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Chapter 30. Your Company Culture Is a Meaningless Platitude

Company culture is a very serious matter, put together after much employee feedback and deliberation, and carefully designed to capture the key things that make your company great. It’s also usually a load of well-mixed fertilizer.

Most companies boast of their “company culture” thinking that it’s the thing that makes their company wonderful. It’s not. Most companies run on “the default settings” most of the time, and as a result, look pretty much interchangeable. It’s the changes from those defaults, for better or for worse, that truly define your culture.

Your company culture isn’t what makes you great–it’s what makes you different.

Hire the best, teamwork, ethics... these are all platitudes. Real company cultures are made of four things:

• Polarizing decisions

• Excesses

• Quirks

• Dysfunctions

Polarizing Decisions

Many decisions in companies are delicate balancing acts between two desirable but opposing goals. The default setting for most companies is to strive for balance. But company cultures are defined when a company puts its thumb on the scale—choosing one at the expense of the other.

Work/Life Balance

Jackson Fish Market is a tiny user experience consultancy. It has a small handful of employees, but they’re widely regarded as being among the best in the business. When the founders left their executive roles at Microsoft, they decided they were going to build walls around the impact of the company on their ...