How To Make Company Culture Stick
InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari prioritizes
imagination, harmony, and action;
here's how he made it more than a mission statement.
After
rumors circulated earlier this year that InMobi, the India-based mobile ad
giant, was considering a sale to Google, its CEO Naveen Tewari announced firm plans to stay
independent and seek an IPO.
"We
take a lot of pride in originating in Asia because India and China are the two
countries that are leaping over the whole PC-era completely. So we think that
the [mobile] game has actually just started," Tewari told Fast Company.
"How often do you land in a space that is paradigm-shifting and you happen
to be one of the front leaders in that industry?"
The company, which is second only to Google in the
global advertising market, announced in February that it had expanded its reach to 1 billion unique devices. In the past two years, InMobi has put out 20
new products aimed at helping clients with mobile advertising. And since its
creation in 2007, employees and former employees have launched more than 40
startups. "As the PayPal Mafia is known [in the U.S.]—we’re the InMobi
Mafia in India," says Tewari.
So how does a leading company in a market projected to reach $100 billion continue to think like a startup?
Tewari credits this
three-pronged approach:
Recognizing that real innovation
could only come hand in hand with some level of failed experimentation, Tewari
says that it became impossible to measure innovation by traditional metrics of
growth (read: successes). A failed project with innovation lessons can still
count as "growth." So InMobi removed all classic performance metrics
used by other large companies.
"We told our product engineers
and product managers, ‘Look, this weird concept of paying you a bonus at the
end of a quarter is frivolous because you are all trying to do things that are
phenomenal,'" Tewari says. "We took away all of the possible
conversations that could have led to people getting their performance judged
based on short-term incentives."
Instead of bonuses, employees
received steady incremental pay increases every year. Employees are allowed and
encouraged to work on pet projects, so long as they don't expressly interfere
with day-to-day duties. And in what Tewari calls an effort to build trust with
his team, the company now has close to zero policies. Only absolute essentials
like travel ("Take off if you think it’s important for you") and
expenses ("Travel as if it were your own money") exist in simple
one-liners.
As innovation cycles shrink and
companies become more competitive, the only sustainable advantage one company
will have over another will be its innovation, says InMobi's chief revenue
officer Abhay Singhal. "We think that if organizations need to maintain
startup culture—if organizations need to be innovative and agile for the
future—then we need to have people who have very open minds, people who value
imagination, unity, and action and experiential understanding."
The next challenge is to make sure
that mentality endures.
In
June, InMobi gave its internal company culture an official name,
YaWiO (based on the Turkish, Sanskrit, and Latin words for imagination,
harmony, and action, loosely translated), and an accompanying company festival, dubbed
YaWiO-X.
"We really want everyone in
InMobi to reimagine, to stretch themselves, to think of a new world which is
very, very different from what they’ve inherited," says Singhal. "But
never be out of harmony, whether it is harmony with their own colleagues,
harmony with the environment, harmony with how our customers and partners
perceive us."
To make sure that the company
culture is more than a forgotten mission statement, InMobi thinks of it almost
like a religion. "The three basic ingredients that bring culture to life
are the scripts—how we should operate. The rituals are the second. And the third
are the festivals that we are to celebrate from time to time," says
Singhal.
The inaugural YaWiO-X festival was a
hackathon where 270 employees (known as InMobians) from the Bangalore
headquarters split into groups and set to work solving one of three challenges posed by X Prize, the
nonprofit Magic Bus, and Indian aerospace startup Team Indus. The InMobians
devised solutions for issues like women's safety around the globe, setting up communication between an unmanned rover
and a lander on the moon, and transmitting educational materials to kids over
very low bandwidths.
And the three-day festival didn't
just produce some potentially world-changing ideas. It cemented what its culture
was all about.
"We realized that the festival
might be a very, very unique way to bring culture to life—a festival that
really takes our values and opens ourselves up for even the external world to
affect us, and to learn from what we are doing and contribute back to our
culture," says Singhal.
The mobile ads platform recently
celebrated its seventh anniversary.
As InMobi was honing its internal
culture, Tewari says other companies started to take notice.
By the time YaWiO was launched last month, 50 companies had passed through
the InMobi headquarters to learn how to implement their own
innovation-fostering cultures. At one point, he says, InMobi had to hire a
full-time staffer just to play host to these companies.
So InMobi decided to open-source it.
"As technologists, we all write
code. And we seem to have written a code for a culture. So why not share that
culture code with people?" Tewari says. "Maybe we’ll have a lot of
companies in the world that run on YaWiO."
By Sarah
Lawson
http://www.fastcompany.com/3048361/most-creative-people/how-to-make-company-culture-stick?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-newsletter&position=1&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=07
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