The Busyness Paradox

We Put the Cult in Culture

• Frank and Paul • Season 1 • Episode 13

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Do you work for a company or a cult?

The idea is simple: attract energetic, young college graduates with the promise of fulfilling their wildest dreams and desires. Grown-up playgrounds for offices. Free food! The opportunity to change the world while playing beer-pong! Kind of low pay. Heaps of reassuring praise. Very long hours. Office keg parties: that are mandatory! Brilliant managers! Whose wisdom is never to be questioned. Super cool coworkers who share your love for the company. Because those who didn't just...vanished one day.

Join us as we discuss this niche cultural trend that has emerged over the last two decades. Also, learn how to join our new Busybody cult! (Electric hoodies required)

Episode "sponsor":  Golden Calf Consulting

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Come visit us at busynessparadox.com to see episode transcripts, blog posts and other content while you’re there!

SPEAKERS
Paul Harvey, Frank Butler

Frank Butler  00:17
Hello Busybodies, welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  00:25
Good day.

Frank Butler  00:26
And on today's episode, what are we talking about Paul?

Paul Harvey  00:29
Cults I want to talk about cults. 

Frank Butler  00:30
Cults?

Paul Harvey  00:32
Oh, I like it!  Starting one, being in one, recruiting.

Frank Butler  00:36
So you're trying to say we're going to try to create a cult of Busybodies,

Paul Harvey  00:40
A cult a Busybodies! You got it

Frank Butler  00:42
Man, I love it. I love it. Let's do it. 

Paul Harvey  00:45
So listeners, cult up.

Frank Butler  00:48
It's time to cult up.

Paul Harvey  00:51
Apparently that involves the following: submission, exclusivity, persecution complex. Gotta have one of those. Control, of course, isolation, love bombing. That's an interesting term. Showering with affection, gifts of affirmation, and so on. Threats of loss of love. 

Frank Butler  01:09
Hmm.

Paul Harvey  01:10
Special knowledge, indoctrination, salvation, groupthink, cognitive dissonance, good stuff, shunning strict gender roles, purity standards, lack of accountability. All this coming from Dr. Christina Villareal, apparently a student of Margaret singer who did a lot of the foundational work on cults in the mid 90s and such, and how is this relevant to business you might ask? Besides the fact that we're starting our own cult of busyness? The answer comes to us from (arguably) Silicon Valley. So, this is a concern that's been raised several times in recent years, at some of these tech startups have developed a cultural playbook. That's fairly similar from one company to the next, and results in organizational cultures at the startups that in some cases is a little bit difficult to distinguish from that of a cult. So Frank, you being more of the macro strategy level person, I sprung this on you because I figured this is probably something that you know a little bit about startup culture and that kind of thing. And I'm interested to get your take on it. I've mentioned in past episodes, the book disrupted by Dan Lyons, real funny guy, and his take on working at a tech startup, a quote unquote, Silicon Valley startup, although it's actually Cambridge,

Frank Butler  02:32
Dan Lyons?

Paul Harvey  02:33
Dan Lyons 

Frank Butler  02:34
He's actually...he's been a writer for the actual show, Silicon Valley. 

Paul Harvey  02:37
That's right. 

Frank Butler  02:37
It's on Showtime, I think

Paul Harvey  02:39
HBO,

Frank Butler  02:40
 HBO. Yeah.

Paul Harvey  02:41
I believe, actually, he left his job at HubSpot to become a writer on Silicon Valley.

Frank Butler  02:45
And that show was great. It cracked me up.

Paul Harvey  02:48
One of the funniest shows. And if you've ever started any kind of business as we both have, you can tell that the writing comes from people who have lived the experience. Yeah, I can't say that. I've had much experience with a tech startup. I can say that I've had none. But I know several people who have and they say it's almost eerie how spot on that Joe is. But anyway, he gives a humorous, kind of light hearted but a little bit serious account of his time working at HubSpot 30 years older than the average employee and complete fish out of water story. Some of the humor points are right on the edge of this is funny, but it's also a little possibly scary. I don't want to necessarily pick on HubSpot here. But a lot of these tech startups seem to have similar cultures that, like I said, Follow the same playbook. And it doesn't always end well. I'm thinking of Theranos as an example. 

Frank Butler  03:39
Oh gosh, yes, 

Paul Harvey  03:40
We see a lot of these parallels of that list of things I just mentioned at the beginning here the characteristics of cults kind of what it takes to create a cult control the persecution exclusivity submission.

Frank Butler  03:53
Yeah, my favorite though is still appearance standards. I'm like I can live up to that.

Paul Harvey  03:56
I'm looking at us both on zoom. Maybe we're not the ones

[laughter]

Frank Butler  04:00
I got my hoodie on right now, unzipped. T-shirt underneath 

Paul Harvey  04:03
You must look like us. 

