Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

OF CULTS AND CONSULTANTS
In the most intense kind of organization, members hang out only with other
members. They ignore their families and abandon the outside world. In
exchange, they experience strong feelings of belonging, and maybe get access to
esoteric “truths” denied to ordinary people. We have a word for such
organizations: cults. Cultures of total dedication look crazy from the outside,
partly because the most notorious cults were homicidal: Jim Jones and Charles
Manson did not make good exits.
But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously. Is a
lukewarm attitude to one’s work a sign of mental health? Is a merely
professional attitude the only sane approach? The extreme opposite of a cult is a
consulting firm like Accenture: not only does it lack a distinctive mission of its
own, but individual consultants are regularly dropping in and out of companies
to which they have no long-term connection whatsoever.
Every company culture can be plotted on a linear spectrum:
The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The
biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something
important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something
those outside it have missed. You’re not going to learn those kinds of secrets
from consultants, and you don’t need to worry if your company doesn’t make
sense to conventional professionals. Better to be called a cult—or even a mafia.