What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities

The natural thing for the manager to say is, “I hear you and, quite frankly, I agree with you, but I was overruled by the powers that be.” This is absolutely toxic to the culture. Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless.

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud? Modern companies tend to focus on metr

Great sales cultures are competitive, aggressive, and highly compensated—but only for results.

If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions at all, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you in the slightest, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I will never believe you are telling m

the three types of bad employees, all of whom you should probably fire.

One way to think about designing your culture is to conceive it as a way to specify the kinds of employees you want. What virtues do you value most in employees?

Cultural design.

Many CEOs model a successful leader whose methods they haven’t internalized or whose best practices don’t apply to their company.