Frank Butler  04:04
My hat on

Paul Harvey  04:06
Find your worst clothes, throw them out. Go find someone else's worst clothes. Put them on.

Frank Butler  04:10
That's right. Scarily enough, Paul and I are both wearing hoodies. Both...mine's a zip up though, is yours a zip...yup, his is a zip 

Paul Harvey  04:19
It's a zip up. 

[zipper sounds]

Frank Butler  04:20
Darn

Paul Harvey  04:20
And it lights up 

Frank Butler  04:22
His lights up 

Paul Harvey  04:22
And it's a heated hoodie. 

Frank Butler  04:24
I'm jealous of the heated hoodie, but 

Paul Harvey  04:26
Red, white or blue, red...

Frank Butler  04:28
I mean 

Paul Harvey  04:29
...blue. Think I'll leave it on to make you jealous.

Frank Butler  04:31
Okay, that's the next level is that, ok, we're going to upgrade our hoodies to hoodies that are battery powered for heat and have a light built into them that can be...red white or blue, is that what is was?

Paul Harvey  04:41
Yep, hot, medium...high, low, medium colors. Red, white and blue.

Frank Butler  04:45
Well, there you go. And then we'll all have baseball caps too. That's going to be our appearance standards. That's going to be the buisiness body cult outfit of choice.

Paul Harvey  04:56
You're not welcome to listen to our show if you're not wearing... I can't even follow through

[laughter]

Frank Butler  05:00
Can't do it  

[laughter]

Paul Harvey  05:01
Don't be like us. [sighs] Ah, we don't dress well. Anyway. So it's Dr. Christina Villareal. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing it wrote this article called, can you tell the difference between a cult and your startup, take the test. It's not really a test. But it goes through this bullet list of things associated with cult practices, brainwashing, techniques, and such, and draws kind of freaky parallels to what we see. And this is where I become interested. We don't really see this anywhere. But these tech startups, it seems to be a cultural playbook that sort of shapes the culture of the first.com, boom, in the late 90s, early 2000s, when you had college grads or college dropouts, or whatever kind of running the show and running a company exactly how you think a college student would run a company, with the beer pong tables and beanbag chairs. And whatever was interesting to me about this second coming of the tech wave is that we're seeing the same potentially cultish cultural elements, despite the fact that it's really venture capitalists behind the scenes controlling things to a much greater degree than it was in the first calm wave. So it's interesting to me that they're sort of replicating the culture of that first comm wave, even though it's coming from a different place. And we've never seen this approach to culture anywhere, but quote, unquote, Silicon Valley tech startups, or established companies now Google, what have you. So that tells me that it can't be that successful of an approach, because no other companies have really tried it or succeeded with it, only these tech companies. So why is that?

Frank Butler  06:40
You know, thinking more generally about it. One of the first blog posts, I think my first blog post for the Busyness Paradox was about racism in software, knowing the valley and knowing these kinds of companies and such, but I was able to think about those elements and go, you know, I would assume that they're male dominant, which I think is very true, especially in the IT software development, software engineering side of things. But at the same time, they're also clustered in a very similar area, right. And most of the people who are going to that region are feeding through the same schools, Caltech, Cal Berkeley

Paul Harvey  07:19
For the ones that are in Silicon Valley.

Frank Butler  07:21
Actually, interestingly enough, I know Georgia Tech supplies a lot. And I back when I was in college at the University of Georgia as an undergrad, we used to make fun of the Georgia Tech students because they would have to come to Athens to meet women, because at Georgia Tech, I was a joke, please. You know,

Paul Harvey  07:36
Certainly there's self-selection though. It's a field that tends to draw men, yeah.

Frank Butler  07:40
Right. So you got this self-selection kind of going on. But also, I think one of the other elements that we see in this process is this notion that Michael Porter, I think, talks about a lot with clusters for industry to he don't do these industry clusters. And this is a great example in Silicon Valley is the definition of a cluster for an industry, right? Most software development companies or software as a service, or whatever it is, have really flocked toward the valley right to San Francisco in the Valley area. And it makes sense, right? If you go back into history, Hewlett Packard originated out there, I believe Intel was out of there as well, I might be wrong about Intel by No, no, I think I started you know, and I think there was some companies there that were also doing things with NASA, right? So really trying to be at the forefront of tech. And then of course, because of that exposure that people have in that area, they queue off of that they get jobs and internships in these areas. They develop their expertise. And then they go off and start businesses, because they see opportunities, and so on, so forth. So it makes sense that there's this cluster there that's specific to that, but I get that.

Paul Harvey  08:47
But what about like HubSpot to us Dan Lyons example, over in Boston, and like the clusters that we're seeing in? I don't know, Vermont, in Chicago area. geographical clustering doesn't seem to explain why were the companies themselves. I shouldn't say that we're similar types of companies have sprouted up outside the actual physical Valley. Right? They seem to follow the same cultural approach.

