I was talking to someone a few days ago and we got into the subject of company culture. There are company cultures that put fire in our bellies and ones that make us watch the clock. Having spent time in the small business and startup community I’ve come to hear people talk about their “open company culuture” frequently. It usually involves a spreadsheet and a talk about how the company has an open books policy that everyone in the company has access to. A few quarters go by and the company doesn’t do so well and everyone gets bummed because the spreadsheet doesn’t change, despite rhetoric to the contrary. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you run a company you can have an open culture without exposing your financials (and yourself) to scrutiny.
A great example of this popped into my blog reading this morning. Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame.com, posted a blog entry titled “4 Minutes and a Buzzer” today. He talks about how the company has all team members to share an idea and have it debated for four minutes. Now I’m not just throwing this out there to point out that it sounds interesting. This sort of thing happens around the Lotame offices on a regular basis.
The company is in the social media advertising space and doing some really innovative things. If you ask the team where their most innovative ideas come from you will quickly learn that it is events like this that lead to many of them.
