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Worth Doing Wrong: The Quest to Build a Culture That Rocks
The Quest to Build a Culture That Rocks
Business is hard. Arnie Malham, founder and president of cj Advertising, understands this thoroughly. But the challenges that make business hard are more than just obstacles--they provide the foundation to building and strengthening a culture that attracts the best people to do the best work.
In Worth Doing Wrong, Malham provides strategies for creating a culture that will help you smash business goals, achieve win-win relationships with your clients, generate buzz in your community, and cultivate a workplace that you and your employees will love.
Business is hard. Arnie Malham, founder and president of cj Advertising, understands this thoroughly. But the challenges that make business hard are more than just obstacles--they provide the foundation to building and strengthening a culture that attracts the best people to do the best work.
In Worth Doing Wrong, Malham provides strategies for creating a culture that will help you smash business goals, achieve win-win relationships with your clients, generate buzz in your community, and cultivate a workplace that you and your employees will love.
178 pages, Hardcover
Published November 9, 2016
12 people are currently reading
111 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 6, 2018
I loved this book! Full disclosure, I saw Arnie speak at EMP and this book tracks his presentation very closely. But it’s a fast read (prob took me 2-3 hours) and has some great take-aways. I stole a lot of great ideas for Fringe’s culture from here, but those are on a different document :)
My take-aways:
Culture reflects leadership.
It’s YOUR fault as a leader that you do not have the culture you want
Seven commandments for creating a culture that rocks:
1. Respect your employees.
2. Invest in your employees.
3. Embrace top-down core values.
4. Hire for culture.
5. Generate unavoidable culture. (Go big or go home!)
6. Do it wrong, make it better, get it right.
7. Never give up.
Great short paragraph on how to R&D (Rip-off and Duplicate):
Say that we need to come up with a commercial for one of our clients. We start out by looking at all their competition in the market. We compare that to our own work. Then we roll up our sleeves to try and find a better idea. How do you get to a better idea? You brainstorm it.
Great turns of phrase to encourage contribution (esp in meetings):
I like that idea, tell me more about that.
Let’s explore that.
What would happen if that were true?
How would that look?
Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more.
Be careful with Morale Surveys (dark arts), but here’s a question to ask:
“Of any place you can imagine working, with a score of ten being best place you can imagine and one being the worst, how is your morale at this company, right now? Just circle a number, and write in why you chose that score.”
What did they do with the above?
Every month, we posted the average score, the participation rate, and every comment along with its reply—every comment, every response.
Reverse Paranoia
The feeling that everything you do is going to create a win for you down the road—everything
Align company core values to founder/CEO personal core values
Culture reflects leadership
People follow what their leader does, not what their leader says. And if leaders don’t do the things they say they’re going to do, their company is at a disadvantage.
In sales, no means maybe, and maybe means yes
Average Is the New Shitty
Being an average place to work is even worse than being a terrible place to work, or as your disgruntled employees like to say, a “shitty” place to work. Why? Because people don’t put up with shitty. They leave. Average, however, creates a quandary for people. They wonder whether, if they leave their average place, they’ll wind up at a shitty place. So they stay. In other words, average is the worst culture most people will tolerate for an extended period of time.
Everything you do should be a beacon to talent
Our goal is to create stories for people to talk about.
Hire for Culture, Educate for Skill
I want people who are willing to grow, learn, and be a part of a team. The talent will come if you spend time doing the work. I don’t need everyone to be an A-player in terms of experience; I need A-players in terms of attitude.
Late in the book there is a great 3.5 page read on their hiring process. In short:
Group interview unearths solid cultural fits.
First individual interview verifies the needed skills are in place.
Realistic job preview determines if a finalist is a fit with the team.
Personality test confirms all.
The Fine Art of Failing Up
Failing up is not the art of not making mistakes; it’s the art of making mistakes that push you forward.
Culture reflects leadership. Culture reflects leadership. Culture reflects leadership.
Leadership is knowing what you want and creating a strategy to get there.
The only advantage your company has is people. And the only advantage you can give them is a strong, sustainable culture.
Arnie-isms
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong
Business is hard
Culture reflects leadership
Tell me more
This is how we live!
Twenty years to become an overnight success
Gradually, then all of the sudden
We’re done it wrong enough to figure out how to do it right
My take-aways:
Culture reflects leadership.
It’s YOUR fault as a leader that you do not have the culture you want
Seven commandments for creating a culture that rocks:
1. Respect your employees.
2. Invest in your employees.
3. Embrace top-down core values.
4. Hire for culture.
5. Generate unavoidable culture. (Go big or go home!)
6. Do it wrong, make it better, get it right.
7. Never give up.
Great short paragraph on how to R&D (Rip-off and Duplicate):
Say that we need to come up with a commercial for one of our clients. We start out by looking at all their competition in the market. We compare that to our own work. Then we roll up our sleeves to try and find a better idea. How do you get to a better idea? You brainstorm it.
