Atlassian and the truth about bean bags

STEPHEN BROOK

February 20, 2020

The Australian

You can copy Facebook and Google all you want, but ‘transformation’ usually has a a better alternative, says Atlassian’s ‘work futurist’.

From Leadership

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Dominic Price, “work futurist” for the $53 billion tech firm Atlassian, is his good old-fashioned common sense.

It feels almost heterodox amid the pool tables, lolly bowls, hanging indoor gardens and meeting rooms named after 1980s and 1990s songs which dot the firm’s main Sydney office.

“People see the habit or behaviour and think they can copy that, and they don’t realise why it’s done,” says Price. “Beanbag sales people in the past 10 years must have been rubbing their hands at the number of organisations going ‘we’ve heard Google has beanbags and they make a shitload of money — so if we get some beanbags in …’.”

Price is a cheery former accountant who hails from the English city of Manchester. He has a big personality but is blunt when it comes to pointing out how workplaces are fertile ground for corporate absurdities.

“I worked with a leader years ago who read (Facebook executive) Sheryl Sandberg’s book (Lean In) and decided that when we had meetings that ran over lunch, he would provide us with sandwiches,” Price, clad in his personal uniform of Atlassian-branded T-shirt and shorts, recalls.

The only problem was that the sandwiches were stale by the time they arrived from the canteen, a factor ignored by the leader who, undeterred, announced to staff: “See, we’re just like ­Facebook”.

Equally absurd are the corporate buzzwords favoured by many leaders: Price has a visceral dislike of many of them, especially the concept of “transformation”.

He says: “(The word’s) been commoditised and used to describe anything. It’s heavily misused — probably it’s a lie, right? It’s merely produced for some board of directors somewhere to say, ‘Someone’s told us where we need to be innovative’. It’s a nice mission statement: ‘we’re being innovative, don’t worry’.”

Post-it perils

Price’s point is that a “transformation process” has a fixed end point, and means little if attitudes don’t change as well. He recalls one tech company creating an innovation room, with all the bells and whistles, including Post-it Notes, but the room was next door to the office of the old-school chief financial officer, who would shout at staff as they entered the room: “Where are you going? Have you finished your work yet?”

To the surprise of the company, the innovation room was rarely used. As Price puts it: “It had all the perks, the artefacts, but none of the actual substance or intent.”

Another company underwent an 18-month “agile transformation program” which was timed to end so that an executive could preside over a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the agile room.

Price tells companies to ditch innovation and instead practise evolution, because evolution is a continual, never-ending process.

“The reality of the world we’re in says (we need to) learn a little bit every few weeks and change a little bit every few weeks,” he says.

A favourite example of failure to evolve is the video chain Blockbuster’s failure to purchase streaming service Netflix, at a time when the retail chain dwarfed the content provider. Now Netflix dwarfs the streaming landscape and Blockbuster has ceased to exist.

Even successful businesses are in danger.

“It’s not always incompetence,” he says. “If you look at the banks, it’s that they are very profitable. That success can breed a multitude of sins. But that historical success doesn’t necessarily guarantee future success.”

Banks and insurers need to reinvent their business to make themselves attractive to new customers if they are to cater to people such as Price’s 22-year-old sister who has never stepped into a bank branch.

“If she’s not going to get an (insurance) quote within 30 seconds, she’s not going to buy,” he says. “She’s never going to call someone up because the idea of phoning someone is filled with trepidation. These organisations have to go ‘well, if my future markets operate differently, I have to operate differently’.”

He sees two types of business leaders.

“There are the ones who employ people to drive change in their organisations, but not change themselves — because they’re fine. And then the ones who think, ‘well hang on, if I want to drive change in my organisation, I have to change’.

“Probably a good example of (the latter) is Andy Penn at Telstra, who has gone through a publicly uncomfortable changing. He regularly blogs about how his role as CEO is changing, because the organisation around him is changing. And he can’t just sit in his ivory tower and tell everyone what to do.”

I found it very uncomfortable. I’d never worked in such an open, collaborative environment. And so I didn’t understand the rituals and habits of how you go about communicating

Atlassian, Australia’s greatest technology success story, creates, licences and maintains software products, including its blockbuster workflow management system JIRA. It was founded by University of NSW graduates Scott Farquhar (owner of Elaine, Australia’s most expensive residential property) and the outspoken Mike Cannon-Brookes (owner of Fairwater, the second most expensive residential property, situated next door to Elaine).

Price has a dual role at the company: he heads up its research and development projects and is responsible for seven global R&D centres. The accountancy graduate was a director at Deloitte and worked for gaming company Aristocrat here and in India. He joined Atlassian more than six years ago when it had 450 staff (it now has more than 3500).

Initially, it did not go well.

“I found it very uncomfortable,” he says of his early days at Atlassian. “I’d never worked in such an open, collaborative environment. And so I didn’t understand the rituals and habits of how you go about communicating.”

Ego reshaped

He was feedback shy, but Atlassian reshaped his ego, beating him into shape in the first six months.

His “quite amazing boss” took him aside to say: “I can see that you are frustrated and that you are pissed off. And if it’s any comfort, you are pissing off the people around you. You might think you are hiding it, but you are not.”

He was told his job, as the company rapidly expanded, was to “reverse engineer all the things you’ve seen go wrong before and prevent them from happening here”.

As part of that process Price came up with a list of corporate buzzwords and concepts he wanted replaced. Rather than growth, he likes the idea of scaling: “Growing is getting bigger, scaling is getting better. The world is changing so fast that growing and getting bigger is not keeping up with how the market is changing.”

Tenure is another concept he wants replaced and prefers to think of “initiative”. Price says decisions and new ideas were once the preserve of the most senior people in the organisation but “in the environment we’re in now, brilliant ideas can come from anywhere. And in fact, brilliant ideas often don’t come from the most senior people”.

He likes working with graduates who, he says, “don’t know what they don’t know” because they are free of the “blinkers and blockers and walls” that develop over years in the workforce.

“Graduates plough through walls because they can’t even see them,” he says. “That’s healthy, to challenge the norms and the default thinking.”

Similarly, companies need to switch from regarding themselves as disrupted, to being disrupters.

Price is very keen on knowledge acquisition.

He is the type of interviewee (Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of advertising and marketing group WPP, is another) who turns the interview back on the journalist to find out what is going on.

“If I think about the best leaders I see out there, they have such a strong eye and curiosity about what’s happening outside their four walls,” he says.

There is no doubt Atlassian’s dream run has helped to shape Price’s view of the future of work.

As software such as JIRA becomes more vital to the conduct of business, and leaders such as Cannon-Brookes become more prominent across a range of public discourse, it is inevitable that the culture of tech workplaces will seep more into the mainstream.

But for all the staff-designed corporate T-shirts, the bar, shrouding the reception desk with cobwebs for Halloween, or erecting a Statue of Liberty festooned with bunting for Thanksgiving, Price is very clear that each perk is channelled to a corporate intent understood by all.

“This is an environment where we work really hard on very complex problems with a huge debt of gratitude to our 150,000 customers who use our products on a daily basis, who expect those products to be performing,” he says.

“That’s a huge ask. And so the perks are there to create an environment where, if you’re not feeling in the zone, go and have a game of table tennis, go and have a game of pool, go and grab a can of soft drink.

“But the outcomes that you’re going to deliver at the end of the week — they are known.”