S02E09 Culture needs to meet strategy for breakfast, lunch, dinner and the after party, with Spencer Harrison

Rethink Culture

"The best organizations will win the battle for talent by creating cultures that allow people to be their best more frequently. And that means one of your practices as a leader needs to be gathering stories that tell you when your people are at their best."

S02E09 of the Rethink Culture podcast shines the spotlight on Spencer Harrison, a professor of organizational behaviour at INSEAD Business School and a TED speaker. Spencer's expertise and research are widely recognized in the field, and his work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Money, and Inc. magazines. He co-founded The Creative Collaboratorium, the world's largest working group of creativity researchers, and serves as a culture advisor to some of the world's fastest growing companies, including Google, Salesforce, and Deloitte.

Spencer shares his journey from English to business professor and provides insight into ways of identifying outstanding management and leadership. He describes the differences and relationships between big C culture and small C culture, and highlights the value of a healthy work-life balance for employees. Despite their unpopularity, he stresses the role of office meetings in maintaining company culture and explains why leaders should take an interest in story-gathering and storytelling.

The podcast is created by Rethink Culture. Our goal is to help 1 million businesses create healthier, happier cultures, by turning culture into a KPI. Visit rethinkculture.co to see how you can create a healthier culture at your company.

Production, video, and audio editing by Evangelia Alexaki of Musicove Productions.

Listen to this episode to find out:

• Spencer's journey from wanting to be an animator and a poet to becoming a business professor.
• How to identify the excellent managers and the high-performing leaders.
• What is big C culture and what is small C culture.
• What anthropologists discovered conducting research on tribes sharing a sack of rice.
• The role of meetings in building a culture supported by visual information.
• How high-performing leaders transform meetings into cultural moments.
• Why leaders need to be story-gatherers and storytellers.
• How to give a sense of meaning to your team through stories.
• Why culture should not be abstract values and impersonal behaviours, but personal and relatable stories.
• Why culture needs to meet strategy, not just for breakfast but also for lunch, dinner and the after party.
• What you can do to create a better work-life balance for the people in your organisation.
• If we need the office to maintain culture.

Further resources:

• Spencer Harrison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curiosityatwork/
• INSEAD: https://www.insead.edu/
• Book of Questions, by Pablo Neruda: https://www.amazon.com/The-Book-of-Questions/dp/1592703224
• Odes to Common Things, by Pablo Neruda: https://www.amazon.com/Common-Things-Bilingual-Pablo-Neruda/dp/0821220802