Great turns of phrase to encourage contribution (esp in meetings):
I like that idea, tell me more about that.
Let’s explore that.
What would happen if that were true?
How would that look?
Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more.
Be careful with Morale Surveys (dark arts), but here’s a question to ask:
“Of any place you can imagine working, with a score of ten being best place you can imagine and one being the worst, how is your morale at this company, right now? Just circle a number, and write in why you chose that score.”
What did they do with the above?
Every month, we posted the average score, the participation rate, and every comment along with its reply—every comment, every response.
Reverse Paranoia
The feeling that everything you do is going to create a win for you down the road—everything
Align company core values to founder/CEO personal core values
Culture reflects leadership
People follow what their leader does, not what their leader says. And if leaders don’t do the things they say they’re going to do, their company is at a disadvantage.
In sales, no means maybe, and maybe means yes
Average Is the New Shitty
Being an average place to work is even worse than being a terrible place to work, or as your disgruntled employees like to say, a “shitty” place to work. Why? Because people don’t put up with shitty. They leave. Average, however, creates a quandary for people. They wonder whether, if they leave their average place, they’ll wind up at a shitty place. So they stay. In other words, average is the worst culture most people will tolerate for an extended period of time.
Everything you do should be a beacon to talent
Our goal is to create stories for people to talk about.
Hire for Culture, Educate for Skill
I want people who are willing to grow, learn, and be a part of a team. The talent will come if you spend time doing the work. I don’t need everyone to be an A-player in terms of experience; I need A-players in terms of attitude.
Late in the book there is a great 3.5 page read on their hiring process. In short:
Group interview unearths solid cultural fits.
First individual interview verifies the needed skills are in place.
Realistic job preview determines if a finalist is a fit with the team.
Personality test confirms all.
The Fine Art of Failing Up
Failing up is not the art of not making mistakes; it’s the art of making mistakes that push you forward.
Culture reflects leadership. Culture reflects leadership. Culture reflects leadership.
Leadership is knowing what you want and creating a strategy to get there.
The only advantage your company has is people. And the only advantage you can give them is a strong, sustainable culture.
Arnie-isms
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong
Business is hard
Culture reflects leadership
Tell me more
This is how we live!
Twenty years to become an overnight success
Gradually, then all of the sudden
We’re done it wrong enough to figure out how to do it right
January 5, 2022
What is your favorite quote from the book?
More of an idea than a quote. I love how he talks about his “overnight success.” His overnight success took 20 years of hard work and it was such a nice reminder that in order to get it right he had to do it wrong over and over and over again and risk getting it wrong in order to get it right in the end. It was so important that he get his culture right that he was willing to risk screwing it up and being wrong in order to make sure he got it right. It was just way too much to his company.
Which coworker would you recommend this book to?
Any leader or manager who has been tasked with influencing culture. At our size, everyone. I love how he talks about his overnight success. His overnight success took 20 years of hard work and it was such a nice reminder that in order to get it right he had to do it wrong over and over and over again and risk getting it wrong in order to get it right in the end.
What is a specific real world application that you will be able to make from what you learned in this book?
He talks about shining a light on things and being transparent in order to keep the gossip down. If you don’t talk to people then they’re going to talk amongst themselves. His feedback board that always received a response seem to be a good way of knocking out misinformation and allowing employees to know what was really going on versus talking amongst themselves and inventing something far worse than the truth could’ve ever been. If you’re not intentional with your culture then bad culture will automatically be created so if we want to continue to have a workplace we love to come to every morning then we need to intentionally weed out the bad culture and flood our workplace with positive culture. And of course, you can’t do everything yourself so this idea of having champions to on specific tasks means that they will actually get done. We’ve already started assigning champions to things and I think we’re on the right track with that. Keep assigning a champion to each core initiative.
What is the one thing that you think you will do differently or think differently about since you read the book?
It’s easy to forget that you have to be so intentional with creating good culture. I really think that we should probably do check-ins regarding culture every quarter to make sure that we haven’t gotten lazy and allowed bad habits or bad influences to creeping in that will cause us to have a toxic culture in the future. It’s not always what you do it’s also how you do it.
What is one point you disagreed with, or at least questioned, in this book?
With our company as small as it is I don’t know that having any kind of feedback board is very helpful. We address things as they come up but once we get bigger it might make sense. I just think that if we continue to work on open communication and discontinuous dialogue and feedback with team members that we don’t need a bulletin board..
