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Arrogant Companies

If there is one thing that success inexorably leads to in a company culture, it is arrogance.  Arrogance in turn leads to complacency, blindness to threats and a loss of touch with reality.  Further, it motivates your competitors to join forces against you.  I believe arrogance is a big part of why it is so hard for humans and their organizations to stay at the top of any particular endeavor for any length of time.

Two recent news items led me to write this post.  The first is the Senate inquiry of Facebook, and the second is the Boston Celtics.  Let’s start with Facebook.

Not Everyone's Favorite

I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg, so I can’t speak to how he is as a person.  But his company sure is acting arrogantly, and his media persona comes across as anything but humble as you can see from the above image.  He evidently carried business cards that said “I’m the CEO, Bitch.”  Now, he attended famously arrogant Harvard, and his creation is a world beater that crushed MySpace with far superior execution, so I would expect a modicum of swagger.  But Beacon was the first sign that something was amiss in the decision making there.  Now we have a more serious PR fiasco surrounding opt-in policy for personal data exposure.  The Facebook team’s blindness to the backlash that Beacon brought about, and recent refusal to revert to opt-in, leads me to conclude they are losing touch with reality, and are blind to threats.  Complacency – I don’t see it yet.  But two of the three warning signs of an arrogant culture are evident.  I wonder if the company is at its peak?  I hope not.  The good news is that, if they recognize it and work on it, they can overcome their arrogance problem.  Look what happened to the Celtics in games three and four of the NBA finals.

The Celtics team captain, Paul Pierce, taunted the Lakers fans after winning game two, saying “We ain’t coming back to LA!”  He was predicting three consecutive wins at home in Boston.  This is the kind of arrogant behavior that transforms a sense of defeat and hopelessness in your competition into a thirst for vengeance.  The Celtics lost game three.  They became complacent, while the Lakers played with renewed vigor.  Thoroughly humbled, they got down to business in game four and won it.  Mr. Pierce will be heading back to LA, hopefully having learned to keep up the intensity and humility.

I shouldn’t pick on Facebook.  My entire industry is perceived as arrogant.  Which is why at NAV we make a concerted effort to avoid conceit.  Entrepreneurs are highly sensitive to it, appreciate its absence, and we win deals because we are perceived as good guys to work with.  It is a source of competitive advantage.  Please let us know if we ever start to stray.