. My boss told me the story of how stunned she was, two weeks into her life at Wal-Mart, to be at an outdoor restaurant with a group from Sam’s Club. The manager of the restaurant mentioned that he shopped at Sam’s, and said, “hey, what is that thing you guys do every morning with the shouting and the clapping?” And yes, the group stood up and did all THREE cheers for the patrons in the restaurant.

And Sam—that would be Mr. Walton—was big on culture. If we can keep our culture, he said, then the business will take care of itself.

In the end, it got ridiculous. Culture, I used to tell them, is not a cheer or a recited mantra produced on cue. It’s more about the actual rules that govern the company and the way people interact. And it doesn’t matter how many talks you give about the ten-foot rule, if the president doesn’t say hello to the rest of us (and he didn’t)—that’s the culture.

So now—trawling for anything to write about today—I read the interesting fact that the president of Zappos is ardent about the company culture that he will FIRE anyone who doesn’t fit.

To Puerto Rican eyes, this seems crazy. Perhaps because in Puerto Rico, you can only be fired for cause—because you did something wrong—and not at will. But there’s something else as well.

We are—sorry—much more cynical than the average gringo. You guys up there are horrified when a politician gets caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Down here?

Most of us don’t even lift an eyebrow.

So somehow it’s a little easier to imagine people buying in to a corporate culture in Iowa, say.

And Zappos does take it seriously. 480 pages seriously, in fact. That’s the size of the annual company Culture Book, an unedited affair derived from the employees themselves. Everybody hired has to spend a month in the customer loyalty program, which included two weeks of talking to customers in the call center. And of course, there’s the 2,000$ offer to quit that’s made in the first week after the training.

OK, now we come to core values. Zappos, like Wal-Mart has ‘em. And here they are:

Deliver WOW Through Service

Embrace and Drive Change

Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded

Pursue Growth and Learning

Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

Do More With Less

Be Passionate and Determined

Be Humble

Hey, pass me the Pepto-Bismol, would you?

Nor am I the only person to say this. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book about it—Smile or Die—and the billion-dollar motivation industry that caters to corporations with glum employees.

Everybody’s gotta be happy—or in Zappos’ terms, fun and a little weird. But she points out that a culture that enforces one mood only may have a problem when the mood doesn’t fit the situation.

Remember the banking crisis four years ago? Ehrenreich argues that everybody jumped on the bandwagon, everybody was a team player, everybody was thinking positively. What was needed, of course, was a Cassandra—somebody screaming that the situation was crazy.

As well, constantly forcing yourself into a positive mood erodes your ability to detect your real mood. A deadening of the affect takes place.

I saw it all the time on the faces of the Wal-Mart people. I’ll do a lot to keep this job—sit in a cold, arid environment, cope with demanding bosses, make impossible budgets.

Just don’t ask me to smile!