Frank Butler  09:13
Well, you see the success of the valley, and what all is going on there. So in the strategy sense, when we talk about isomorphism, or this idea of mimicking, looking at other firms, and in general, right, we like to look at people who are successful, and try to emulate some of the things they do, right. That's why we care about what sneakers LeBron James might wear, or the clothing that some of these people might wear

Paul Harvey  09:35
Like us.  Yes  Like our clothing. Speaking of, I'm getting really hot with my heated hoodie on so

Frank Butler  09:41
So he has to turn his light off

Paul Harvey  09:42
I gotta turn it off. 

Frank Butler  09:44
But that's sort of, I think, part of it, right? There's, if you look at what gets the money, and the success, venture capital, money and so on, they're probably miss attributing some of it but I also would say there's probably a spillover effect to Okay, we're going to start a new business, we need to get people who are good at doing this. So we're wouldn't hire the same consultants or we're going to hire the same people who were involved in those organizations that did those startups. They're trying to do everything they can to emulate where the money is going. And as you say, there are these clusters, geographically different areas like Boston, like Atlanta even. And what you see in that process is that these organizations are trying to emulate that mimetic isomorphism, as we would say, those institutions that have had a lot of success raising venture capital,

Paul Harvey  10:28
Alright, fair enough. Let me just play devil's advocate, find my tinfoil hat here. But what about the argument that this is a clever way to get young college graduates to work their tails off for not a lot of money? So you're coming to this real expensive part of the country, be it San Francisco or Boston or Atlanta even. And not always contrary to some what I think is popular belief, not always paying huge salaries, at least for the entry level positions, and expecting employees to basically live at the job and making it possible to do so. So you've got all the food and buffets and what have you. And you're basically taking college students and saying, don't go to the real world. This is like a halfway house for college graduates just at parties and kegs and beer pong and writer battles and beanbag chairs. It's just a half step into reality. In exchange for that, you just go you bust your ass all the time and never question anything your supervisor says, and live, eat and breathe. This company always wear the attire, logos, because that's a recurring thing that you hear in a lot of the stories for hosts about to Theranos and everything in between, like you do not question the we're here to change the world. Everyone here is a rock star like, Alright, it's culty stuff. Is that a way to get young people to work real hard for not a lot of money?

Frank Butler  11:47
Yeah, going off that too. I think that's what the Villareal research talked about with regards to like, lack of accountability is that the leaders don't get held to the same standard, right, they can make with mistakes and everything. But yeah, no, I think there's certainly something to it. They're getting, they're bringing people in with the promise of riches. And they're dangling that carrot out there. But saying, hey, until we can get there, because we are a startup, here's some equity in the company.

Paul Harvey  12:13
I think that's a big part of it. If we ever go public, right,

Frank Butler  12:16
You're gonna be rich, because you see it all the time, right? You saw what happened with even Instagram, when you got acquired by Facebook, even though it was not publicly traded, they got bought for $3 billion. So

Paul Harvey  12:26
I thought it was one billion

Frank Butler  12:27
Three, Facebook paid three

Paul Harvey  12:29
Thought it was one... Alright, Busybodies, someone 

Frank Butler  12:32
Fact, check it 

Paul Harvey  12:33
Settle this for us, we don't have the follow-through to google it ourselves.

Frank Butler  12:37
We'll figure it out later. But to help with that startup cost, hey, if we pay less, and we give you equity, and if we're getting you excited about the potential of making money, think about all those IPOs and all this money that was being made by these people who took equity instead of a lot of money, then they were able to really use that as a tool or a mechanism to say in the future, your hard work now is going to pay off. And it works in a lot of cases, right? People will get stuff developed, they're able to create these entire platforms. And they go public. And of course, you hear about all the high profile or Uber, Facebook doing it, etc. And sure, it's great.

Paul Harvey  13:13
Fair enough.

Frank Butler  13:14
But at what cost overall, I don't think we ever talked about those that haven't had success.

Paul Harvey  13:20
Yeah, I wonder what the percentages of how many startups actually go public? Not many. How many get required? acquired? Yeah, probably talking some real numbers at that point

Frank Butler  13:30
Then you wonder to how many of these people who've been involved in it, keep going to these companies where they're getting these promises? And then they're not doing very well? And eventually they do hit it big? 

