I’m often asked asked which company cultures I admire, especially as I tend to be critical of the culture inside tech firms. It’s easy to have good vibes in small firms but organisations who manage to deliver good culture at scale are the ones I’m most interested in. I often call out Nando’s or Octopus Energy.

I was delighted to get the chance to talk to the CEO of Octopus Energy Group, Greg Jackson. I’ve often reflected that the best cultures seem to be codified and made explicit, but Octopus’s culture isn’t really defined by formal values, Jackson doesn’t pin it down to three or four words. Instead the culture has a vivid feeling but is loosely articulated, a tangible mix of trust, autonomy and a shared mission.

Cultures are often defined by what they’re against as much as what they are for. Many companies give a laundry list of desirable attributes they strive for. There’s an organisation at the end of my street that has ‘excellence’ and ‘respect’ on its windows, but would any business claim to be built on mediocrity or disrespect? Aren’t they just given? Sometimes these things are called the Pillars of Character. Yes, we have integrity here, but how does that help you work here?

For businesses these pillars are useless for creating differentiation. Jackson’s approach at Octopus stands apart from that, he takes issue with common norms elsewhere. Researching for the conversation I listened to one interview where Jackson talked about the absence of back-to-back meetings in his day. He said:

First of one thing I do that I think is unusual is I don't pack my day with meetings. I'm religious about having lots of time outside meetings because in the one hour that someone wants to have a meeting, I can make 10 phone calls or I could drop by the desks of half a dozen team members and I can be available for people to deal with what's going on that day. So one thing for me is your time is far too precious to let it get soaked up on other people's meeting requests. It's quite funny when I got a new PA, she came from a very large software company and I said, ‘I've got a lot of meetings tomorrow’. And she said, well, where I used to work, my job was to pack from 8 AM to 5 PM every day, hour by hour by hour. And I was like, Whoa, how does that person get any thinking time? How does it get any, any time to reset? And how does it get to do anything proactive that changes the world?

After the conversation, which was recorded live on stage near Guildford, someone came up to me. ‘My son works at Octopus,’ he said. Here we go, I thought. ‘Every single word he said up there is true. He says he wishes he’d joined there years ago’.

Links:

Greg on High Performance podcast

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