Dis-Appirio

Today, the Appirio brand is being retired and fully folded into Wipro. Like many Appirians around the globe, I’m reflecting on what made Appirio the special place that it was.

Glenn Weinstein, Appirios’ co-founder and former CIO, used to tell the story of creating a name for the new company he formed with Chris Barbin, Appirio’s CEO, Mike O’Brien and Narinder Singh. He shared the name “Appirio” with his wife, who cautioned him that if the startup went bust, it could be mocked as “Dis-Appirio.”

Luckily, Appirio didn’t “dis-Appirio.” It thrived, becoming a booming, global cloud consultancy focused on improving worker and customer experiences. We won all the awards. We became analyst darlings. We were a highly sought-after employer. We reached Global Strategic Partner status with Salesforce. We were buzzed about in the top tier press. We had an NPS score that our competitors couldn’t even come close to.

You might have noticed that I’m still using “we” to refer to Appirio, even though I left the company several years ago, after we were acquired by Wipro. This lingering “we” is a testament to the power of the Appirio culture and its strong alumni network, which includes active virtual and in-person groups around the world. Though we’ve all since moved on, we’re still very much a family. Being a part of Appirio goes beyond a place of employment; I’ll be an Appirian for life, regardless of where I work.

Recently, a question was posed in one of the alumni groups: Has anyone found anything similar to Appirio? While many shared why they liked their current positions and companies, everyone agreed that likely nothing will ever compare to the Appirio experience. During my time there, you’d often hear people say, “I’ll take the worst day at Apprio over the best day anywhere else.” Even when we were in it, we knew it was a once-in-a-career experience.

But why? What made it so special?

I’m still hoping Chris Barbin writes a book on it, but in the meantime I have some thoughts on why Appirio’s culture was so different and why it continues to thrive long after the company itself is gone.

1. Employee engagement was the most important metric. Every other week in our all company call, we showed a dashboard that contained, among other metrics, our internal NPS score, “fun factor” (a measure of how much fun employees reported to have in a given week), and attrition. These metrics mattered just as much — if not more than — project wins and pipeline. Our executives absolutely believed that we could only do good work if people were happy.
2. We encouraged flexibility long before it was a trend. Appirio became a hot place to work in part because we allowed employees to work wherever they wanted. One employee drove around the U.S. in an RV with his family and called various campsites and national parks his office. Another relocated to Asia for a season just for a change of pace. Want to work from the beach for a week? Fantastic. We valued productivity, output, and results, and we knew that could be achieved from anywhere in the world.
3. Great ideas came from everywhere. Appirio was low on formal hierarchy. Our executive team set an example of welcoming suggestions, feedback and ideas from all levels of the company, regardless of job title or years of experience. Our “Ideas Board” allowed employees to submit ideas on everything from product solutions to employee benefits. Others could then upvote or downvote ideas and add commentary. Each idea was assigned an executive lead, who then was accountable for the concept and its outcome. This empowerment was displayed in our daily work as well. There was little to no red tape or hoops to jump through to make something happen. We were given the freedom to do the very best we could on behalf of the company and were recognized as the experts we were in our field.
4. Everyone at Appirio thought someone else at Appirio was smarter than them. John Gorup, all around amazing human, was famous for putting this so well. The company was filled to the brim with incredible intelligence — but there were very few egos to be found. Employees were brilliant, but they were generous with their intelligence. This led to an environment where asking for clarification, posing questions, debating ideas, and contributing were expected and encouraged.
5. We felt connected. Though there were more than 2,000 Appirians around the globe — and the vast majority of us were virtual — I’ve never felt more connected to a group of people before. We were quick to adopt a variety of digital tools to make real-time, virtual collaboration incredibly easy. We met as a full company every other week for a town hall, and then again yearly for an all day town hall that mixed physical with virtual activities. There were ample ways to formally and informally celebrate the success of others, share personal stories and milestones, and encourage relationship building. Whether it was our Wiki where anyone could spin up an affinity group, our Lean In Circles where women and men alike helped each other grow, our Chatter page where employees at any level could hand out points and prizes to colleagues to recognize their hard work, or our in-person social events, we were all tuned into one another. This continues today, with pings from alumni Slack and Facebook groups multiple times a day.
6. We didn’t take ourselves too seriously. We quickly became known for throwing the best Dreamforce parties. An infamous typo that might have resulted in a trip to HR became a company-wide, beloved inside joke. (Thank you, Mike Martin, for the Hawaiian shits.) We had stipends for team bonding (hello, aerial gymnastics class!). As one of our event marketers used to say, “We’re not brain surgeons. No one’s going to die if we make a mistake.” We took our work quite seriously, as the awards and recognition prove, but we also knew we could have a blast doing it. Appirio’s personality became well-known and much-loved amongst our customers and partners.
7. We took big risks. Going hand-in-hand with not taking ourselves too seriously, we also weren’t afraid to swing big. Sometimes these risks paid off in dividends (spending a giant chunk of our corporate budget on developing a high-profile global world tour event series to attract new customers and retain current ones) and some flopped (booking Snoop Dogg as entertainment for our Dreamforce party. He bailed hours before the event was to take place.). We all recognized that a company can never stand out by blending in. If we wanted to make our mark on the industry, we had to take calculated risks, and that included embracing the failures.
8. We got scrappy. When budgets were slim and resources were low, we were often at our best. In the earlier Appirio days, we parked a branded food truck (with free food!) outside of a competitor’s event to lure their customers away. When we wanted to develop a showpiece industry survey white paper but couldn’t afford the cost associated with using an outside vendor to do the research, we threw our marketing team into doing the survey, number crunching, and conclusion-drawing ourselves. Because Appirio welcomed risk, we could get creative when our backs were against the wall.
9. We were great communicators. Full disclosure: I served as Appirio’s Senior Director of Global Corporate Communications, so yeah, I’m patting myself on the back here. But I couldn’t have done a good job if our leadership wasn’t fully embracing of the value of communications and totally bought into transparency. (And that ethos came long before I was hired.) We trusted Appirians as intelligent adults who could handle the truth and understand complex information. Unless we had to sign an NDA and legally could not discuss a topic, everyone knew everything. Every other week in our all hands call, we plainly reported on pipeline, bookings, revenue and profit when we were still a private company. We showed attrition numbers. We had live, anonymous Q&A where literally any question was fair game. Nothing was reworded or deleted or hedged, even and especially the tough questions — and oh yes, we had some tough ones. (Case in point: one person famously asked an executive why they recently gained weight — and the executive answered!) Executives encouraged employees to chat them directly with questions or feedback. Because we trusted employees to handle this information, employees trusted leadership in return. We weren’t distracted by wondering what was going on because we knew what was happening.
10. We cared. First and foremost, we cared about one another. While “family” is a word thrown around (and sometimes weaponized in) many companies, it was real at Appirio. When one Appirian’s house was destroyed in a fire, another Appirian a world away started a GoFundMe for the family — which raised tens of thousands of dollars in just a few hours. When I became a solo foster mother and had child care fall through on a very busy day, my boss welcome me to bring the baby (now my 4 year old son, Jack) into the office. I led a full day offsite carrying him in a Baby Bjorn, and it was one of my proudest professional moments. But we also cared about the company and our work. While I suppose statistically someone at Appirio must have just been there to collect a paycheck, the vast majority of us cared deeply and personally about the company, our work, and our mission. This wasn’t a company — it was our company.

If you were lucky enough to be an Appirian, what do you think made the company and its people so special?