Paul Harvey  13:38
Yup 

Frank Butler  13:38
Because they've got skills. It's not like these people aren't skilled workers

Paul Harvey  13:41
You do hear those stories of, you know, it took five tries, but they finally right, took the right job and hit it big, yeah,

Frank Butler  13:48
Yeah. So it's, again, they can use these stories to help with that process. But I do think they intentionally do that, to create an environment to get things done. Think about it right there. They're usually able to take, as you say, people, not pay them well, but are very skilled, dangle that carried out their riches. But at the same time, they create this real strong culture. Because I think if at the end of the day, that's what might be one of the attributes, people were making, attribution theory, maybe your side of the world to dictate. That's part of the reason why these companies are successful, because they have this overly focused, hyper focus culture and 

Paul Harvey  14:27
Wired Magazine...I just noticed, I'm wearing a wired hat. Maybe I'm on the take here, but they ran an article a year or two ago, I think it was called, why you should run your startup like a cult, or no, you should run your startup like a cult period. Here's how I think what's the title of it? Right, making a lot of those same arguments that you know, if you really want to do something big, you got to have you ever gone all in? Yeah, and I guess where I find this fascinating from my micro psychological perspective is that in a lot of ways, these companies are doing everything that we say to from my field. They're like checking every single box. So naturally, you have to wonder, why are you doing everything we say to do? It's all about the psychological side of motivation, tapping into what your employees want and need a stage of life that they're at. Like they're doing everything right. Just wonder cults also do everything right in that regard. So I guess maybe that's where this the not suspicion, but the pessimism or whatever comes from that you're doing some cult like stuff, that doesn't necessarily mean you are a cult.

Frank Butler  15:28
Well, and to your point to, there is some really bad stuff that they're doing right, the gender aspects of things are really awful. And I mean, some of the stories we've heard of some of these firms, once they start to crumble is fringes around and crumble. Now we've also seen other companies tried to pull this off that aren't in tech, right? WeWork being a great example of this. WeWork was trying to do the same style for basically what is office leasing spaces, right?

Paul Harvey  15:53
Yeah. Approximately two hours ago, I was having a conversation on a similar topic with my class. And one of the students spoke up who had done an internship with WeWork. Now they're reading the book by Dan Lyons about HubSpot. She said, yeah, that really reminds me if we work, so you're right.

Frank Butler  16:10
Yep. The whole thing that their founder tried to do was push WeWork as being an IT company, even though it's really was just a real estate rental company.

[speaking in parody tones]

Paul Harvey  16:20
Hey, speaking of trying to be a real company,

Frank Butler  16:23
Uh, that...that was a "real estate" company.

Paul Harvey  16:26
Huh? Anyway, I think that our self-imposed sponsorship hiatus, you know, the one we had from the

Frank Butler  16:34
Oh, yeah, the HRTracker thing...that went well.

Paul Harvey  16:36
Yeah, that debacle. Yeah, I think it's up.

Frank Butler  16:40
No kidding. So do we have another sponsor? 

Paul Harvey  16:43
Of course we got sponsors. Busyness, Paradox, man! You know, everyone wants a piece of this.

Frank Butler  16:47
Yeah, that's true. Cool. So what do you got? 

Paul Harvey  16:50
Damned if I know

Frank Butler  16:52
Well, Aren't you the one that...whatever, it doesn't matter. So long as it's not HRTracker again

Paul Harvey  16:58
Nah, I'd remember that.

Frank Butler  16:59
Okay. Well, let's give it a go.  All right, here we go.

Paul Harvey  17:04
Managing through a pandemic is tough. Doing it well? Not possible. And yet, somehow, you've done it through sheer grit, determination, other worldly talents here to four unseen among mortal humans. You've guided your department, Task Force, subcommittee, maybe even a whole company. Through this challenging time. You deserve to pat yourself on the back. But this is no time to rest on your laurels. You've earned the respect of your employees. But have you earned their undying love and devotion? With your direct reports walk into fire, literal fire for you. If not, you need to contact golden calf consulting. Golden Calf can help teach your subordinates what it truly means to be a subordinate. But it has to start with you. Look, no one's gonna worship you until you start worshiping yourself. You need to understand that your management prowess is more than just luck. It's a result of hard work, determination and define grace. It's a sign that the almighty or the aliens or something bears you above all other men or women sorry. It's just that almost all our clients are men. Anyway. Golden Calf can help you to develop the narcissistic delusions necessary for your people to see you as the demigod that you are, will teach you how to transform employee respect, into adoration through this strategic deployment of frat house amenities that teach employees to enjoy being at work, so much so that they gradually forget they even have, sorry, had a life outside of work. What's the matter? You're the only family they need. So let us teach you how to turn free beer into devotion and free Kool Aid into one step at a time jelly. In the meantime, look your employees in the eyes. If you see anything less than an unthinking willingness, no, a desire or need to sell their earthly possessions all up in an underground bunker and fight to the death for your God given right to dodge income taxes. And you need to call us golden calf consulting. We put the cult in workplace culture.

Frank Butler  19:14
[speaking with pretend indignation] Ah, what? Paul What was that?

Paul Harvey  19:18
I don't know. That...I think that slipped through our Keanu Reeves filter.

