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I'll pick out a thread here: the toxic culture. When businesses fail, it's regarded as obvious that the toxic culture contributed to the downfall. With successf
by moomin 10y ago
I'll pick out a thread here: the toxic culture. When businesses fail, it's regarded as obvious that the toxic culture contributed to the downfall. With successful businesses like Uber or some bank you recently read about, it's assumed that somehow these behaviours are what makes the companies profitable.
My own theory is that toxic culture is a drain on every company with one, like a parasite on a host organism. Sometimes the host is strong enough to survive, sometimes it isn't.
I've worked for toxic tech and toxic finance companies. In both cases I felt that poor decisions were made that a healthier culture could have avoided.
- enraged_camel 10y ago>>With successful businesses like Uber or some bank you recently read about, it's assumed that somehow these behaviours are what makes the companies profitable. I'm not sure that's true. At least with Uber, it's pretty well-understood that they are successful despite their toxic culture. And that's mostly because they have received billions from VCs, which does a great job shielding them from the consequences of bad decisions such as harboring and protecting sexual harassers at the corporate level.
- tyre 10y agoI don't think it is universally agreed that Uber is successful despite its culture. It may be that, in at least some industries, ruthless aggression is a financially advantageous attitude. Investment banking comes to mind. If we want to change culture, it has to be for reasons other than money. The Pyramids were a phenomenal project that we couldn't realistically replicate today (due to costs), but I'm okay sacrificing that for not using slave labor. Speaking of which, the American South was an economic powerhouse with a culture of slavery and brutality (in large part because of it, not despite it.) I think that's what a lot of people are grappling with in Silicon Valley. We want to have a positive, inclusive culture and also build massive companies. People rarely talk about what happens if you can only choose one. The reality of taking venture funding is that you are expected to do the latter, with the former a nice to have. (You can read my comment history to see that I'm strongly against these types of culture.)
- throwaway2048 10y agoThe pyramids wern't built by slave labour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_...
- hurbledr 10y agoYour source doesn't agree with your statement. from the wiki page: In addition to the many unresolved arguments about the construction techniques, there have been disagreements as to the kind of workforce used. The Greeks, many years after the event, believed that the pyramids must have been built by slave labor. Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levy) until the construction was completed, pointing to workers' cemeteries discovered in 1990 by archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner. For the Middle Kingdom Pyramid of Amenemhat II, there is evidence from the annal stone of the king that foreigners from Palestine were used.[1] Couple points. You can be both a skilled worker and a slave. Also, if you are working to pay off a tax debt, that pretty much makes you an indentured servant or slave.
- taytus 10y agoI don't disagree with your analysis, but can we stop calling uber a successful business? It has been probed countless times that they are bleeding money and still is not clear if they will ever be successful.
- brianbreslin 10y agoHow we define success is such a finicky topic. Some circles define success as how much money they raised from investors. Others as how much money they raised from customers (sales). Still others might consider reach as their metric (users/installs/whatever).
- trome 10y agoYeah, as of yet Uber is not able to turn a profit, and is surviving on massive subsidies. Short of self driving cars, this is unlikely to change.
- dtornabene 10y ago100% this. I'm amazed that its still given this rhetorical leeway in discussions. As a sibling noted, it survives on subsidy.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoIf both successful and failed businesses can have toxic culture, then I think we've eliminated culture being correlated with business success or failure. Allegations to contrary, in either direction, sound more like survivorship bias.
- moomin 10y agoBy your reasoning, we can eliminate terminal cancer as being correlated with life and death.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoUh, terminal cancer? No, we can't.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nitwit005 10y agoCompanies often don't know why they succeeded. They have some idea, but it's an incomplete and biased picture. There is a tendency to credit company culture, but presumably some companies have succeeded in spite of their culture, rather than because of it.
- lmm 10y agoHow do you propose to test your theory? I don't know what you're defining as "toxic", but I've found that the worst companies I've worked for have been very "positive attitude", process-heavy, and diverse, and made a lot of bad decisions because no-one wanted to call them out as bad. The better companies I've experienced have a kind of skeptical, even caustic, culture that lets bad ideas get shot down quickly.
- a_bonobo 10y agoHave you read DeMarco/Lister's Peopleware? The main hypothesis is that projects (companies) mainly fail because of sociology (culture) and not because of lacking technology, to quote: >The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.
- jlebrech 10y agoUber is toxic to it's industry, which is an advantage.