In an interview from Motley Fool Live, recorded on June 15, Udemy (UDMY -1.20%) Chief Learning Officer Melissa Daimler answers a question from Fool.com contributor Rachel Warren about how business strategy and culture work together as a company grows.
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Melissa Daimler: I think one of the best examples I have for that is when I was at Adobe (ADBE -1.42%) for almost 11 years, and we went from 3,200 employees and 11,000 when I left. Massive growth. We shifted our business model from shrink wrap in a box to technology in a box to software-as-a-service. We acquired three major companies, each with about a thousand employees. Shantanu [Narayen] became CEO, there was a CEO shift.
When I was there, the strategy evolved quite a bit. Therefore, how we worked and the skills we needed, also needed to be looked at. While I was there, we cultured, we didn't call it that at the time, but three different times. Every time there was a major shift, we paused and said, given our strategy has shifted now to software-as-a-service, is how we're working enabling that?
Are some of our values and behaviors just part of our DNA, so we don't even need to call those out anymore? Are there new ones that we need to look at that would help us be more effective strategically? It was a great example of that, the what and the how coming together, the strategy and the culture. We did that exercise every time we did a major pivot with the business, and then we highlighted that with the leaders and employees, and then had a whole kind of skills development around that.
If we were becoming more agile in how we make decisions, which was one of the areas, what is our decision-making framework and how do we make sure that everybody understands and has those skills in what a good decision looks like? There was this evolution between moving quicker as a company, and a strategy, and then how we did that through quicker decision-making was a key component of the culture.