Frank Butler  19:23
But, but wait...Justin! What was that? Oh, man, we might have to fire Justin. That's ridiculous.

Paul Harvey  19:33
We might have to. This is his job. I mean, I know...I guess I read that but I don't think about what I say on the show. I mean, come on. Everyone knows that.

Frank Butler  19:41
I mean, that's the whole thing, right? We don't think about what we say, we just say it! 

Paul Harvey  19:45
We have no filter. That's why we hired the guy. That's why we have a Keanu Reeves filter.

Frank Butler  19:49
Justin! Oh, man. Ah, sorry, Busybodies. Anyway, I think we were talking about WeWork and them trying to give that appearance that they had this it culture thing going on, whereas they really not. And trying to package something old is something new. 

[normal dialogue resumes]

Paul Harvey  20:09
That reminds me if you haven't heard it yet, there's a really amazing podcast about everything that went on at WeWork. It's Season One of a show called foundering. It's based on, also narrated by Ellen Huet, who did a lot of the early reporting on them for Bloomberg. And I'll tell you what, if you want to hear a blow by blow account of everything we're talking about here, the indoctrination tactics, the use of youthful, largess, like beer and parties and the prospect of Getting Rich from an eventual IPO, to gloss over the low salaries and long hours, the hero worship of the company's leadership, punishments for those who asked questions, man, apparently, it was all there we work. And, you know, I go back to what I was saying a few minutes ago. There's a bit of an irony, a paradox here where a lot of these borderline cult, the sort of startups are really doing everything that someone who teaches a class like mine would say to do, from a psychology of management perspective, they're really doing everything right. And so I think it's like a lot of things that there's some power in this stuff. There's power in psychology, and you can use it in good ways. You can use it in bad ways. And you can have good intentions, but go a little too far. So I think the challenge for a lot of these startups in particular is finding where the line is your startup, you need to grow faster, you're not going to survive, you need to have a lot of passion and drive from your employees in order to grow fast. I don't think it's a bad thing to foster this type of all in culture. The question is, how do we know when we've gone too far, when we've gone from startup to cult, like, where's that line?

Frank Butler  21:53
It's almost like that idea of too much of a good thing is actually bad. And if you're doing everything that we say to do, but kind of to an extreme right, and if you look at what they're doing, it's sort of taking what we talked about in classes, or we do executive education, that things that you should be doing. They just take them in, they give them that one extra little tweak that goes sort of above and beyond I think what we tend to recommend even

Paul Harvey  22:17
That's true, and I think it's possible...well, we've seen that it's possible to lose touch with how far you've gone in a given direction. You're doing these tweaks, you're taking things a step further than might be advisable in terms of getting commitment and motivation and drive out to your employees. And you don't realize when you've gone too crazy town.

Frank Butler  22:38
You've crossed some sort of boundary

Paul Harvey  22:40
Yeah, like, you know, like the Stanford prison experiments back in the 70s. And 

Frank Butler  22:44
Yes, oh, that's a great example, right? where they actually bought into what they were doing, even though 

Paul Harvey  22:50
Including the people running the experiment, and he what's his name is Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo, he frequently is the first to admit that, yeah, I went way too far, like I should have pulled the plug on that thing. Way beforehand, way before I actually did. It took someone coming in from the outside and seeing what was going on and saying, What in the world are you people doing here? I think that's not a bad, what's the word I'm looking for? Not like a standard, but it's a good it's a good test for your own culture. If someone from the outside world comes in and says you people are nuts. Yeah, it's at least probably a good sign that you need to take stock of where you're at

Frank Butler  23:24
Like a litmus test, or

Paul Harvey  23:25
Litmus test. Thank you. 

Frank Butler  23:26
Yes, that's

Paul Harvey  23:26
That's the word I'm looking for

Frank Butler  23:27
That's, yeah, exactly. That's actually a really great point. If you're in a startup environment, especially these high tech ones that are notoriously known for bad culture, to the point that it usually generates negative public relations. That might be something that even the venture capitalists who are looking to invest in these companies might want to look for is having some sort of cultural gauge, right? Are we seeing that they've gone off the deep end? Now, of course, there might be ways that they obfuscate what they're actually doing when they have external people come in, right? And that's what cults do. And when they know that there's a threat, they can behave.

Paul Harvey  24:03
Which is another litmus test, when you find you have to change your behavior when someone from outside your company comes in. What's that tell you

Frank Butler  24:09
You know, once you're inside, you don't realize that's not normal, right? Because you're having some level of success or being praised for that work. You're getting that feeling of being part of something important

Paul Harvey  24:20
Which is where I think the outside perspective comes in handy. You got someone who's not right acculturated, indoctrinated into it. 

Frank Butler  24:26
I think the problem with that, though, is that the outsider might not realize what's going on, because they can only be there for so long, right? I don't know. It's certainly a fascinating sort of concept. And I do think there's a lot that needs to still be explored in this area as to how much is exactly acceptable. I mean, we do want these companies to be successful, but at what cost?

