Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

So much of the energy and focus in our industry is on the what and how: on design, on the technologies we use, on business strategy, on tactics.

Yet as legendary management thinker Peter Drucker (reportedly) said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

Drucker’s point is that if your organisational culture isn’t healthy, whatever else you do will likely be far less successful.

We’ve seen numerous cases in point in recent years.

Uber was poised to totally dominate ride sharing. Lyft, their nearest rival was running out of cash, and could not find additional capital. But a series of disastrous steps and revelations about the company (its terrible internal culture, accusations of intellectual property theft, and worse) saw Uber lose a significant number of great employees (more important than funding in many ways), lose many riders and drivers to competitors, while Lyft was able to raise a significant amount of funding and start seriously eating into Uber’s market share.

Theranos was one of the most exciting companies in the world. A charismatic leader in Elizabeth Holmes, a mission to drastically improve health care, a board of powerful, influential people. But ultimately a company built on fraud and deceit. Holmes faces criminal charges. A billion dollars of investors’ funds have evaporated. Talented passionate people who spent years of their lives are out of work.

There are numerous examples of such failures in recent years, large and small. And at the heart of these failures is culture.

Recognising the value of this to our industry, last year we started the Culture conference, focussing on creating healthy team and organisational cultures, and how to build and grow them.

This year’s event is shaping up as a very worthy successor to last year’s highly successful conference, so if you lead or manage teams or organisations, or work in people ops, HR, Culture or Talent, Culture will expose you to the latest thinking on hiring, onboarding, growing your teams and people, don’t miss Culture, on October 31st the Convention Centre in Sydney. We guarantee one day invested will help you and your team immeasurably.