Draft on culture
If you’ve ever watched the Tour De France, you’ve seen a pack of riders careering around curves at a blistering pace. This main group is called the peloton (from French meaning ‘platoon’) and they travel together for one simple reason — to save energy. In fact, by traveling together, drafting on each other, air resistance can be reduced by 90–95%.
Headwinds exist inside a company as well, but thankfully, companies too have a peloton. This drag-reducing structure inside the company is culture. When you work within the culture, you dramatically reduce the energy required to reach your destination.
Culture is critical since building a product isn’t a solo endeavor — it entails working with other organizations and people. To be effective, you must not only understand this shared operating system, but you need to tap into it.
A few examples of companies with clear values:
At Zappos, the ethos of delivering happiness is what they collectively value.
Amazon embraces a relentless push for innovation on behalf of customers.
Google culture strongly values its goals system (OKR) as its alignment vehicle.
If you’re running into headwinds at work, consider that you might be operating outside of what the company values. Changing a culture is hard, aligning to one is much easier. Alignment to shared values is within your control, your circle of influence, changing them is not.
How can you put this concept into action? Here’s a start — notice what the company cares about. Reflect on how has it mobilized in the past for major initiatives. Get inside that cultural peloton and align with what matters most to the people around you. You just might find yourself pedaling less and going further.
Draft on culture.
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