Paul Harvey  24:46
You know, do a quick internet search on this stuff. And I myself was surprised at how big of an issue this is. Just this morning, I looked up or I stumbled onto an article from HR technologist by Puja Lalwani sorry, if I mangled that. And she just list one after another these like seemingly well-meaning companies that went too far she mentions we work she mentioned a way luggage company and I wasn't familiar with says their culture involved public shaming on slack. Wow. 16 hour workdays, no time off employee surveillance, bullying and firing, thinks period underwear founded and initially run by a woman, she was kind of forced to step down. After all these allegations of sexual harassment reported nudity, I'm not sure what was involved with that bias. Female founder, CEO. Now going back to your point about the gender misogyny and stuff, you know, this is the last thing these startups need.

Frank Butler  25:36
Well, and that's exactly it too. And what's really interesting that in that case of that underwear company, it was a female version, tried to, I would probably say, emulate some of the things that these right, male dominated companies were doing good point, because that's where the money goes, in trying to set yourself apart, one of the things that businesses are always trying to find is their niche in some way. Because you've got this landscape full of all these different competitors, you've got all these different elements of noise out there, and you want to cut through that noise and set yourself apart in some way. And that could have been working for them. And it just reinforces that behavior. I mean, I don't know, I would have to look further into those cases. But I would assume that's part of it. That copying by others, right, yeah.

Paul Harvey  26:19
Well, what did you call that?  Memetic isomorphism? 

Frank Butler  26:21
Memetic. Yep, exactly. Memetic isomorphism. Yep. It's a fancy term for just copying what's working,

Paul Harvey  26:27
Copying what's working, yes. It's hard to provide real concrete advice on this. Basically, if you think your startup is becoming a cult, it's probably becoming a cult. And if you can't get an outside perspective on that, to confirm or deny it, it's I don't know, helpful to look in the mirror and say, Is this the way I plan to run a company, I don't know.

Frank Butler  26:47
There's something that might also work in these kinds of contexts as well, trying to figure out what your core values are. And I know there's different exercises that can be done. I know there's consulting firms out there that do these things. I know one assignment that's done to help understand the core essence of a company is to pretend you take a little team and you send them to Mars, quote, unquote, Mars, and then they have to establish like business from the ground up. And their goal is to figure out those elements that are necessary to make that company successful in a new environment, basically,

Paul Harvey  27:16
That's a really cool idea.

Frank Butler  27:18
Yeah, there's little activities like that. One of the things that I try to get people to do is ask the question, why and ask it like five times in a row. So it's like, why is this going on? Ask it again. So okay, so you answer, but then why? It is like when a kid asks you questions, right. But the whole idea is that it helps you boil down to an essence, right? What's the easy phrase? That's something everybody can understand. And that's the key.

Paul Harvey  27:43
And that's particularly relevant here. Because a, almost a defining characteristic of any cult like organization is never question never ask what's happening, especially if it's decisions coming from up above. So having that just built into your culture that we have these activities, we have them specifically to ask why it's a good way to keep yourself honest, I think.

Frank Butler  28:02
Yeah, I think about...that's probably a really good thing to do. I didn't

Paul Harvey  28:06
Yeah, heh. That worked out well. It kind of...similarly, I don't know how if this is actually what happened, but you kind of get the sense going back to that the HubSpot example. And Dan Lyons disrupted book, it sort of seems like, I don't know if you're familiar with the aftermath of that. They allegedly did some pretty shady stuff to try to prevent the book's publication, really. But once the book was published, there was some Fallout. And then it seems like they said, Alright, this has happened. There's like a best-selling book about us being a cold like workplace, maybe there's some learning to be done here. Maybe we can make lemons out of lemonade. And you get the sense that maybe that happened. Like they kind of use it as a wakeup call to rein in the stuff that was a little bit out of hand. But they also stood up for some of the things that they said, you know, he didn't like this, but we think it is good. And here's why. So it forced them to maybe critically sort of examine themselves look in the mirror a bit. And they're doing pretty well, apparently, these days. So maybe that was ultimately beneficial to them.

Frank Butler  29:04
That's a great point. And you wonder how much of that was that influence of that book? And making them have to look in that mirror, reflect on what they've done. And how does that impact perceptions? And that's one of the things, perceptions matter. 

Paul Harvey  29:17
Oh, yeah. 

Frank Butler  29:17
And if the perception you're setting is wrong, then you've got to figure out either we've got to make an adjustment or the audience, we might be catering to changes in a way that we don't even like. Right, right.

Paul Harvey  29:28
It's good point.

