As you move on from a founder-led culture be deliberate about keeping the core focus, values, and nature of the organization that got you to where you are, while shedding the baggage that is holding you back. In general, that means:
- Preserve and protect the founder’s values and positive influence.
- Evolve the organization’s strategy as appropriate.
- Drive follow-on changes in relationships and behaviors.
Per my earlier article, culture is the collective character of individuals in an organization – the way they behave together, relate to each other, the attitudes and values they share, and the environment in which they exist. When someone founds an organization, its culture starts as a reflection of their own personal character. The further people get away from that founding individual by level or time, the harder it is for them to understand, believe in, embrace, and follow that.
Rustin Dodd looked at this in his recent article on Luka Dončić, Jimmy Butler and the culture question: What so many leaders underestimate. His main point is that culture isn’t just about stated values but about how those values are embodied in daily interactions and practices, built and maintained by focusing on authenticity, storytelling, and aligning actions with core values.
This aligns with the BRAVE approach to culture looking at Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values and the Environment. The departure of a founder is a massive change in an organization’s environment or context. The three steps discussed in this article flow from that. Part of this is nested leadership making sure your ever-adapting tactics continue to flow from strategies that make deliberate choices and fit with your culture, knowing that culture is your only sustainable competitive advantage.
For founders’ legacies to endure after they are gone, their values must get brought to life in guiding principles, so they continue to be more than “words on a page.” Then capture, tell, and embed stories about why the founder started the venture and what mattered most to them to reinforce that shared purpose, core focus on design, production, delivery/distribution, or service, and those guiding principles.
Moving on from Walt Disney
Walt Disney founded and ran The Walt Disney Company until Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over 1984. Until then, the company’s leaders made all major decisions by asking “What would Walt do?” The trouble with that was that Walt had died in 1966.
What Eisner and Wells did first was to reground the company in Walt’s core concept of Disney as an imaginative entertainment company started with a mouse and driven by the idea that “If you can dream it, you can do it.” That had been valid when Walt died in 1966 and was still valid.
But the world had changed (pun intended) and the company had lost its way. Eisner and Wells put in place four new imperatives that drove tremendous value over the next decade:
- Reinvest in animation as the font of all their imaginative entertainment, yielding new movies including “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Lion King” in short order.
- Raise the price of the theme park entry effectively 10% per year every year with virtually no reduction in traffic.
- Build out Walt Disney World to capture more adjacent revenue in hotels and food and beverage, knowing that people that stayed “on campus” spent more time (and money) in the parks.
- Build out Disney Stores and take back control of the characters that had been licensed out.
Those changes required changes in the organization and its ways of working including the creation of a formal “Synergy” department to leverage the intellectual property created by animated films in the parks, merchandise, other media, and all sorts of different areas.
Implications for you
- 1Preserve and protect the founder’s values, core focus, and positive influence by translating those into a shared purpose and guiding principles.
- 2. Evolve the attitude and strategy as appropriate – on a continuous basis, keeping your eyes and ears open to changes in the world so you can adapt and then adapt again.
- 3. Drive follow-on changes in relationships and behaviors with a new organization and more structured, formal, and systematic communication network coupled with inspiring direction, enabling resources, empowering authority, and credible accountability, completing the cycle of building trust in each other’s intentions and capabilities.
John Hall
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