And Vijay Says…

If you listen to certain VCs and CEOs active on social media – you might come to a conclusion that the existential threat to their companies is “culture” ( or lack there of). It’s also largely silly.

Most touristy places I have visited have some kind of “cultural immersion” program – where you are exposed to their food , music , dress etc in a short time . At the end of which – you get a glimpse of some things that may entertain you , but you still don’t know much about that culture . Eating spaghetti doesn’t make me Italian , even if expertly cooked by Mario Battali. Recently at a sales training event , the trainer confidently  exclaimed “I know how you Europeans feel – I lived there for 5 years”. There was a collective groan from my European colleagues in response which amused me to no end.

Culture is extremely complex – and if you are not an anthropology major , you probably have not spent sufficient time understanding what constitutes it . I spent some time reading about it – and it gave me a headache .

It takes a significant amount of time and effort to be part of a culture . Seeing it from outside and living it from the inside are two vastly different things . I have lived in USA for 15 years – but it would be outrageously wrong if I claimed to have a full grip of American culture . Similarly I am amused when I hear American friends say “I love India and Indian food – your chicken tikka masala and garlic nan is the yummiest meal I ever had . And I was stunned by the beauty of Taj Mahal” .  ( Chicken tikka masala is mostly a dish invented by North Indian chefs who moved to the Western Hemisphere , and designed for western taste buds – we don’t eat it in India . And I have not seen a garlic nan in India at any house . Finally – Taj is amazing , but it also stands out because there are many unsightly things around it that you might find hard to deal with if you lived there ) . 

The first time I heard a serious discussion of culture at work was only a few years ago . I was never too interested in a detailed look at it when I was in the earlier stages of my career . That particular discussion was along the lines of “we need to work on the culture – it looks rather different from the awesome culture we grew up in” .  

They were referring to a time 15 – 20 years ago, where it was a young team of mostly males , all whites , all MBAs with engineering degrees . Their managers were quite similar to them – just older and wealthier for the most part.  The team we were worried about was diverse , not all MBAs and not looking anywhere similar to the managers on any aspect . Why exactly were they worried ? I didn’t know then – and I still can’t put my finger on it today .

And then there was this CEO I know who said “let’s spend part of our next offsite defining our culture . I keep hearing that the company culture has changed quite a bit”. He was leading a young company that was doubling in size every year – which meant 

1. It is hard to put a finger on a culture that has only existed for few years . Too young to have a specific culture to begin with.

2. Half the team is new at any given point . Culture – in a company or country – evolves by mixing new with old  . It’s not static . I can barely recognize the my hometown in India these days . They drink capouccino and lattes today ( there was only coffee – regular “kappi” – when I lived there ). 

3. Can you define and implement culture top down ?  No – and you can’t do it by hanging slogan filled banners either . Was Roman culture created by the Ceasar and his senate by a royal decree ? 

What about the big companies that have been around for decades like GE or IBM ? Well – they probably have had good times and bad times in those decades . Which means they also had employees and managers who worried about culture changes periodically as market transitions happened . 

Does all this mean that culture is unimportant ? No certainly not – it is part of our identity as corporate citizens, and hence is important . All I am saying is – just don’t get too wound up about it . 

Embrace the idea that despite your strong desire to direct it in a centralized and top down way, it will grow in largely unpredictable ways. A culture has subcultures – even a small state like Kerala (where I was born and raised ) have three or four distinct sub cultures. So why do we expect that a one size fits all culture will ever exist that covers the existing fairly stable engineering team and the fairly new and fast changing sales team ? 

Culture is built on people . Treat people well and give them the freedom to do their jobs , and be transparent to the extent you can . And change your approach as you learn what is working and what is not . Maybe if you do those little things – you will have a culture that you are comfortable with. It’s a “maybe” – don’t waste your energy trying to design something that was never meant to be designed . 

  
We were a bunch of trainees listening to Mr FC Kohli at TCS in 1999. He asked if we had questions – and one of my friends asked “Our title now is Assistant Systems Engineer trainee. Our competitors give way nicer titles at our level. Why can’t we be called consultants?”. Mr Kohli’s response was “The guy who takes photocopies in one of our young competitors is called VP of corporate communications. Would you want to be a VP too , young man?”. I think he also added that “what they call as revenue is less than what we call as profit every year”. I have not seen Mr Kohli since then – but I will never forget his view on titles in the work place. It essentially formed my habit of making fun of titles at every opportunity I get 🙂

There was one company I worked in – Novasoft – where there was absolutely no hierarchy. There was an MD and the rest of us were all senior consultants. In every other company I have worked in, there has been a hierachy – and some had ridiculous number of layers.

The confusion that titles generate is unbelievable. Every time I have a discussion on careers with one of my team members or mentees – I see this first hand. And now as I try to evaluate various offers for my own employment, I find myself confused quite often too in this regard.

Contrary to popular opinion, size of the company is clearly not correlated to titles. One of the smaller sized companies I considered as a potential employer told me that they are very lean and flat, and that everyone is treated equally and that they don’t cater to ego titles. After meeting the executive team, I realized the head of sales alone is an EVP and everyone else reporting to their CEO is an SVP. Another startup has a CEO who is also the president, although for a long time to come there is no reason to think they will have more than one division. Yet another startup has a VP working for a VP who works for another VP.  These are not companies that have thousands of employees – the three examples above don’t even have 500 employees I think.

The big companies are almost all terrible about titles and levels. VPs working for VPs and managing partners working for managing partners are common.There are General Managers in many such companies who don’t have a team or budget .And since a lot of people get involved in every interesting initiative in these companies – folks at the lower rungs of the corporate ladder spend a lot of time looking at the org chart to figure out who has real clout and who is wasting their time. At least at one of my prior employers, “who do you work for?” was asked of me routinely before someone granted me a bit of their time.

