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European culture and tech (60)

The ailment

I recently had a very interesting discussion on LinkedIn, something that might be as rare as a unicorn. A distinguished professor and entrepreneur was voicing his frustration with legacy technology companies, particularly in Northern Europe. According to him, the flat culture of these companies which celebrates individual contributions has caused them to slow down to a crawl.

We live in rapidly changing times. And that means that processes, opinions and technologies must evolve too. And if you have many of those "free individuals" who are all treated as essential stakeholders, colossal effort is required to achieve alignment. That often proves to be too little too late, because either alignment takes too long and the opportunity is lost, or worse, a few dissenters prevent consensus and block change.

Obviously this way of working puts us at a disadvantage. Other cultures may blindly follow the leader and that's that. Combine that with ruthless succession dynamics and you have an efficient, albeit inhuman, machine. Our freedom loving European culture can still be a good fit though to niche, masterwork type of markets, where the teams are inherently small and there is intimacy with customer needs.

But are we really doomed to a forever exclusive SME status?

What led us here in the first place?

We first of all have to acknowledge that this is precisely the culture that led us to the successes of today. All early trading and exploration, all technology innovations in Phillips, all enlightenment and industrial era progress on our continent was enabled through the conditions of this culture.

But how to make it work in the 21st century? I think that we aren't actually implementing that culture anymore and the bad results we are seeing are exactly because of this dissonance. We have tried to emulate the American corporate culture (sometimes this was imposed unwillingly via mergers and acquisitions) and try to combine it with our own culture. No wonder this didn't work.

The cure 

My proposal is instead to embolden our culture and give true power to the individual.

Do you want employees to genuinely care about the company’s stock price? Are you puzzled why one of the stakeholders halts change - despite the profit gains? Well, an easy way is to directly connect it to the worker's interests - implement schemes where employees are given stock options. This will naturally motivate people to have a growing company and not one that tries to limit change to maintain a comfortable and secure job. 

Are we still troubled about the slow progress of change? Well, that's exactly why we need processes! Make it so that the stakeholders are not informally selected on a "who showed up" basis, but decided via process. Give all members voting rights, but authorize decisions on a qualified majority rather than unanimity - this is how you avoid the ‘Viktor Orbáns’ of the world..

Do you want more trailblazers and autonomous people to lead the change? Well, the change starts with you. Stop talking only about the stakeholders - there are very few people in the world that are motivated by that. Instead, clearly and transparently, talk about goals and vision. Involve stakeholders, even outside the company such as customers, worker unions, users or municipalities so the employees have a feeling of the context they are operating. This will naturally inspire your team to innovate and deliver solutions with real impact.

European culture is not a weakness — it’s a powerful framework for innovation when properly understood and implemented. By doubling down on our values while modernizing our processes, we can lead the next wave of meaningful, human-centered technological progress.

Here is a picture of a computer chip that looks like a city in a museum in Rome. Just think of what technology we can build with this model!



 


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