Teradata's Cultural Legacy - Part 1

The success of a new company is not ensured just because someone has a good idea. Other ingredients are needed that are just as important. The right people have to come together in the first place to generate the escape velocity necessary to propel a nascent company from the ‘idea’ stage to the creation of a detailed concept design that illustrates what that company’s product is, why it is different from anything else available, and how it works. Investors need the combination of ‘people’ and a viable ‘blueprint’ for success to decide if they can risk their capital and have a good chance of a healthy return in the future.

To the money coming in from investors, more talent must be added to make the big leap from design to build, a blend of skills and enough bums on seats to master the array of challenges that no one has been able to master before. Through a combination of innovation, inventiveness, leadership and down right bloody mindedness, a collective will to succeed needs to be created and shared amongst the workforce to provide the energy necessary to feed and nourish each employee as they search deep inside themselves for that extra effort to make a difference. And so, if you get those ingredients right, the product sees the light of day. The sum that is greater than the individual parts that came together to create it.

But even when the product physically emerges, most new companies probably won’t live beyond the prototype stage. Few companies will get to see their product being shipped to their first customers, and even fewer will have a life measured in decades. The businesses that do more than survive, but go on to grow and scale up their operations have a state of mind right from the beginning, that they are not creating a start-up company, but in fact they are creating a big company that is just starting small. To carry that off, such companies need more than people, capital and a vision, they need a philosophy that binds everyone together in the pursuit of a single aim.

To have a future beyond a gathering of some smart people around a great idea, a company must establish a cultural identity that defines what the company is, what it stands for and how it expects each employee to behave in supporting the company’s primary objectives. Such a cultural identity creates the right environment for success. Making it easier to get the best from all of the people that live inside its corporate walls by establishing a common purpose for everyone where the parameters of expectation are not just known and understood, they are embraced. A code to live by. A common culture, that every employee buys into, is critical in bonding employees to each other as well as to the company, a culture that makes it clear what every individual must do in order for the company to achieve its aim and become a big company, a success. 

Teradata’s longevity has been, in part, the result of the cultural legacy that its founders established from the beginning. To create a new technology from scratch that utilised so many new techniques and components in one product would put a strain on everyone working towards the company’s objective, to create the first commercially successful Massively Parallel Data Base Computer. In pursuing that dream, every employee would be presented with personal and work challenges that they had never been exposed to before. It was important that each individual understood what was required of them, but also that they understood that they weren’t ‘alone’, that they were part of the Teradata ‘family’. Everyone was there for each other.

If they were going to succeed in bringing together a lot of gifted individuals to do more than co-operate with each other, the founders understood the importance of establishing that ‘family’ outlook for Teradata employees. They knew that they had to to get people to go beyond working together, they had to work for each other. Everyone had to feel that they had skin in the game, that they would succeed or fail together. That everyone had an important job to do, that no one individual was more important than everyone else.

However, establishing such a culture takes more than one person to make it work. It needs the majority of employees to adopt it and live it, to teach it to the new employees that walk through the door. In effect, to make the company by ‘being’ the company. In becoming a Teradata employee, you became a member of the Teradata family where loyalty, generosity, individuality and a devotional obsession were prized characteristics. 

Beyond each person’s responsibility for their own actions and achievements, the Teradata culture needed everyone to feel a collective responsibility too for the actions and achievements of their work family. If someone was slipping behind in their work schedule, what could you do to help? Was there a better way to achieve a particular outcome? If you get something wrong, understand the impact that has on your colleagues. Every Teradata employee was invested in not only doing their best, but in getting the best from each other. This approach was the antithesis of many of Teradata’s competitors where individual attainment was built on a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality that was valued above the kind of shared ownership and collective responsibility model that characterised the Teradata way.

People were chosen to join Teradata because they had the right skills but also that their character ‘fit’ the desired culture of Teradata. If a company can be said to have had a personality, then Teradata did, and it reflected very strongly the people that worked for it. Teradata Corp reflected the souls of its people and the shared dream that they had. To find more people that would the Teradata culture, employees and trusted advisors were asked to recommend others who were like them. Waves of expansion came from friends and friends of friends.

When presented with the ambition of what the founders wanted to achieve, the inductees bought into the aim to build a new company based on good values of decency, honesty, respect and hard work, and to make a new machine that would revolutionise how businesses and governments could use information to improve everyday life. 

In effect, Jack Shemer’s dream became everyone’s dream and to get the job done, those early Teradatans understood that they needed to have a sacrificial mindset. Management stressed the belief that every job across the company was important to the success of Teradata, everyone had a job to do and they must do it as best as they can. Many sacrificed time away from the office as a result, putting the goals and achievements of the company and their colleagues before almost everything and everyone else. Many marriages and personal relationships would be tested by the sacrifices that being a Teradata employee, in those early years, demanded. Most came through with stronger personal relationships as a result, but for some, their personal lives suffered as a result of being obsessively driven to bring success to Teradata.

Teradatans were 24 hour a day employees, constantly thinking about the next challenge ahead, not just in the office, but at home too. Employees often worked long hours, some would chase down an idea for days on end, without rest, having to be sent home to get some sleep and to freshen up.

As Jack Shemer navigated his way through the 60s and 70s, he understood that to fulfil his dream of a data base computer, he had to find others that could share his vision, take the right actions and endure the personal sacrifices necessary to make it real. He knew that success would ultimately require a collective undertaking by a diverse group of gifted individuals, united by a common ‘culture’ that brought people together with the sole aim to design, build and sell a new type of computer system.

Teradata’s family ‘at work’ culture was purpose driven and value based, creating a corporate psychology necessary for building a good company and a unique product. To go from nothing but an idea to a fast growing technology company in a short space of time would be demanding for everyone that signed up for the journey. As a result, the leadership team needed to create a set of values that reflected the right behaviours, both individually and collectively, of its employees to ensure that the personal sacrifices and contributions made by people were not wasted by the actions of others. Each employee had a bond with every other employee, not just with the management of the company. 

Every individual that joined the Teradata family adopted that culture and perpetuated it long after the founders had moved on.  Many that left Teradata and worked elsewhere took that culture with them, and with varying degrees of success, they exported it far and wide. In other examples, employees that left Teradata chose to work at other companies that had similar cultures centred on the importance of the individual and their contributions to the life and soul of the corporation. It’s survivability beyond the corporate walls of Teradata shows the strength of its values and the bond people had with it. 

Progress relies on momentum. The four founders knew that they couldn't do everything themselves, they needed others to join the family and get stuck in. What they did provide was a mass of momentum comprised of motivation and belief, and as it rolled it grew bigger and drew in more of the people needed to build the dream and they added more motivation and belief until the momentum became unstoppable. 

Teradata was not an average company to work for. It demanded excellence but also nurtured and developed talent, helping its people to be the best they could be. The cultural DNA behind Teradata’s early survival and success is a legacy that is as evident in today's organisation as it was in the 1980’s, ensuring that whatever the future holds, Teradata will put its people at the heart of it’s endeavours as it looks forward to another 40 years of success.