Stan Slap is the founder and president of SLAP, an international consulting firm that helps organisations get maximum commitment from their manager, employee, and customer cultures.
SLAP has worked with the who's-who of the Fortune 500, companies that you've heard of like Costco, Oracle, HP, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Amazon, General Electric, Intel, Viacom, Tesla, Glassdoor, Warner Music Group — and some companies that you haven't; all told, SLAP has worked with companies doing business in 44 countries. Stan is also the author of two books: Under The Hood and Bury My Heart in Conference Room B.
This podcast dives into Slap’s ideas about understanding, managing and shaping effective employee cultures. His model for culture is the first coherent model that I've found that is useful and tested at scale; it is therefore more powerful than most other formulations of employee culture that you'll find.
Note: you may also read a summary of Stan’s 2015 book Under The Hood.
SLAP Company — https://slapcompany.com/
Under The Hood — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571574-under-the-hood
Commoncog summary of Under The Hood — https://commoncog.com/under-the-hood/
Bury My Heart at Conference Room B — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7810760-bury-my-heart-at-conference-room-b
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:32 Employee Culture is About Business Performance
00:07:36 What a Culture Is
00:10:59 Thinking About Culture as an Organism
00:21:19 What Management Gets Wrong
00:22:56 What To Do When You've Lost The Culture's Trust
00:29:09 Tension Between Managing Individuals vs Managing Culture
00:33:33 Giving a Culture Energy
00:38:22 Introducing Change to a Culture
00:46:00 Doing Cultural Understanding at Scale
00:55:00 Four Step Process for Cultural Commitment
01:04:40 Danger of Corporate Values
01:09:24 Managing Culture in a Rapidly Scaling Company
01:16:12 Dealing with Bad Subcultures
01:22:53 Stan's Closing Message
01:32:00 Where Folks Can Find Stan