Frank Butler  29:29
That's a that's really an interesting question. I do think we should have an episode at some point about that idea of reflecting. Because I think it's such an invaluable part of things that people don't spend enough time doing, especially in these examples here with a cult. We just mentioned this idea of reinforcing behaviors. Oh, we're doing this. We got rewarded in some way. There was some success, whether it's, we hit a milestone faster than we anticipated or investors gave us money that we didn't anticipate or something. There was something that triggered that sort of gambling since when you hit a jackpot on a slot machine, even though it's a penny slot and you won five cents, that triggered that same response, but

Paul Harvey  30:07
Triggers some dopamine and you do it again.

Frank Butler  30:10
Right. Exactly. That might be why reflecting is so important in these scenarios, because you can step back and go, okay, we've been doing this for a minute. Why? And just ask why. And is it the right thing to do? Because you gotta think some of the stuff that they're doing, they have to think there's something wrong with it, like the nudity aspect, right. And we've heard this stuff with Enron, for example, and their shenanigans. In this example, with this underwear company, you mentioned that you think about that nudity? I mean, when does that make sense?

Paul Harvey  30:41
They are selling underwear, but I don't know enough about the context.

Frank Butler  30:45
If it's come out where they're talking about nudity explicitly. Yeah, yeah That means there's something wrong and of course, the sexual assault and have it's really bad, but

Paul Harvey  30:53
It sounds like it was not being used in the service of marketing. It was being used in the service of getting employees in line from what little bit I've read about right.

Frank Butler  31:01
It was misused. Yeah. And I know that there are still some imbalances there and what's appropriate between men and women? I understand it's much harder to figure out what's appropriate attire in some cases men have it easy. I will not lie. Yeah. button down some slacks. Pretty straightforward

Paul Harvey  31:19
Uh, I believe you mean the

Frank Butler  31:21
Oh, sorry. The powered hoodie.

Paul Harvey  31:23
The powered hoodie. A baseball cap.

Frank Butler  31:26
And I'm in jeans, so jeans. That's gonna be

Paul Harvey  31:30
I'm not wearing

Frank Butler  31:31
Oh

Paul Harvey  31:31
This is zoom. I mean, you

Frank Butler  31:32
pose naked I guess under that. Unfortunately. I can only see you know from the chest up, so

Paul Harvey  31:37
Hoodie up, I'm all good. I'm all business.

Frank Butler  31:40
Party down below business on top. No wait. Party down below cult on top

Paul Harvey  31:45
Cult on top party below.

Frank Butler  31:49
As we go off the rails, folks. Yeah.

Paul Harvey  31:53
Where's our producer? Justin, why you letting us say this stuff? 

Frank Butler  31:56
You're supposed to control this stuff, man. Ay, What a…

Paul Harvey  31:59
Loser

Frank Butler  31:59
Useless. Bet he's drunk.

Paul Harvey  32:02
Bet he's drunk again. 

Frank Butler  32:03
Yeah, yeah. Keanu. If you're available, we need your help.

Paul Harvey  32:09
We have a, we have something to deal with. We need your help Keanu  But truly, though, I think in a corporate environment, it's there's laws against this stuff that should force you to look at yourself and go, "what was I thinking," I'm gonna channel my inner Dr. Phil, I mean, that will kill your company faster than you can even imagine, especially as a startup, you don't have all these resources to play these kinds of games, Your reputation is one of the only cards you have when you're a startup 

Frank Butler  32:34
That's just about it, right? And venture capitalists, a lot of them, the idea is important, but they're looking to invest in the person who's running that show, too. If they're hearing this kind of stuff,

Paul Harvey  32:44
They don't want a headache.

Frank Butler  32:46
But they're not going to want that they don't want that to transfer on them either. They don't want that spillover effect.

Paul Harvey  32:51
You have to wonder like the mindset of someone that goes into hazing as a management tactic, like what in their life led them to think that was an appropriate response. And I guess if you have a very frat like culture, maybe hazing is on your subconscious agenda. 

Frank Butler  33:07
But now, with all that said, culture is so important to any organization, especially startup, the critical elements that we're saying here is that there's a lot of things that you can look at, that these cults have done in this villa real article that Paul pulled from here, there's certainly some elements in there that you would want to look at in terms of how can we do this in a legal way that's going to be fair to everyone, regardless of gender, sex, political beliefs, whatever the whole spectrum,

Paul Harvey  33:37
And that's effective. Managing through fear is not effective in the long run. Get something done right now, maybe, but you're gonna pay for it with interest

Frank Butler  33:46
Yeah, I certainly do believe in that notion of you take care of your employees, they will work harder for you.

