Culture Matters...Just Ask Zappos

In our Stanford Advanced Project Management Program (on campus courses available at Stanford March 21-25), we address the importance and centrality of culture to effectively executing strategy.  Zappos, the online retailer recently bought by Amazon, has made its culture a central part of its strategy for how it serves its customers and its employees. A recent Financial Times Case Study summarized key aspects of the Zappos model.

• The combination of corporate culture, customer service and supply chain make Zappos stand apart.
• The organisation lives and breathes customer service, which stems from its unique corporate culture.
• Zappos understands it must recruit people who can deliver customer service. As well taking care to hire the right employees, it provides every recruit with the same basic training.
•  It not only focuses on customer experience at the front end, but delivers its promise from the back end.
  

 

• Company culture stems from intrinsic factors and needs to be established early rather than reverse-engineered.
• Customer service excellence starts from a commitment from the top and must be "lived into" by every employee.
• Core values are underutilized tools. Set them collectively, authentically, and make them committable.
• Ultimately it's all about the people and their own belief in themselves.

 

So...how might a leader of a large, complex new product development project think about culture.  Consider the following:

1. Does your team have a culture, how it does things, how it works together, what distinguishes it from other teams?  Is it more that team shirts? 
2. Is the culture of the organizations involved in your project different (by discipline, by country, by part of the company, from prior acquisitions?
3. Map the different cultures involved on your project to better understand where the critical touch points are and to improve overall understanding among team members.
4. Openly discuss these different cultures in project team meetings and actively work to increase understanding of how those differences in culture impact how the team works together and shares information.
5. As new team members are added, make sure they learn how culture is important to the team and the criticality of understanding different ways of working among the diverse team members.