Joe treats goals and culture like the scientific method: you form a thesis (goals and principles), test it (run the business), measure results, and refine. This is an infinite loop — not recursive, but evolutionary. What Apple measures today should be radically different from 1984.
Most companies fail this by defaulting to one of two patterns: the culture reflects the CEO’s personality unconsciously (“the company is run by trying to make the CEO happy”), or it’s imported from a book without testing. Neither is iterative. Silicon Valley CEOs will measure everything about their product but won’t measure culture — or they’ll define “ideal culture” based on their own behavior patterns rather than what produces performance.
Joe uses the Walgreens example: while other drugstores measured sales per store, Walgreens measured sales per customer, focusing on customer experience. The metric you choose shapes behavior. Similarly, involving the team in creating goals (like involving customers in product design) eliminates the problem of “how will the company take this change.”
“Everybody wants to do a good job. There’s nobody who’s like, ‘You know what, I just want to do a shitty job.’ So the question is what is the environment doing to take away their desire to be successful?”
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