🔮 The Smell of The Place
*People: Create the context for ideas to breathe
A close friend and collaborator introduced me to Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal; and his “The Smell of the Place” talk is the one I send anyone looking for advice on creating an exceptional workplace culture.
“The Fontainebleau forest in spring” - a crisp, energizing, full of possibility environment.
The full talk and my observations from it in action below ↓
Much has been written about the stagnation of product innovation and newness since the pandemic.
Uncertainty let “Professional Leadership” infiltrate creative teams, bringing with it the four c’s:
Constraint, Compliance, Control, Contract.
Strategy became a box of limitations rather than an enabler of possibilities.
Systems were created to monitor instead of accelerate.
Every decision (large and small) required approval.
Innovation died in committee.
Exceptional creative cultures operate from the antitheses of the four c’s:
Stretch, Discipline, Support, Trust.
Stretch means setting ambitious goals that push people forward rather than constraints that hold them back. Not "stay within these boundaries" but "here's the mountain we're climbing together."
Discipline over compliance. Teams develop internal standards that exceed external requirements. Self-governance becomes stronger than oversight.
Support transforms the leadership role entirely. A managers’ role is to remove obstacles, provide resources, and enable success. Not to control outcomes but to amplify capability.
Trust operates beyond contracts. When people know their peers will deliver, they take bigger creative risks. Safety comes from competence, not documentation.
Leadership isn't there to motivate creativity.
Its goal is to remove everything that kills it, creating conditions where creativity naturally emerges.
In this context people feel empowered, move faster, think bigger, care more deeply about their work.
Excellence feels inevitable.
The “smell of your place” determines whether your organization breathes or suffocates.