Dr Jeff Cornwall

One of the greatest challenges faced by growing businesses is to avoid the pitfalls of culture drift. 

Most entrepreneurs launch their businesses with the intention of building a certain type of culture.  But, the demands of growth can take the entrepreneur’s eye off creating an intentional culture.  And each new hire can bring in elements from the different cultures where they have worked.  The result is that over time the culture can look very different from what the entrepreneur had originally intended.

My friend John Wark has passed along an interesting article from Inc.com about an entrepreneur named Nick Sarillo who founded Nick’s Pizza and Pub.  Sarillo’s story offers lessons on how to create an intentional culture during times of growth:

Sarillo has built his company’s culture by using a form of management best characterized as “trust and track.” It involves educating employees about what it takes for the company to be successful, then trusting them to act accordingly. The alternative is command and control, wherein success is the boss’s responsibility and employees do what the boss says. Think of the Navy SEALs versus the National Guard. Both approaches can work, but they produce very different cultures. If done right, moreover, trust and track can allow a company to be nimble, flexible, and productive enough to perform at the highest level through good economies and bad.