On Building a Strong Company Culture…

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After an exhilarating RSA Conference last week, I cam back home fully charged and energized after witnessing how vibrant the Identity industry continues to be.

I had a chance to meet with and talk to a whole bunch of bright people who are deeply concerned with the issues that we face as a society due to the ongoing cyber war.  On my trip home, my mind was spinning with ideas of what to write about.  In the end and after much consideration and soul searching, the topic I felt most passionate about writing was how important it is for us at Identropy to build and maintain a strong company culture, particularly as we continue to grow up as an organization – bizarre choice perhaps, but sincere for sure.

So, without further a due, I wanted to share some of our thoughts on this topic and hope that the identerati pardon my using this Identity-focused channel to discuss more philosophical topics.

One of the core values we strongly encourage at Identropy is self-development and work life balance.  We believe that this is the best way for the team to keep performing at its peak, stay focused, make customers happy and in the end have a more enriching experience while working on something they feel passionate about. At Identropy, providing the best identity and access management solutions to our clients is really our calling, not just a job.

Looking back at the last 15 months, I came to realize that one of the elements that contributes to self-development and work life balance is reading (or listening to audio books).  By accident perhaps, we have improved and fine tuned our approach to many things that affect our culture and our focus, such as recruiting, fostering innovation, identifying with our vision, compensation plans, marketing and our delivery of service, thanks to reading very impactful books and putting what we learn from them into practice.

Turns out that without knowing it, Identropy adheres to a new movement in corporate culture: the social happiness movement (Thanks Tony Hsieh).

We run a sort of book club, where we all exchange our perspectives on different books (or audio books), make recommendations and borrow books to one another on a regular basis.

Personally, I started the journey about two years ago thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s books (to which I was introduced by a good friend), and what started as very intriguing reading and out of the box thinking, turned into a strong interest in positive psychology and philosophy – but that’s just me, and the road ahead is at large still.

So, on my flight back from San Francisco last week, I thought if these books have had such a profound and beneficial impact on me personally and on Identropy as a growing organization, I figured: why not share this insight with others out there, outside of my immediate circle of family and friends, and see what happens?

And with that, I give you our recommended book list, prioritized based on what we considered to be the most impactful books and the sequence we would suggest you read them.

I want to clarify that neither does Identropy nor I have any affiliation to the authors in this list or their publishers.  Evidently, I would really enjoy engaging in a conversation with these authors one of these days.

If you have read any of these and care to share the impact they may have had, I thank you in advance for leaving us your comments.  Better yet, if you have recommendations that you won’t mind sharing with us, we will sincerely appreciate it.

Essential books

1. Malcom Gladwell – "Blink", "Tipping Point" and "Outliers" (I just finished "What the Dog Saw", which was also very good)
2. Robert Kiyosaki – "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"
3. Daniel Pink – "Drive" (* see note below)
4. Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson – "Rework"
5. Geoff Colvin – "Talent is Overrated"
6. Tony Hsieh – "Delivering Happiness"

Other relevant books

• Jonah Lehrer – "How We Decide"
• Daniel Goleman – "Emotional Intelligence"
• Fernando Savater – "Etica para Amador" (though I only know of it in Spanish)
• Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner – "Freakonomics" and "Superfreaknomics"
• Leo Babauta – "The Power of Less"

Books in the queue

• Ken Robinson, Lou Aronica – "The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything"
• Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright – "Tribal Leadership"
• Jim Collins – "Good to Great"
• Sally Hogshead – "Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation"
• Shep Hyken – "The Cult of the Customer"
• Scott Belsky – "Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality"