Get in the Game

Editor’s Note: The following is a lightly edited excerpt from Mark Miller’s book “Culture Rules.” To learn more, visit leadeveryday.com.

Do you enjoy games? My answer is ... it depends. My family will tell you games of pure chance are not my jam.

Games involving some strategy, however, are much more enjoyable for me.

Before I started working on this book, I don’t think I had ever read the instructions for a game. It’s not that I don’t care about the rules — I just have others in my family who really enjoy knowing, understanding, and enforcing the rules. I’ve always left this responsibility to them. However, when we decided to use a game as our overarching metaphor for “Culture Rules,” the research team and I started reading game instructions from CATAN (formerly known as The Settlers of Catan, which I have won only once) to Monopoly, to the rules of golf, and many more.

GAME OBJECTIVE

The objective of reading all these rules was to see how we might create our own for building a High Performance Culture.To qualify as High Performance Culture, three conditions must exist:

• Alignment: The vast majority of people associated with the organization must voluntarily and wholeheartedly commit to the Aspirations of the enterprise (the more people who enroll, the stronger the culture will be).
• Performance: Every organization has its own metrics of success (performance).

  Regardless of your end goal, High Performance Cultures produce superior results over time. Without these tangible and sustained results, you may have created a good culture — a place where people like to work — but strong performance is a hallmark of the type of culture this book is dedicated to help you produce. Greatness hinges on execution and culture is the oil for the hinge.

• Improvement: There must be an ongoing effort to improve the culture. An organization clinging doggedly to the past may shine brightly for a season, but it will not last. Is your culture getting better? Building a High Performance Culture requires constant vigilance and effort.

WHY PLAY THE GAME

In games requiring more than chance, the right (good) moves are rewarded, and the wrong (bad) moves are punished. The same is true with culture craft. However, leaders have many competing priorities in the business world, and if you’re not careful, the distractions of today can destroy your culture and your future. Organizations do not drift toward greatness.

If you want to simplify what’s at stake and begin to understand the scale of your opportunity, I refer you to the great management and leadership thought leader Peter Drucker. He said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He was right, but I want to do more than give you an insightful and pithy quote.

Let me start with something you already know: Every organization has a culture. In some cases, the culture creates real, sustainable competitive advantage and superior levels of performance. In others, the culture is a source of significant organizational drag. Left unaddressed, your culture can produce more than drag; as the toxins increase, a culture can actually kill an organization.

For many of you, neither of these extremes reflects your current reality. So why would you want to consider playing the game? I’ll share just a few reasons at this point.

• Treading water is not an option. There are no stagnant cultures — each one is growing in strength and vitality or losing its essence, energy, and life force.
• A thriving culture will release the untapped potential in your people and your organization.
• If you are a person who likes to avoid risk, you should be interested in building a High Performance Culture because it is a hedge against irrelevance or worse. A healthy culture can prevent you from becoming the next Enron or Lehman Brothers.
• Finally, a High Performance Culture is the ultimate competitive advantage.