How does something you learned from this book tie into one of the core values of the company?
Oh there’s a lot of authenticity throughout this book allowing people to be authentically themselves and creating a culture of authenticity. When you create that open authentic culture then you’re going to attract similar people and you’ll have fewer people to weed out. Of course, if they are authentically awful then they can go somewhere else.
More of an idea than a quote. I love how he talks about his “overnight success.” His overnight success took 20 years of hard work and it was such a nice reminder that in order to get it right he had to do it wrong over and over and over again and risk getting it wrong in order to get it right in the end. It was so important that he get his culture right that he was willing to risk screwing it up and being wrong in order to make sure he got it right. It was just way too much to his company.
Which coworker would you recommend this book to?
Any leader or manager who has been tasked with influencing culture. At our size, everyone. I love how he talks about his overnight success. His overnight success took 20 years of hard work and it was such a nice reminder that in order to get it right he had to do it wrong over and over and over again and risk getting it wrong in order to get it right in the end.
What is a specific real world application that you will be able to make from what you learned in this book?
He talks about shining a light on things and being transparent in order to keep the gossip down. If you don’t talk to people then they’re going to talk amongst themselves. His feedback board that always received a response seem to be a good way of knocking out misinformation and allowing employees to know what was really going on versus talking amongst themselves and inventing something far worse than the truth could’ve ever been. If you’re not intentional with your culture then bad culture will automatically be created so if we want to continue to have a workplace we love to come to every morning then we need to intentionally weed out the bad culture and flood our workplace with positive culture. And of course, you can’t do everything yourself so this idea of having champions to on specific tasks means that they will actually get done. We’ve already started assigning champions to things and I think we’re on the right track with that. Keep assigning a champion to each core initiative.
What is the one thing that you think you will do differently or think differently about since you read the book?
It’s easy to forget that you have to be so intentional with creating good culture. I really think that we should probably do check-ins regarding culture every quarter to make sure that we haven’t gotten lazy and allowed bad habits or bad influences to creeping in that will cause us to have a toxic culture in the future. It’s not always what you do it’s also how you do it.
What is one point you disagreed with, or at least questioned, in this book?
With our company as small as it is I don’t know that having any kind of feedback board is very helpful. We address things as they come up but once we get bigger it might make sense. I just think that if we continue to work on open communication and discontinuous dialogue and feedback with team members that we don’t need a bulletin board..
How does something you learned from this book tie into one of the core values of the company?
Oh there’s a lot of authenticity throughout this book allowing people to be authentically themselves and creating a culture of authenticity. When you create that open authentic culture then you’re going to attract similar people and you’ll have fewer people to weed out. Of course, if they are authentically awful then they can go somewhere else.
May 27, 2023
Arnie Malham is an accidental micromanager turned servant leader, and a brilliant one at that. His book, Worth Doing Wrong tells the story of how he build a workplace culture that many others aspire to have. A culture that is based on growing people first which leads to growing the business.
The book is a treasure trove of tried and tested culture programs that inject fun, recognition, and continual learning into an organization, that anyone - as Malham says - can R&D (Rip-off and Duplicate). Recommended for entrepreneurs that want to take their culture to the next level.
The book is a treasure trove of tried and tested culture programs that inject fun, recognition, and continual learning into an organization, that anyone - as Malham says - can R&D (Rip-off and Duplicate). Recommended for entrepreneurs that want to take their culture to the next level.
November 27, 2018
This is not the most compelling or hard hitting business advice you will ever read. There are nuggets of really great ideas surrounded by plenty of mediocre suggestions without a solid backing. I appreciated the focus on culture and how to empower employees to build that culture.
October 15, 2020
Awesome book on culture. I took the liberty of the author’s suggestion to R&D (rip-off and duplicate) his ideas in the book. We have already implemented half a dozen things in our company and will add another half dozen ideas soon. A MUST READ for any small business owner.
October 23, 2021
Read this Book to learn how to rock your business culture
If tomorrow promised you a greater business culture than today, this is the book you'd want to guide you the moment you woke up that day! Great advice on employee appreciation and engagement. Highly recommended!
If tomorrow promised you a greater business culture than today, this is the book you'd want to guide you the moment you woke up that day! Great advice on employee appreciation and engagement. Highly recommended!
January 28, 2025
Some genuinely new and fresh insights under a cohesive culture strategy.
Read
January 5, 2017If you understand that the leader IS the culture of the business, and you want to build a strong culture for your business, this book is a good choice. The author chronicles his adventures and mistakes in building a strong consistent culture at his company. Easy to follow and emulate.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews