Finding (and Keeping) Your Company’s Soul

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ranjay Gulati, professor at Harvard Business School, says the most successful organizations tend to have one thing in common: a soul. Moving beyond culture, the "soul" of a growing start-up -- or a more established company -- is built on clear business intent, a strong connection to customers, and a stellar employee experience. Gulati says that leaders must think hard about preserving all three elements of the soul even as they scale and never lose sight of what makes their company special. He's the author of the HBR article "The Soul of a Start-Up."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you listen. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. Three years ago our magazine and
0:50.6	website published an article that explained exactly what startups
0:53.6	needed to do if they wanted to scale into larger, longer lasting
0:57.3	organizations. It talked about hiring functional experts and adding management
1:01.6	structure and learning to plan and forecast in a
1:04.4	discipline way. Today the author of that piece is here to talk about the flip side of
1:08.9	that idea. His most recent research delves into what startups have to retain as they grow,
1:15.0	and what more mature companies might want to think about getting back.
1:19.0	The answer is their soul, their essence, their energy, that thing that first made employees,
1:25.0	customers, and investors so excited to give their talent or money or both to the
1:30.0	cause.
1:31.0	Ron J Galati is a professor at Harvard Business School and he is the author of the HBO article, The Soul of a
1:36.2	startup in the July-August 2019 issue of the magazine.
1:40.7	Ron J, thanks so much for coming in. Thank you, Allison.
1:43.0	My pleasure to be here with you. So we hear a lot about startup culture and how it changes as companies grow.
2:00.0	Why did you choose the word soul?
2:02.0	Well I think culture is a very important construct,
2:05.0	but I think it's focused much more on understanding
2:09.0	manifest behavior.
	...

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