Paul Harvey  33:53
You want them to want to do what you want them to do. They legitimately want to do what you want them to do. Your job is easier as a manager, and everyone's happier

Frank Butler  34:00
And the things that drive that would be things like they agree in the mission of the company, or they agree with the vision that you have, or that story that you say, Hey, this is what I think we can do. If we're able to accomplish the delivery of this product or service we're creating, look at what's going to happen if we can do this, and drive people's passion to do that. You don't have to create the cult like environment. You just need to create an environment that's healthy for them to then take those values and go with it. I mean, sure, have a foosball table and some air hockey and stuff like that. That's great. You should have that, especially in creative environments. You want to give people outlets to give their brain a chance to decompress, let them go have sleep sometimes. I mean,

Paul Harvey  34:42
The culture has to fit the job.

Frank Butler  34:44
Right. You know, sleep sometimes is the biggest thing to get their minds back in or let them take vacation. I get that there's deadlines and you don't want people to Trump you and stuff like that. But the reality is that your people are going to be so much more effective if they can get decompression time in there.

Paul Harvey  35:02
Now someone's gonna call us out because we're always singing the praises of Steve Jobs. And he was, as far as I know, not guilty of any kind of perpetuating a cult like culture. But he was, by his own admission, a very difficult person to work for. And with and you got incredible results out of it. There are edge cases, what thing I think a lot of people don't get is that Steve Jobs was hard on his employees. So I'm going to do that too. Oh, you're not Steve Jobs. No one else is, as always, your management style has to fit your own personality and who you are as a person. If you're going to push the limits, you bloody hell better have the skill and the reasoning behind it to do so.

Frank Butler  35:43
Paul just went English there for a second with the bloody hell. But you know, we'll let that one slide

Paul Harvey  35:49
No English to American filter.

Frank Butler  35:53
You know, the Steve Jobs example is always very relevant. Because if you ask a lot of those Apple employees, about their 10 year working for Steve Jobs, many of them say that it was the time in their lives that they were the most proud of. They also said it was probably some of the hardest times of their life. I think the difference is that Steve Jobs focused in on treating people equally, it was very clear that he didn't care if you were, you know, man, woman, child, whatever, he had that same temperament no matter what he treated people the same.

Paul Harvey  36:20
I think it did have something to do with... Well, I say I think I'm just 

Frank Butler  36:24
His lsd use? 

Paul Harvey  36:25
I'm recalling...not that one. I'm recalling a different interview where he talked about how he was particularly hard on people who he felt did not perform up to their actual abilities. He said, If I go out and look for a plus players, and if they give me a minus work, I'm going to bludgeon them more than an A minus player give me a minus work. Like if I hired you, because you're the best of the best, why aren't you being what you can be? Why aren't you performing at that level? Right. I think that's where a lot of what you're saying came from that you've all said he was hard to work with. But they're so proud of what they accomplished during that time in their career, because he held them to the level that they were in fact capable of performing at.

Frank Butler  37:02
Yeah, I think that's a that's a great point. And I think that's why they are proud of the work they did during that era. Apple might have been a hard place to work at, but not a cult.

Paul Harvey  37:13
I think I'm that way too. I don't mind being bashed about the head and ears if I am phoning it in

Frank Butler  37:18
Right

Paul Harvey  37:19
And someone calls me on it. I appreciate that. Like thank you for the wakeup call.

Frank Butler  37:22
Right

Paul Harvey  37:23
Maybe. 

Frank Butler  37:24
But as you and I know, there's some personal attributes that might cause you to misperceive a situation too 

Paul Harvey  37:30
There is that 

Frank Butler  37:31
Going back to our study that we've done in the past. And we'll do something else on that. I don't want to, you know, this is already going long as it is. But I like that idea. Yeah. So stay tuned. Anyway, I think it has gotten long at this point through so we might want to...any parting thoughts Ph- uh, there, Paul?

Paul Harvey  37:47
...did you almost call me Phil? 

Frank Butler  37:48
I did almost call you Phil. I'm sorry. It's what happens when you're working with Phil and you send emails. So hold on, let

Paul Harvey  37:54
And your Dr. Phil imitation.

Frank Butler  37:56
Any parting thoughts there, Paul?

Paul Harvey  38:00
I think it's all been said. Well, okay, I do have a parting thought. One of the recurring findings regarding this topic is that there's a lot of involvement of young people, impressionable young people. That's not just people being recruited into these companies, but also the people running these companies. So it's especially a topic for our younger listeners to be mindful of. When you're perhaps running your own startup or being recruited by a startup or working at a startup where this cult like mentality does exist, it tends to be targeted on your age group.

Frank Butler  38:33
And that was the rest of the story, folks.

Paul Harvey  38:35
That was the rest of the story.

Frank Butler  38:37
Thanks for listening. Until next time,

Paul Harvey  38:40
Good day

Frank Butler  38:41
Good day.

Paul Harvey  38:42
The Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from its business time by Jermaine Clements and Bret McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'd love to hear from you. Please send questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input at busynessparadox [dot] com, or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, busynessparadox [dot] com to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, I Heart Radio, Google podcast for your preferred podcast provider.

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