What is culture, really?
Culture can be tricky.
Running like a thread through failed and mediocre companies the world over is one big, overarching difficulty they consistently encounter - grasping the concept of culture itself. It’s so broad, ill-defined and all-encompassing that it’s hard to pin down and take specific action on.
Culture touches strategy, operations, hiring, human resources, sales, marketing, product development, research, leadership - everything your company does. Its influence is hard to overstate, but equally hard to define. Most leaders are experts in their chosen field, not in high-performance culture, so they don’t know where to start or what to do, and shaping culture feels like a huge effort and investment with no guarantee of results.
Edgar Schein, MIT Sloan School of Management professor and one of the world’s leading academics in the field of organisational culture until his death in 2023 described culture as “a pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered or developed in learning to cope with its problems.” Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital fund Andreesen Horowitz and author of the books The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are talks repeatedly about culture being how things are done when you, the leader, aren’t there. Netflix’s famous Culture Deck, written by CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord refers to culture as what you reward and punish in your organisation.
All of these definitions are helpful, but incomplete.
Your culture is how people in your organisation behave, how they treat each other, how they collaborate and how decisions get made, especially when the pressure’s on and things are hard.
Who you hire and how you define what makes someone “one of us” is an incredibly important element of culture. What you reward and recognise, implicitly and explicitly, is just as crucial.
Culture is founded on what you, individually and as a group, believe and aspire to. It’s how people feel when they’re part of your organisation or when they’re on the outside, interacting with you.
It’s your only real, sustainable competitive advantage, especially in a world of vibe coding and 3D printing. It will help you weather economic downturns, transformational technologies, political upheaval, competitor actions and all manner of other challenges.
Ultimately, the answer to the question, “What is culture?” is this: it’s the fabric of your organisation, the threads that bind everything you do. Mozart once said, “music is not the notes, but the silence between them.” Similarly, your culture is your people and the spaces between them.
It’s the key determinant of success and the biggest factor in whether you and your team love your work, or just tolerate it. It’s forged in the hard times and brings about the good ones. It’s the heart of your company, the spirit of your business and the soul of what you do.
Said differently, culture is everything.
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