#CultureHacking
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
–Peter Drucker
And technology for lunch, and products for dinner, and soon thereafter everything else too…
So what is ‘culture’? And what is the hype about it?
I had the opportunity to share what I have learned about it from my own experience while organizing student events back in college, working in factories around Northern Mexico and finally taking the leap to become an entrepreneur by launching and building GO.
So, culture… think of it as a racing car: we are all inside a racing car but only one person is behind the wheel and starts accelerating. There are usually two reactions to this: either you get scared, freak out and want to stop it and get out right now, or you awkwardly start laughing without knowing why, you don’t know what to expect out of this situation, but hey! We are all sharing the same experience, so let’s just enjoy the ride and see where it takes us. What are you doing/willing to do to enjoy this and make others get the most out of it, too?
Culture is every group’s individual and collective attitudes and behaviors, and is composed by every effort, cause and effect that leads to feeding and reinforcing it. Therefore, a culture might be good or bad only when compared to another culture or framed within the given context of an individual or collective perspective.
Our friend Patrick said that what made us at GO stick together was not the business potential nor the promise of monetary return, but the shared conviction of doing something big, maybe larger than ourselves. And maybe that was the very first value we crafted for our group and our work.
Meanwhile, we still have much to learn and work to do in regards of finding the suitable culture that would allow our work at GO to flourish at its best. Lately, I wonder about the intersection between culture and cities, and how this might shape (and is shaping already!) the #futureofwork, and after our experience in Santiago, Istanbul and Yangon, it has become more interesting than ever to look forward to seeing the corresponding impact and effect that their entrepreneurial communities will have over their entire cities in the years to come. So here’s to culture, the collective force that, if treated adequately and driven with care, will lead us to take better decisions and thrive, even in unpredictable, chaotic and uncertain times… or not.
-at
Yangon, Myanmar. December 10, 2014. #ttt