Company Culture

Culture drives success

There is significant truth to this statement, yet it is often severely misunderstood. For some reason it seems people, including myself, jump to the conclusion that this means a company must have a healthy, positive, friendly culture in order to be successful. But let’s look at the objective facts, many top tier companies have cultures people describe as toxic, and many have cultures people love. So what are we missing? If culture is so important, why does it seem like the interpretation of culture is a mixed bag?

Strategic Alignment

Culture is important for success, but deciding the type of culture is most important. If a company wants a system to be repeatable, they make a bunch of processes to keep people within a realm of duties. This leads to stagnation and burnout, and consequently churn, so a culture can be built to support a churning strategy. I’m not making an argument that this is the type of business I want to be a part of, nor am I saying it’s ethical to intentionally stress humans to leaving jobs, but the truth is, it is a valid strategy. If you can onboard someone and make them effective in 5 days to follow very strict processes, you don’t need to worry about tenured employees leaving, and you can stop worrying about promotions and raises. You find someone else, offer them starting salary, same output, less cost. Conversely, if you want to break boundaries and innovate, you must allow people to be free of process. Process restricts innovation because it adds boundaries and rules. Innovation is important, but it’s also important to turn an innovation into an efficient machine. Once you have the innovative idea, you have to build it systematically. Once Apple designed the iPhone, they had to produce millions. Happy and relaxed employees are often more productive, but it’s also more expensive. Once the iPhone was designed, Apple’s only incentive is to determine the most cost effective pattern to produce them.

What’s my point

My point is every company has its own culture. The larger the company, the less you can influence it. In my experience, and shoutout to one of my close friends for saying this, a startup becoming an enterprise can feel like something you can influence, but you often cannot. I watched an org grow, churn 3 times, and it has the same culture. 50-70 people came, none of them changed the culture, yet many tried. So you have 3 options. First, find a company with a culture you like. If you can’t find one, make yourself more hire-able. If you don’t want to put in the effort, you don’t belong at that company anyway. Second, start your own company. If you start the company, you control the culture of it. Finally, deal with it. You can leave or you can stay. A CEO just has to say “you’re fired” and you’re gone. If you want to improve your situation then do it. It’s okay to leave, but it takes effort. Remember, you probably don’t control the culture, a small enough company can be influenced with the right leader, and if you think you’re the right leader then you can try somewhere small or start something new.