Josh Allan Dykstra
Igniting the Invisible Tribe
ISBN: 978-0-9858326-1-2
The culture of a company is one of the main factors why employees choose to stay in a job or leave a company for another. It’s a topic that is widely discussed among startup founders, corporate executives, and entrepreneurial ecosystem builders. In many of the startup conventions and conferences I’ve attended, company culture is front and center in the discussion between founders. Josh Allan Dykstra has done a lot of research on the topic of company culture and has distilled his findings in his book, Igniting the Invisible Tribe.
I picked up a copy of this book like I have many others, during a startup event. This book was handed out after Dykstra presented at the Global Accelerator Network Rally in Denver, Colorado, in 2016. He gave a keynote on building culture in your business, and that you must create the culture that you like early on in your company – something that has been said at nearly every other culture-related presentation I’ve attended over many conferences and get-togethers. The book touches on much of what he discussed in that keynote presentation.
Much of the text is focused on flattening the organization and being a leader in the trenches rather than a supervisor at the top of the pile. Many lean startups don’t have time to create an organizational chart similar to the type large corporations do, as startup founders must sometimes wear a number of different hats each month, week, or even day. Even some older high-growth companies that may not qualify as “startups” any more utilize a flatter or completely flat organization, in order to continue delivering the best products with the least amount of overhead. This book is a great resource to those startups that may have started drifting in the direction of a larger corporation, but want to come back to their startup roots.
The book, like many other in this category, was an incredibly quick read. I was able to power through the book in a few hours while I was on the train back to Iowa from Colorado. Each of the chapters ends with a series of questions, to get you thinking about your organization and how you can apply Dykstra’s information to reshaping your company’s or startup’s culture. The chapters also contain a great number of examples of successful startups and companies who have used techniques Dykstra recommends to create meaningful, long-lasting organizations. Even with all of the information presented in the book, I wish that the author would have integrated more of his keynote into this book. It would have helped expand on what was written, and would have helped pull certain parts of the text together a bit better.
Overall, 7/10, would recommend as a good resource on company culture, and a way to reshape your organization’s culture to better reflect how you want things to operate. As a stand-alone product without the keynote, it is a decent resource. However, I wish that Dykstra had integrated more of the information from the speech into the book. That would have added some needed meat to the bones of the book, and probably would have bumped the rating up a point.