At some point – HR would introduce a concept of job bands into the mix. This is supposed to decrease confusion – but ironically I have only ever seen it increase confusion. Now people get looked upon by both their internal and external titles. Although the theory is that no one should know another person’s internal title – it is rarely a secret. So now this becomes 2X as bad in the confusion it creates and loss of efficiency that it results in.

Then there is title inflation. Because titles are cheap and money is expensive – many managers generously give titles without any thought, usually in lieu of compensation or to hire someone away from competition. I have worked at a company where you cannot walk across a floor without literally running into a VP or SVP.

What is the question that I spend the most time answering as a manager ? it is “how can I get promoted?”. As I speak with them more and dig a bit deeper – many times they are not even really asking for a promotion. They just need an increase in base pay or bonus or they want more stock. Sometimes they really are indeed asking about moving to the next level and need just advice on skill gaps . In many cases the root of this conversation is something like “Dick in marketing is a VP, and I do way more than he does in product management – so why I am I just a director?”. In many cases – this is a genuine question, which makes honest answers very difficult for the managers. I know one executive who promoted someone to a bigger title because this person was better than everyone else in the team. What he did not realize was that the team was a bunch of poor performers to begin with and it was a low bar to promote someone compared to them. These things happen every day and frustrates many of us endlessly. I certainly have been frustrated an awful lot both as an employee and as a manager.

Not everyone gets “life is not fair in corporate world” quickly. Every manager who generously gives away undeserving titles to their employees is doing significant harm to other employees and managers. It is not that HR and upline managers are ignorant of this. Its just that no one ever gets around to fixing it for the long term.

From an org design point of view – you only really need a manager, a director and a VP in a hierarchy. Maybe at more than 500 people or so – it makes sense to have 2 divisions at each level (like a director and senior director) . At executive level – the sole criteria should be whether the person can form a plan to align with corporate strategy, get it approved and execute to deliver results with practically no supervision. With this lens – how many people truly deserve to be VP, SVP, EVP, GM etc ?

Does all of this mean that you as an employee or candidate should not ask for as good a title as you can get ? No – absolutely you should ask for as good a title as you can get if you are in a company that has all these issues I talked about above. When a lot of employees bring up these conversations, hopefully people in positions of power will wake up and do something about this topic. Till then – you are welcome to join me in making good natured fun of titles, including my own 🙂

This is the first Sapphire I am missing in a very long time – probably in a decade or so. But thanks to the high quality live streaming video provided by SAP, and twitter – I felt I did not miss much . I woke up early, fed my dogs, brewed some coffee and sat down by the kitchen table to watch Bill McDermott’s keynote. Bill did not wear a tie – and I nearly fell off my chair !

Now, Bill is one of the best speakers amongst enterprise SW CEOs. And the settings, videos etc are totally world class. But despite having those two HUGE advantages – I finished watching the keynote feeling that SAP failed to capitalize the opportunity to seize customer imagination fully.

SAP’s biggest strength and biggest weakness is its huge and varied portfolio. There might not even be anyone employed by SAP who can talk intelligently on all those products, even at a high level.  From the keynote’s perspective – it was a bit all over the place. I think Bill had a lot to cover, but in the process could not spend enough time to meaningfully cover anything . But that said – I give him huge credit for keeping a 90 minute keynote to 60 minutes. And when I suggested on twitter that he should aim for 30 minutes next year – he agreed ! For a speaker of his caliber – I doubt it will take more than thirty minutes to make an impact.

The concur demo was great. The User experience part is truly a breath of fresh air for people who are used to SAP GUI. It could have been a whole lot nicer if Bill could also point out how predictive analytics on hana could make it even better, or how it integrates with other SAP solutions.

S4Hana part was on the underwhelming side. This is a product that is close to SAP’s heart and for the most part – its success is what the company apparently is counting on. It was mentioned briefly in the middle of the presentation. There wasn’t a customer case study – not even SAP IT as a customer – to make the point. For the most part – the big ding on the keynote was that the only customer conversation was the under armor story, which SAP has told many times over in the past. I was honestly disappointed to not see a big cross section of customers showcased. I am hopeful that SAP will make amends in the following keynotes.

On the partnership front – SAP had two big names. Google and Facebook both add to the coolness factor of SAP and those two companies would probably benefit a lot from SAP’s enterprise credentials. That said, it was not clear what the Facebook announcement was all about. It sounded like someone read some prepared notes. I am looking forward to details on that. Facebook has a LOT of capabilities to mine data – and uses an assortment of technologies for its big data use cases. Very curious to see where SAP fits in.

I loved the emphasis on data driven enterprise using Hana. Makes total sense – assuming a few things. Hana should be more affordable and less exotic – Not many enterprises will put a petabyte of data in main memory today. So pricing model for Hana should probably get off its “champagne” level to more of a “budlight” level, and automated dynamic tiering of data (making use of less expensive tech to store data infrequently used) should be available . All those hadoop/spark type partnerships and SAP’s own Sybase technologies can help. From twitter conversation with Hana product boss Mike Eacrett, it looks like all those things are on their way.

Bill did call out Hana Cloud Platform. I honestly think that HCP should have been the theme this year at SAPPHIRE. It could totally be the unifying layer for all the ideas he explained today. Again, I am hopeful that one of the next keynotes will go into that in more detail.

Looking forward to see what else SAP has on offer this week. Congratulations to Bill and team for a great start to the conference and good luck !