CDOQ

I met a software engineer yesterday at a conference — let’s call him Ted (not his real name). He has worked at well-known Silicon Valley companies like Square, Google, and Yelp. Ted told me that culture varies widely across companies. I asked, “But how does that affect your job? You’re a software engineer — you just have to code to the requirements.” He smiled and said, “Culture defines how good the requirements are, how good my code is, and how happy the customer will be with the application.” Then Ted shared a practical test for culture: measure how much time you spend convincing others. If most of your energy goes into persuasion instead of building, the culture is working against you. In a healthy culture, things just flow — and you spend your day building, not convincing. In other words, in good cultures, it takes less energy to get things done.

Around three years ago, I started a podcast, Valley Nordic , with a Norwegian venture capitalist, Arne Tonning , as an experiment. Arne and I think differently about the the world. He has a Nordic and a venture capitalist perspective on technology companies and I have a silicon valley perspective on business. Hence, the podcast is titled Valley Nordic. We started as an experiment to see if we record our conversations and post them online, would anybody listen. A few days after our first episode was released, we got feedback that we needed topics for our episodes:) In essence, the podcast is a free flowing conversation between Arne and I on business, culture, and technology with our diverse perspectives as they relate to selected topics.  Thanks to our listeners, we published our 100th episode last week.  We looked into 27 companies and we were right about their growth challenges and their valuations. See the complete podcast episodes index:   Episode T...

I spent most of the 2020 at home and I thought that it would result in a lot more reading than usual (~12 books a year).  I was wrong but not entirely, I read 14 books last year:)  2020 Books  Following are some random and interesting excerpts:  1. The Worldly Philosophers   There is a "preanalytic" process that precedes our logical scenarios, a process which we cannot escape, and which is inescapably colored with our innermost values and preferences. "Analytic work", writes Schumpeter, '...embodies in the picture of things as we see them, and whenever there is any possible motive for wishing to see them in a given rather than another light, the way in which we see things we can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them.  2. Technology Strategy Patterns  When the good leader's work is done, his aims fulfilled, the people will all say, "We did this ourselves." - Lao Tzu  Definition of [technology] archite...

A culture that eats strategy for breakfast, eventually dies of indigestion. 

Society is the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture is whatever we do with each other by undirected choice. If society is all that a people feels it must do, culture "is the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority " ( Burckhardt ).  Society is not to be confused with, say, natural instinct, or any other form of involuntary activity. Society remains entirely within our free choice in quite the same way that competition, however strenuous or costly to the player, never prevents the player from walking of the field of play. Society applies only to those areas of action which are believed to be necessary.  Culture can not be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. It is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by soc...

Technologists like solving problems and marketers like commercializing the solutions. - Jan Uddenfeldt

Cultures always  fascinate me. How do they develop? How do they change? How the meaning of an action is different in different cultures? Why people are not very good at seeing things from another perspective (influenced by another culture)?  To continue learning about cultures, I just finished reading a book -  Figuring Foreigners Out -which gives very pragmatic advice on understanding and adapting to new cultures. Thanks to my teacher, Donna Stringer , for recommending the book. Following are some edited excepts that explain fundamentals of culture:  1. Culture is the shared assumptions, values, and beliefs of a group of people which result in characteristic behaviors. And, cultural generalizations are necessarily statements of likelihood and potential, not of certainty.  2. An instance of behavior has no particular meaning other than what the people who witness that behavior assign to it. Behavior means what we decide ...