Our military is changing and I don’t think for the better. At the US Air Force Academy where I spent a little time, they are now telling cadets to be color-conscious, not color blind.
This is a big deal because academies are in the business of training career officers that become generals that set policy and fight our next wars.
I am telling you right now, if you are a startup, don’t follow their lead. Create a culture that is color-blind and merit-based. Create one that is resilient. The Academy is on its way to creating a brittle culture that will break under a little stress.
Here is yours truly in the top row way back in the summer of 1980.
I will tell you that when I received the hazing treatment, it came from all kinds of people. Female, male, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Black, White, Brown, Asian. It didn’t matter where the shitstorm started it all flowed downhill and I wound up doing a lot of pushups.
Pushups break your leather shoes in.
When I was spoken to back then there were five responses:
Yes Sir/Ma’am
No Sir/Ma’am
No Excuse Sir/Ma’am
Sir/Ma’am may I make a statement?
Sir/Ma’am may I ask a question?
For what it’s worth, the third response was my most frequent response. I did a lot of pushups.
Brittle cultures have employees walking on eggshells. Instead of thinking proactively about the business or about how they can make the business better, they are walking around hoping not to offend anyone.
When the fur flies as it often does in a startup, you cannot worry about if someone’s feelings are hurt due to a pronoun. You have to get stuff done.
Companies like Coinbase and Basecamp have been active in making sure their corporate cultures are respectful to everyone without being “woke”. There is a difference and when you go woke you go too far.
I have seen and been invested in woke corporate cultures and they just don’t work. They inhibit company growth.
Two startups I have been invested in had corporate cultures where the use of cuss words was strictly prohibited in the office. As a former floor trader, a certain cuss word was a verb, a prepositional phrase, a proper noun, a subject, a predicate, a modifier, an adverb, an adjective, and an exclamation. Basically, any place there was a grammatical structure in the English language, this word could be inserted. I used it freely.
I was told by the CEOs about their policy after I spoke and I respected and honored it. They went by the “broken window” policy. If you allow words like that then all kinds of other words are on the table, and when other words are on the table someone will inadvertently get offended.
Both of these companies had exemplary cultures. One went out of business but it wasn’t because of the culture. The other one thrives to this day. When you talk to employees they really enjoyed working there, even in the company that went out of business.
The old dinosaur floor trader in me says we would have eaten the current generation up for breakfast and disposed of them by lunch. The trading floor was a brutal place when it came to “culture”. Traders had a way of finding your superhuman weakness and placing it under your saddle like a burr. They’d then proceed to ride you in the rain and put you away wet.
That’s not the way to build a corporate culture for your business although it made you resilient. The problem was if you weren’t resilient, you were outta there so the culture was binary. A rough culture that hazes a lot forms a callous on people. That callousness can inhibit them from feeling or being empathetic.
You want some empathy in your corporate culture. Some people call that “emotional intelligence” and whatever you call it, it works. You probably never have heard of James Liatuad but he took five companies public by the time he was 55. He instilled an emotionally intelligent culture into his businesses. He passed away a number of years ago now but his son started the Jimmy John’s sandwich chain using the same principles. Like I said before, it works.
Nope, you want your culture to resemble a tallgrass prairie. Prairies whip in the wind and don’t break. Prairies have deep roots in the ground so they are stable. When the fire comes, it burns but it comes back quickly. Animals can chew it, but it uses the byproducts of the animal to make a stronger more dense prairie. Prairies make room for new productive plants and choke out weeds. It supports all kinds of species and life.
When the time comes to celebrate, everyone gets a seat at the table.
That culture starts at the top with the CEO. CEO’s model their culture. If you don’t want people to dress sloppily and wear t-shirts and flip flops you better not do that yourself. If you want people to show up to the office and not work from home, you better be in your office too.
Great cultures start with CEO’s that are servant leaders. Sometimes I feel like CEOs these days just want to get onstage or quoted in publications.
When you roll out of bed in the morning think about your corporate culture. You are the founder and CEO and excited to go to work and go get ‘em. Are your employees?
The Air Force Academy and the United States Naval Academy, and probably West Point, the Coast Guard Academy and the Merchant Marine Academy have lost their way. As has our United States military under SecDef LLoyd Austin. The Chinese and the Russians are laughing at us.
"servant leaders." Very good observation.
Our military (I too am a veteran. USArmy 1979-1985.) is fast becoming woke, no thanks to weaklings like Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin. Say, why do they still have their jobs? They prove that you can fail up.