In late 2017, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann sent a companywide email urging his employees to make decisions more quickly.
"The knock on Pinterest is everyone was so nice," a former executive who left the company in early 2018 told CNBC."No one was willing to offend anyone." By way of comparison, Pinterest is seeking a valuation of up to $9 billion — that's down from its last private valuation of $12 billion two years ago. The company is showing slow if steady growth: It booked $756 million in annual revenue last year, up 60% from 2017. But that's far lower than projections of $2.8 billion in a leaked 2015 presentation from early investor Andreessen Horowitz .
The culture stands out from other high-growth tech companies where confrontation and debate are actively encouraged. For instance, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos advises employees"disagree and commit" — in other words, disagree openly, but when a decision is made, back it to the fullest. Netflix is known for a culture of radical transparency, where employees offer blunt feedback and air public postmortems when colleagues are fired.
Pinterest tried to encourage employees to be more forward with each other through an internal ad campaign in 2016. The company plastered brown construction-paper posters throughout its conference rooms that read"Say the hard thing" in bold red letters, according to many former employees. "It was a really, really weird passive-aggressive culture," she said."It was not a culture encouraged to talk about problems."
After much deliberation, the company finally introduced a"Buyable Pins" feature in mid-2015 that let users buy products directly from retailers without leaving Pinterest. It didn't catch on with retailers or users, but instead of recommitting to the project and figuring out how to fix it, Pinterest gradually abandoned Buyable Pins.
A Pinterest spokeswoman said the company would continue developing e-commerce features based on response from Pinners, or users. Video is a continued focus for the company, she said. But people interviewed cite other instances where the company faced setbacks not only because of Silbermann's cautious approach, but because people were reluctant to make decisions for fear of upsetting fellow employees.
Organizations should want employees to be cordial and friendly, but that becomes a huge problem if being nice trumps giving good, candid feedback, said Jennifer Chatman, professor of management at University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business. This way of dealing with deputies has resulted in high turnover, multiple former employees said. Since 2017, the company has lost two heads of human resources, a senior vice president of engineering, the company president and a senior vice president of ads and commerce, among others.
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