Company Values are a Tool for Employees to Beat Up Management

Corporate culture is one of the first things Dan focused on when he joined NetApp in 1994. (Profitability was another.) He wanted to create a formal set of company values, so he asked everyone on his staff to hold “values meetings” to collect input.

James and I met with Engineering, and it didn’t go well at all. In fact, we absolutely pegged everyone’s Dilbert-o-meter. Lots of cynicism. At the time, Engineering was maybe 20 people, so we all fit into a medium-sized conference room. I remember a woman named Florence asking, “How will these values be used against us?” I found out later that she’d had a bad experience with values at a previous company, along with many others. I confess that company values made me uncomfortable as well. To me, values seem like something personal, not something that a company can tell people to have.

Dan got so much negative feedback that he postponed the project, but he didn’t give up. A year later, at another staff offsite, we spent several hours talking about values. Mostly they were what you’d expect in anybody’s corporate values – integrity and honesty and so on. At first this bothered me. What’s the point, if it’s just the same old stuff? But then I thought about it differently. If you started a new country and needed a constitution, you’d probably include freedom of speech and habeas corpus and a bunch of other stuff just like everybody else. The point isn’t to be original; the point is to capture what’s important to the culture you hope to have.

Telling people what their values should be still makes me uncomfortable, but I have gotten comfortable talking about NetApp’s values. Two things helped me.

The first is that I personally do believe the values we came up with. I can’t tell people what their values should be, but I can tell them what my values are. Not all of my values of course, like about religion or marriage or children, but the ones that apply in a work context. In essence, I’m saying: “These are things that we – as a management team – believe, and since you are an employee here, it seems only fair to let you know.”

Florence’s question haunted me: “How will these values be used against me?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that values aren’t that useful for beating up employees. I mean, if managers want to beat up on employees they have so many tools at their disposal. They can give them bad reviews, no raises, bad assignments – even fire them if it comes to that. Realizing that values are a tool that employees can use to beat up management is the second thing that got me comfortable talking about them.

Here’s an example. Early on at NetApp, we were competing against Auspex (now dead). Auspex had promised the customer support for a new protocol within 12 months, but we knew we couldn’t deliver it in less than 18. The thing is, we knew enough about Auspex to know it would take them 18 months as well. We told the customer that, but they said we should focus on our promises and let Auspex focus on theirs. They made it clear that they would choose the vendor who could meet this requirement. We were having a meeting about what to do, and the question was whether we should also lie. The argument was that neither company could deliver it sooner than 18 months, so it wasn’t like this lie would hurt the customer any; they’d get the protocol in 18 months either way. In fact, we suspected that we could actually get it done faster than Auspex, so if we lied, we would actually be helping the customer, wouldn’t we?

We went on like this for a while until someone – I can’t remember who it was but it wasn’t the boss – said, “I can’t believe that are discussing whether or not to lie to a customer. Don’t we have Honesty as a value? How can we even be having this conversation?” I’m not proud to admit that we had the discussion, but I am proud to say that this comment shut it down immediately.

We were honest, and we lost the business. We were a small company and that deal really would have helped us. But here’s the ironic twist: Auspex never did deliver the new protocol – it’s not clear they ever intended to – and the customer was furious. Two years later, Auspex was out the door and they became one of our largest customers. Over ten years later, they still are.

I think that values are like that. Adhering to values can painful in the short run. Sometimes lying or cheating is the best way to make a quick buck. But if your goal is long-term success, then values are in your own self-interest. I can’t prove that “Cheaters never prosper”, but I do believe this: In the long run, cheaters tend not to prosper, especially if they need to keep dealing with the same people. Tom Mendoza once summed it up like this: “Life is a long game. People remember.”

I’m sure that NetApp doesn’t always live up to our values, but it is something that I aspire to, and it is something that I’m happy to be beat up about.

Comments

[Micheal Craig]

Values and their enforcement on the workforce are on the way out it seems. With ageing baby boomers leaving in droves, companies will be a lot less lenient on pushing this stuff down employee throats.

It is starting to look like an employees market.
Cheers
http://thebusinessanalyst.blogspot.com/

[Werner]

Corporate values will support long-term success only if company's management gets the same endurance by their share holders.

[ex-Auspexian]

Your story seems to imply that Auspex was lying to the customer and maybe even lying to themselves. Being there at that time I can only say that Auspex strove to deliver the highest quality product, which in this particular case , the technology was implemented but had problems coming up to Auspex standards. Also at this time, the marketplace was in a strange place, Auspex delivered mainly to the Enterprise space and NetApp primarily to the departmental or smaller space. Long after the demise of Auspex NetApp began building the large systems to enter that spot in the marketplace.
Then again, you yourself are an ex-Auspexian so you must have carried around those values from Auspex and over to NetApp along with any new ones you adopted.....

[ex-NetApp employee]

I have worked with NetApp before. I quit for personal reasons and it was a very tough decision. I am now working for a very small company. NetApp's culture has influenced me so much, that the first question that I asked the top guy of my current company was that about culture. I feel the difference every day :-)

[John]

Congrats Dave on NetApp making the 100 Best list again this year. There's something unusually good about your culture. I hope you are able to maintain that as you continue to grow.

An NTAP shareholder.

[Reinoud Reynders]

Those values are reflecting on the image of the company. I?m curious if the image of NetApp that I have, as a customer, corresponded with the values of NetApp.
1. Believe in your own strength:
(account managers of a lot of) companies (not only in the storage world) talks a lot about what the competitors not do or not can. NetApp try to avoid this approach and count on there technology.
2.Honesty:
Especially in the beginning, NetApp was an engineer company and engineers don?t use the art of marketing, are not interested in targets, quarter results, ? This spirit is still there. In a big project last year, the responsible engineer of a specific function tell us that the results that we want will not be there in the next 2 years. He knew at the moment that with this answer this project was in danger and that we are considering an other solution (vendor). 3 months later, NetApp won this project.
3. Work must be fun:
Every NetApp employee has always a big smile on his/her face. You must pay them a lot :-). But it must be a lot more. This gives me confidence: in the products and in the people.
4. Openness:
NetApp is very open. You can, as a customer, interact very easy with the company. Product Managers, engineers, developers and even members of the board are relative easy to contact. Not only for the local NetApp employees but also by customers. In September 2006 a group of IT guys were waiting on there plane in Frankfurt. We recognized Jay Kidd (Senior Vice President & General Manager, Emerging Products Group). It was no problem to do some talk with him. After the flight, we were sitting on the same flight, he joined us again and we wait together on our luggage.

It?s of course very easy to not forget those values when your are a relatif small company and on the winning site. NetApp is growing a lot the last years, and I see that it becomes more difficult to follow those values. I hope that you keep those values high on NetApp?s agenda.

[Eric Steadle]

So, where's the link to Netapp's corporate values? They could come in handy one day when I'm trying to get management to do something important. :-D