Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The organization is the product
Organization as product
Peter Rahal's strategy comes down to two things: people, and mastery of the product, with brand and product treated as one. The brand is what the raw product wears on the outside. The organization is itself a product, and four processes keep it right and its culture lived.
Four processes
The four are who gets selected into the organization, how they are trained and onboarded, who is chosen for promotion and rewards, and how the people who should not be there are terminated. The company spends a lot of time refining its hiring process and treats onboarding as mission critical. All four are organized around a value system, the best way to align a group of people so their behaviors match what the company wants.
Truth-seeking first
The top value is truth-seeking: people with the courage to seek truth and no biases in place. Humility is foundational underneath it.
How do hiring and promotion shape culture?
Organizational psychologist Edgar Schein argued in his 1985 book Organizational Culture and Leadership that leaders embed culture through what they pay attention to, how they react to crises, and the criteria they use to recruit, select, promote, and remove people. People infer a company's real values from who gets rewarded and who leaves. Schein spent his career at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
How well do structured interviews predict performance?
A 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter in Psychological Bulletin, covering 85 years of research, found that structured interviews predicted job performance better than unstructured ones. Structured interviews ask every candidate the same questions and score answers against set criteria. Work-sample tests and general mental ability tests also ranked well.
Why do companies list truth-seeking as a value?
Ray Dalio, who founded the investment firm Bridgewater Associates in 1975, built its culture around what he calls radical truth and radical transparency. He describes the approach in his 2017 book Principles. It includes open disagreement and recorded meetings.