The best way to share and embed cultural DNA is person to person. When you’re growing fast, the new people you just hired most likely have some responsibility to hire as well, so a week of orientation isn’t going to cut it.

If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who don’t, you will lose that culture. It’s just math.

So when bringing in new employees—especially execs—you shouldn’t just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think you’re done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated. Explain how you do things in detail so they don’t make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about what’s working and what isn’t, what you would do in their position, what’s encouraged and what’s verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves.

That’s the best way to immerse someone in the culture, style, and processes of a team. Give them the push they need to start running with the pack rather than leaving them standing on the starting line, reading some docs, hoping they’ll catch up.

Always remember that it’s scary joining a new team. Not knowing anyone. Not knowing if you’ll fit in. Not knowing if you’ll succeed.

That’s why I started doing brown-bag lunches with the CEO. Matt did them too. Every two to four weeks, we’d gather a crew of 15–25 new hires and existing employees and have an informal lunch. We tried to cross-pollinate different people from different groups, a good mix from around the company. No managers, no executives, no keynote presentations. Just an

opportunity for them to get to know the bogeyman at the top and for me to get to know them. They asked me about our products, our policies, about me and Matt and our history at Apple. About why we didn’t allow massages, about why we had so many code names. [See also: Chapter 6.4: Fuck Massages.] And I asked about what they were excited about, what they were working on, why they joined.

It was my chance to highlight why their role was important, to talk about how their team’s goals powered our company goals, about our culture and our products and new projects and what was going right and what wasn’t. New employees had the chance to come directly to me with their questions as well as meet existing employees who were already steeped in our culture, who could help them and lead by example.

Any employee could come to five lunches a year. And each lunch was a cultural inoculation, a vaccine against indifference and apathy, against thinking that what you do doesn’t matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are.

In addition to seeking culture t, it is critical to hire people who can deliver on the Brand Promises and activities underpinning your strategy…

It’s important to hire the best A Player you can find for each position in your company based on four criteria (in this order!):

• Will — a desire to excel, act with courage, persevere, learn, and innovate

• Values — the test for culture fit – do they align with your core values

• Results — in the end can they deliver on your KPIs/outcomes

• Skills — the least important since most skill-sets need updating every 5 years

When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decency—an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respect—is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.

Creating the conditions for a cultural transformation takes all the tools at your disposal. You can’t, for example, command an internally focused culture to magically metamorphose into one that canonizes its customers. You have to nudge, suggest, cajole, and ultimately convince people that the new environment you’re proposing really is the best one for the business and, perhaps more important, for themselves. That takes time - and a good sense of timing.

Some leaders look back on their first hundred days and say, “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t hesitate so long to make those key people changes or that strategic move.” Others were glad they exercised restraint. In most cases the timing are dependent on the situation.