Erik Kastner discussed how listening to employee feedback and quickly addressing problems can transform company culture overnight. Chris Read talked about cultural learning and how guidance is needed for humans to learn in a positive direction. John Willis described using a company's existing culture as a strategic weapon by understanding it, nurturing it, and having it reinforce priorities like in examples from Netflix, Etsy, and GitHub.

1. Culture @ Velocity UK
Nov 2013

2. Contents
1. Erik Kastner (Kickstarter) : One Weird
Trick to Transform your Culture
Overnight!
2. Chris Read (DRW) : Optimizing for
Cultural Learning
3. John Willis (Dell - enStratius) : Culture as
a Strategic Weapon

3. Erik Kastner
● Etsy, Kickstarter
● When wanted to leave Etsy for the first
time:
○ CTO: “You can’t leave, you didn’t tell us
what’s wrong so we didn’t have a chance to
improve”
○ Stayed 2 more years, much happier
● Code, tools

4. Culture
● Culture = this is what you won't forget,
this is what makes this place special
● In the web industry, everyone does
customer support, only the customer
differs: “devops is just a fancy word for
customer service”
● → Caring is the key

5. Caring
People will have problems, but if someone
cares about their problems they will feel
much better. If their problems get fixed,
that’s even more awesome.

6. How to
●
●
●
●
Listen!
Talk to as much people as you can
Have someone fix the problems
Allow them to work on fixing their own
problems
● Start immediately

7. Chris Read
● ex Thoughtworks, DRW
● Cultural Learning: “Learning through
observation or interaction with others.”
● Allows individuals to acquire skills that
they would be unable to independently
gain over the course of their lifetimes.
● Cultural intelligence hypothesis

8. Summary for us non Biologists
● Humans are built for Cultural Learning
● Age of what we’ve learnt matters
● We’ve got to put our learning in to
practice
● Without direction and guidance, humans
will probably go in the wrong direction

9. Affected areas
● Team structure - szerepek
● Team lifecycles - hogyan lesz működő a
csapat, mi van ha feloszlik stb
● Team interactions - egymással hogyan
működnek együtt a csapatok
● Business Unit interactions - értsük meg
egymást
● Group training

10. DRW principles
● Flat org, no corporate ladder
● No salary grades
● Teams organized by service and business
unit
● Physical and synthetic teams
● Upper management access

11. DRW principles
● Incentives: individual < team <
organization
● “Heroes are who get things done”
● Mobility, make it easy to change roles
● People who often work together should
sit near

12. DRW principles
● Knowledge sharing: "borrowing" people is
welcomed
● Must be easy to find the right person for
anything
● Conference attendance, open source
contributing

13. Example: ticketing
● Goal: order
● Teams start to communicate via tickets
● Turns out: it actively blocks
communication between teams, reduced
visibility → fail
● Use it only as a backlog, and
communicate with other methods

14. Summary
●
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●
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Practice what you learn
Question everything
Innovate
Focus on the goal
http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/en/assets/1/event/101/Optimizing%20for%
20Cultural%20Learning%20Presentation.pdf

15. John Willis
●
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Dell
Devops Guru
Funny guy
CAMS: Culture Automation Measurement
Sharing

16. Hiring war
● It's a war to
hire people
● Company
culture
matters

17. Three tribes of culture
1. Change your culture
2. You can’t change culture
3. The Use It culture

18. Change your culture tribe
●
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Command and control
Corporate guideline culture
Motivational posters
Slogans
Coaches
Tells you in detail

19. You can’t change culture tribe
● You can’t change the company culture so
don’t even try
● "Try to work with what you've got"

20. The Use It tribe
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“Don’t change corporate culture: use it”
Figure out what it is
Work with it
Nurture it
Weaponize it

21. The Golden Circle
● Simon Sinek: “Start
with Why”
● why? -> how? -> what?
● the cause -> values ->
products

22. Foundations
● W. Edwards Deming - The New Economics
● Louis V. Gerstner Jr. - Who Says
Elephants Can’t Dance?
Use It Tribe examples: Netflix, Etsy, Github

23. Netflix
“The High Performance Culture”
● They don't apologize for being tough
● They hire smart people who need to
make hard decisions
● Adequate performance earns a nice
severance package

24. Netflix
● Everyone is expected to take risks
● Be a consistent contributor and innovator
● Real company values are shown by who
gets rewarded, promoted, or let go
● Name their products by Nordic deities

25. Github
“People who love to share”
●
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Culture of collaboration
Automation as a culture
No manager - everyone is a manager
Really flat structure

26. Github
● The structure of Github is unstructure
● "We just fill vacuums, we just get it
done"
● A lot like Valve

27. Etsy
"The Artisans"
● “We enable people to make a living by
making things”
● Blameless culture
○ Allspaw about post mortems
● Benefit corporation

28. Etsy
● Tools to reinforce your culture
● Software engineer became the CEO of a
non-software company
○ Keeps himself close: participates in
hackathons, goes to lunch with employees
● "All commerce is about real human
interaction."

29. Devops Companies ( GE )
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GE is big, so affects whole industries
Automation with Chef
Modern style and communication
Deming again
Scientific approach: decisions based on
experiments
● Big data

30. Summary
● Reading list
○ Deming - Out Of The Crisis
○ The Phoenix Project
○ Eliyahu M. Goldratt
http://www.slideshare.net/botchagalupe/velocitylondon-devopsculture-asaweapon-copy

31. Bonus
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Joshua Hoffmann (Soundcloud)
Not only a culture talk, but a must watch
Finctional startup story
Moving to another data center
Heroes are who delete code: “favourite
diffs are red diffs”

32. Questions?