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Last Friday in San Francisco Alex Frankel held a launch for his new book Punching In.

An Influx interview with can be found here.

There were drinks, Alex read some passages from the book and on a wall in the gallery there was this board full of stuff.



Since Alex's book "Punching In" is all about the world of a brand from an employees perspective. For the book, Alex worked at The Gap, Apple, Starbucks, Enterprise and UPS over a two year period to learn their secrets and internal brandwashing techniques. 

In the process, he collected a number of artifacts from his experience including; uniforms, badges, rule books, guides and pay slips, some of which were dispayed on the board.

It was a nice example of cultural curation (idea by Grant McCracken) where the physical elements and artifacts that define a culture are collected and understood.

It's something planners could be doing more of. We tend to do a lot of talking to people and not a great deal of looking and observing. If we looked deeper and picked up and documented more fragments it might lead to some richer insight.


Posted by Ed Cotton CNET has an interesting story about the rapid fire hiring practices at Google.

The company added over 2,000 workers in the last quarter alone and wasn't without financial impact,it caused a 3 cent miss in earnings. However, one analyst pointed out a more troubling fact that half the company has been hired in the past 12 month. That means someone who has been at Google for more than two years is not only a millionaire, they’re also a veteran.

Google’s internal brand culture is in danger of diluting to the point of meaninglessness, unless the HR people can step up and successfully “Googlewash” the new employee base.

Google is a classic example of a company that starts out as a challenger to the incumbents and the established norms, just like Microsoft did to IBM, but in a very short period of time, finds itself just like the incumbents it was rallying against.

In Google’s case, this has happened really fast, it clearly knows it needs to do everything it can to protect its unique culture.

There are some interesting thoughts on this notion from the company’s founders in this video. (warning...it's long, but comments about culture and scale are at 29m 25s)


 

Posted by Ed Cotton