30 Points of Engagement in Six Hours: Omar L. Harris on Culture Operating Systems

Omar L. Harris ran a 900 person organization in Indonesia and nearly sank it with a handful of bad hires. To dig out, he wrote himself a manual. That manual became a book, the book became eight more, and the whole thing became a framework for the part of a business most founders treat as an afterthought. Matt builds operating systems out of software. Omar builds them out of people. Same word, opposite raw material, and the conversation goes straight at where the two meet. ## In this episode * Why a resume is a marketing document, and what actually predicts how someone shows up * The difference between a personality test and a character test, which is what you choose under pressure * Six hours with a team, fourteen teams, and a 30 point jump in engagement six weeks later * Why culture built with a team sticks and culture handed to a team does not * The three things that send any team back to square one * The person who knows everything, and the incentive quietly paying them to stay that way * Where AI stops being useful and human judgment takes over ## Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:49 Nine books, and a novel that took twelve years 01:34 Rebuilding a 900 person organization in Indonesia 02:25 Grow With W.H.O.M., eleven years in the making 03:08 Why pedigree and references predict less than behavior 04:29 Character assessment versus personality assessment 05:17 Walking away from the corporate job, twice 06:27 What carries across every market he has worked in 08:26 What a culture operating system actually is 10:43 Forming, storming, norming, performing, and how to speed it up 11:43 The three things that send any team back to forming 14:30 Fourteen teams, six hours each, 30 points of engagement 16:19 What happens after the first engagement ends 17:20 Where AI stops and judgment starts 20:24 Who should not install a culture operating system 22:09 Tribal knowledge and the incentive behind it 24:29 The assessments he is certified on and how he uses them 26:10 Where to find Omar ## Omar L. Harris Founder of Intent Consulting and author of nine books, including Leaderboard: The DNA of High Performing Teams and his latest, Grow With W.H.O.M. Former general manager for a pharmaceutical business in Indonesia, with earlier roles in Brazil and Turkey. W.H.O.M. stands for Work Ethic, Heart, Optimism, Maturity. The book and the free character assessment are both at growwithwhom.com. He is on LinkedIn as Omar L. Harris. ## One more thing If your business runs on what one person happens to remember, that is a systems problem before it is a people problem. That is the work I do at Front Range Systems: https://crm.frontrangesystems.com/discovery