I have been having conversations about corporate culture and rules a lot lately. It seems to me that as time goes by, the rules build up and people need to be encouraged to challenge the norm and help the corporate culture evolve. If this is not being done, the culture becomes repressive and the rules and processes that guide that culture begin to dominate and hurt the culture. My personal favorite set of books on this topic are Asimov’s Foundation Series:

The premise of the series is that scientist Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept devised by Asimov and Campbell. Using the law of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone for anything smaller than a planet or an empire. Using these techniques, Seldon foresees the fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting thirty thousand years before a second great empire arises. To shorten the period of barbarism, he creates two Foundations, small secluded havens of art and science, on opposite ends of the galaxy. The focus of the trilogy is on the Foundation of the planet Terminus. The people living there are working on an all-encompassing Encyclopedia, and are unaware of Seldon’s real intentions (for if they were, the variables would become too uncontrolled). The Encyclopedia serves to preserve knowledge of the physical sciences after the collapse. The Foundation’s location is chosen so that it acts as the focal point for the next empire in another thousand years (rather than the projected thirty thousand).

What caused that collapse? One of the biggest reasons was the layers upon layers of complexity within the society which became so heavy that the society folded into itself and collapsed.

In my mind, there are 2 types of rules that guide society or a culture: rules that are absolute and rules that can be challenged:

• In the category of the absolute we have the moral and ethical (think 10 commandments). Don’t cheat on your spouse, steal, lie or when you are slide 241 of someone’s 358 slide presentation – resist the urge to jump up and beat them with the laser pointer. Those need to be obeyed or we face chaos and a morale decline (which one could argue we face today).
• The other types of rules are what I would call evolutionary. These are the rules that have come into existence for a purpose that is point in time based. One that comes to mind is segregation, which was a rule put in place by a group of people at a point in time which slowly because unacceptable and was changed. These rules can and need to be changed by people who want to make things better.

With the second class of rules people need to be asking why did the rule come into effect? Do the conditions still apply which make the rule valid? Does it apply in this situation?

If we do not ask those questions, then the environment can quickly become repressive as we work within the confines of rules that may or may not be relevant.

I actively encourage my team to challenge rules, to ask those questions and to push boundaries. It is only through this type of mentality that we make mistakes (which shows that we are trying to innovate – do things differently) and break new ground. A few good examples come to mind of where this has worked:

• Our procurement team has a very fixed buying process, buy from approved vendors. I did not like the approved vendors and their selection so I bought somewhere else and got the product I wanted at a great price. Procurement came after me:

‘You can’t do that’.

My response ‘I already did’.

‘You can’t do that’

My response ‘Oops, I did it again’.

‘Stop that’ they exclaimed.

‘Ooops, did it again and I think the guy next to me did it too’ was my response.

‘OK, you need to stop that. Let us get a quote for you from the approved vendor’.

‘Sure’ was my response.

‘Uh, our vendor is $20 more per unit (I knew that). We have approved your vendor. Would you like to be on the RFP selection committee?’

• We were hiring a student. The first student turned out to be a flake so we never onboarded him and we quickly found ourselves with no pipeline of candidates because the last really good one had been hired to another company. I asked:

‘Has anyone called him and asked him if he wants to work for us or tried to incent him to come work for us?’

The answer was ‘no, we don’t do that. Someone else hired him’.

‘Why not?’

‘We don’t do that’

‘Why not? Go get him’

In the end, the student wanted to work for us – it is a cool job – he starts next week.

• This also applies to external vendors. I love the notion of thank-you cards. Not enough people say ‘thank-you’ these days and I know that only a small fraction of people in the sales business send out thank-you cards. This is a personal choice and I have found this amazing vendor in Seattle that makes very tasteful cards. Emailed them ‘I would like to order in a few cases of cards for my team’. The response, ‘Sorry we don’t ship to the UK’. Making a long story short, we found a very interesting way to get them shipped here and get around their ‘We don’t ship to the UK’ rule.

In the ends, all of this comes from years of selling where all I ever heard was ‘no’. I have a personal philosophy that it takes ‘5 NOs to make a YES’ and apply it both professionally and personally. After all, it is up to us to make things better.

‘Beneath every NO lays a passion for YES that has never been broken’  

Stevens ‘Esthetique Du Mal’, Collected Poems