Hacking Culture

In the 14th century, a small group of samurai hacked European culture. A European captain, William Adams, and his crew washed up upon the shores of Japan. They were captured, and William was coerced into spilling the secrets of the sea. How best to build battleships and frigates. Or, which westerly waterway leads fastest to Europe. William refused, even on pain of death. 

At first, the samurai did not know what to do, until one suggested to prey upon his Christian temperament, or as I would call it: hack his culture. “If you don’t spill your secrets, we’ll put your crew to the sword!” He immediately relented. His Christian temperament would not allow innocent blood to be shed, and the Japanese learned of the sea. 

The European fell victim to his own cultural rules, co-opted by the samurai. While William held onto these rules with Christian fervor, the samurai thought to themselves: why had this fool told his secrets? What were the lives of a few seamen worth to the captain? The Japanese, being foreign agents, had effectively hacked his code. Whereas, another European captain of the Christian faith may not have used “innocent lives” as a bartering chip, the Japanese did so.

When one side holds dearly to a cultural code and the other does not, this exposes the code to hacking. Neither side in this story is morally bad or good, as, according to their own code, the Japanese acted under the way of Bushido. However, by exposing his culture and religiously adhering to its tenets, William made himself vulnerable to attack.

When I worked at Google, they preached a data driven culture. A culture where data rules the day. As long as you have shown that your decision is data-backed, and you have empirical measurements talking about its efficacy, your vote gets more weight. Not only does it get more weight, it gets carte blanche.

Ideally, a data driven culture is one where people have reverence for data. There is no inclination to contort the data, to torture the data, to make it say what you want to say. Instead, you seek to gently probe the data for the truth. If everyone in the culture has that sense of solemn reverence for the data, this culture works wonderfully. It's a universal way to make decisions that are data-backed.

At Google, I saw first hand what happens if you take an individual that does not have reverence for the data, and you insert them into the culture. You get quite the pernicious outcome. The VP tortured the data and forced it to say what they wanted. For, if you torture the data long enough, you can get it to say anything you want. They became unburdened by proof. This made them appear decisive and thoughtful, at least until I had the temerity to dive deep into the data.

I suspect folks that ignore or dismiss the organization’s culture act just like a virus does to its host organism. They don’t beat at the gates like a competitor or a bacterium. They instead co-opt and subvert the genetic/cultural code of their host.

Not only is the virus’s goal orthogonal, if not antithetical, to its host organism, but they in fact use the machinery of their host for their own machinations. That is the same with hacking a country's culture, and the same with hacking a company's culture.

Why is culture hacking more pronounced in larger companies? Because hacking a large company’s culture won’t kill it. Hacking co-opts the productivity of the overall machine. At a large company, the machine is huge, and the co-opting isn't that big relative to the whole machine. At startups, however, taking over only a small part of the machine may bring the company to its knees.

I make sure at my startup everyone fits the company culture, because as far as I know, that is the only way to prevent your culture from being hacked.