When I was in college, I would always check the US News and World Report college rankings to see where Brown ranked (we’re 16th). The annual ritual was that me and my friends would sit around and bemoan that XYZ was ranked higher than us but it was only because they had a bigger endowment or because the ranking system was broken. After all we were cooler or you know better.
And we would read the annoying interview about XYZ’s students who paid no attention to those rankings, because they knew they were at the best school. We knew they paid close attention, but I guess being the top dog let’s you pretend you don’t care.
Maybe this was all a form of buyer’s remorse.
It turns out that the same ritual exists with the Fortune survey of the 100 best companies to work at. Ratings come out, and then you spend half a day trying to figure out how they could be so flawed to pick you as anything other than #1. If you love your job, you want to know why you’re not the best place to work at, because how could things be any better?And then you begin to rationalize that this survey is flawed and broken, because how could ABC be any better than you?
But today we’re #1, and so I am in uncomfortable territory. I don’t know how to act indifferent. But I do know how to say that it doesn’t surprise me that we were voted #1.
And if you ask me why it’s about our culture. What brought that home to me was reading Dave’s book. What was surprising was that the book contained no net new information about the history of NetApp. Oh sure there were details, but there was nothing substantive. I didn’t read the book and think: wow, they lied to me about why they did this or wow, this isn’t what they told us about why this happened. Think about it, a book about 9 years of history written by a key executive had little new information for an employee who had been here for 9 years.
That says something about the kind of culture we have, and perhaps goes to some length to explain our current ranking.
p.s XYZ was Harvard, and dangnabit, was Harvard this year, again! And I am sure it’s the endowment, it’s always the endowment, cause Brown is just sooooo much better.

