Culture: March 2009 Archives

Anyone who has flown Southwest in the past knows things are done a little bit differently at the airline. In fact, in the book Mavericks At Work, authors William Taylor and Polly Labarre discuss how doing things differently has not only made the airline one of the best out there, but it's also created an undeniably strong work culture. The people they hire believe in Southwest's goal of doing things differently, and the work they do on a daily basis reflects this. Case in point? The rapping Southwest flight attendant in the video below. Instead of simply stating the safety instructions in the typical way, the attendant mixes things up, and arguably gets more people to listen to the safety announcement than if they were spoken in their usual "serious" tone.

Southwest is a great example of how you can standout in an otherwise downward-spiraling industry (no terrible pun intended there) with an amazing culture and core values.

South by Southwest (SXSW), held in Austin, TX, seems to get larger each year, and 2009 was no exception. While I wasn't able to attend, I'll make sure it is on my calendar for early next year.

For people like me who missed the big event, Mike Rohde's sketchnotes are an excellent resource. Rohde takes "visual notes" at all sorts of events, including South by Southwest. It's great for people who don't take notes (but should), for visual thinkers, or for those who may have wanted to take notes during the event, but were otherwise occupied meeting, speaking, or even Twittering about what was happening at the mega networking event.

I'm not as familiar with sketchnotes as much as graphic recording or graphic facilitation, but these notes contribute to the type of visual learning that I love and find most helpful. Here are three pages from Mike Rohde, which show the major points Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, made during a talk at SXSW. Tony has been doing a lot of speaking lately and has done a great job turning the Zappos culture into a true story.

A month ago I posted an example of visualizing core values and how GotVMail has used this technique to make our core values as visible as possible. But then we thought, "Where do we show other important ideas about our company?"

So, after creating the original graphic for the center we decided to expand to include company goals, department goals, and personal goals. Getting these on the same page wasn't enough, though. Originally, we were going to print these "visualized goals" for each team member, for every quarter. We realized the extra paper was unnecessary, however, and and decided it would be more effective to integrate the info into our corporate wiki. With the document now posted on our wiki, updates are easier than ever, and the concepts stay fresh in people's minds as they visit the wiki each day.