“My job is to guard the culture.”
This is one of the most resonant statements my own company’s CEO said about what it means to be a part of executive leadership.
It implies two things simultaneously — that C-suite leaders are stewards with a high level of responsibility for what a company’s culture is while understanding it is not they that actually create it. The culture does start at the top, but it is only a trickling brook. It flows downstream to become a powerful force that provides sustenance, but is a threat if unguided.
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Last week, CFO reported that Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat issued an internal memo regarding a reorganization of Google’s finance team, in part to reallocate resources to focus on AI technology.
And almost concurrently, Google had nine employees who were staging a sit-in protest arrested, and 28 employees fired. These actions led CEO Sundar Pichai to issue his own memo, in part stating that Google “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics... This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.”
Google has over a hundred thousand employees spread across the world. Its leadership has guided the company in one general direction since its inception, toward business as well as company culture, and that culture now has taken root. Can Pichai and Porat change not just the business strategy (after all, that is their jobs), but the culture as well? Or can they only act as a guardian to an organism that has a life of its own, and the population of a small country?
CFOs are likely watching how this Google situation will play itself out. We have featured dozens of finance chiefs who have spoken of their responsibility to office culture. Perhaps it would be wise of the Googlers to examine what other companies’ finance leaders have done as well.