Some other thoughts I've had related to this topic:
- It's very common to have a "culture of one" where one person, or a handful of people, architect the culture and expect everyone to abide by it. This is not how culture works in practice
- Culture is necessarily a mesh where everyone contributes, so perhaps the strongest contributor to culture is who "everyone" is (i.e. hiring, retention)
- The gap between culture as defined versus culture as practiced is a constant, and very large, source of overhead. People must constantly play two games: signaling they conform to the stated culture, while operating within the actual day-to-day culture
- Gaps in stated vs. actual cultures come down to "retaliatory" vs "integrative" regimes. A retaliatory regime tends to punish dissenting opinions, driving them from the public sphere (debate) into the private sphere (gossip). An integrative regime rewards dissenting opinions, encouraging public debate and minimizing gossip. It is likely that both are adaptive, depending on the circumstances, given we commonly observe both
Interesting. Makes me wonder if it's even worth having any half baked cultural commitments. Probably. best to either commit and reinforce at every level or just not talk about culture and let business fundamentals drive you wherever they please.
I like the way you called it 'residual error', another framing is that culture akin to the 'smell of the place'. And trust is the bedrock of high-performing cultures.
But culture is designed as much as strategy is designed - OpenAI has to have a different culture vs Oracle; Moderna vs Merck likewise & so on. Lot of flawed thinking about culture comes from folks who think there is a universal 'ideal'. There isn't.
And when companies get too large, it become harder to preserve the same culture no matter what the posters say.
Culture is how people behave everyday - so leaders have an important role in nurturing it. The gap between culture & cult is quite small in teams/orgs with strong cultures.
Some other thoughts I've had related to this topic:
- It's very common to have a "culture of one" where one person, or a handful of people, architect the culture and expect everyone to abide by it. This is not how culture works in practice
- Culture is necessarily a mesh where everyone contributes, so perhaps the strongest contributor to culture is who "everyone" is (i.e. hiring, retention)
- The gap between culture as defined versus culture as practiced is a constant, and very large, source of overhead. People must constantly play two games: signaling they conform to the stated culture, while operating within the actual day-to-day culture
- Gaps in stated vs. actual cultures come down to "retaliatory" vs "integrative" regimes. A retaliatory regime tends to punish dissenting opinions, driving them from the public sphere (debate) into the private sphere (gossip). An integrative regime rewards dissenting opinions, encouraging public debate and minimizing gossip. It is likely that both are adaptive, depending on the circumstances, given we commonly observe both
Interesting. Makes me wonder if it's even worth having any half baked cultural commitments. Probably. best to either commit and reinforce at every level or just not talk about culture and let business fundamentals drive you wherever they please.
I do think you often have to make things explicit, but it is a constant and necessary battle to minimize the loss between explicit and implicit.
I like the way you called it 'residual error', another framing is that culture akin to the 'smell of the place'. And trust is the bedrock of high-performing cultures.
But culture is designed as much as strategy is designed - OpenAI has to have a different culture vs Oracle; Moderna vs Merck likewise & so on. Lot of flawed thinking about culture comes from folks who think there is a universal 'ideal'. There isn't.
And when companies get too large, it become harder to preserve the same culture no matter what the posters say.
Culture is how people behave everyday - so leaders have an important role in nurturing it. The gap between culture & cult is quite small in teams/orgs with strong cultures.
Here's a post I wrote on the same subject: https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/the-smell-of-the-place