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Culture is over-rated. Covid is an opportunity to question why businesses are structured how they are, in particular whether process and conformity oriented cen

Culture is over-rated. Covid is an opportunity to question why businesses are structured how they are, in particular whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results. I say this because work from home leads to rethinking work as a place you go to put in time, as it has been at least since the industrial revolution. And reimagining work as a series of outcomes someone wants to pay you for, because they see value in outsourcing them to you. But instead, companies will just make online versions of the same corporate BS that goes on in the office.

rohan1024 6y ago
This is surely going to happen. It's going to take decades but sure it will. And when this will be the norm current structure will not make any sense to that generation.
ethbr0 6y ago
> whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results Absolutely agreed. Look at how effective Valve has been with a non-hierarchical culture!
- nostromo95 6y ago
  Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.
  - tikhonj 6y ago
    Also, when they did deliver a Half Life game, it was incredibly well executed and novel in a way that could simply not happen at a different company with a different culture. Normally I'd dismiss claims like that as puffery, but here it's concrete: no other big studios have invested in a VR game at that scale. And, veering into less quantitative observations, I haven't seen any VR game—and not many "normal" games either—with the level of attention to detail that Alyx got. I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard. I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)
- loceng 6y ago
  Do you know if there are any good articles on Valve's non-hierarchical culture?
  - arnvald 6y ago
    Not sure if you've seen their handbook? Search for "valve handbook" - it's an internal thing, but someone leaked it a few years ago and now it can be easily found, it explains their culture very well.
    - mbrodersen 6y ago
      The Valve handbook doesn’t reflect the reality at Valve. Not all employees have the power to fire other employees or decide the salary of other employees. The employees that do have all the power and the rest compete with each other to build beneficial buddy relationships with them.
- easton 6y ago
  Actually, this isn’t true. In The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx, Valve talked about how their 10 year dead period where no single player games were released was caused by their nonhierarchial structure. Half-Life 3 alone was started three times since HL2:E2 and people got bored and stopped touching it. They did work on several original titles and ended up cancelling them due to tech issues or boredom. Alyx, once it gained steam, ended up turning into a hierarchical project and the largest in the company history, and was the only way Source 2 ever got finished (since they now had people waiting on it to get the game working). And it worked, as we finally now have proof that VR is a great way to tell stories. The book is excellent, and goes on sale often on Steam. (A decent summary of the book is here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...)
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Hierarchical or not, keep in mind Valve was making an enormous amount of money the whole time. Steam is, by far, their most profitable business. They are also extremely selective when it comes to hiring (they are fairly small but get applicants from literally all over). So that some approach worked for Valve won't necessary work for RandomCo Inc where software is viewed as a cost center, simply because they can't attract the same caliber of talent.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I was being ironic, but decided to write the comment in an ambiguous way as was honestly curious which tack HN would take. The Alyx story you link is probably a great example of the greatest strength being diversity: where diversity often means breaking your own rules when appropriate. Even the Roman Republic's Senate reserved the power to appoint an omnipotent dictator in times of need.
- arnvald 6y ago
  Are there any more examples like that? I think that possibly Valve is an exception rather than a prediction for the future - they're obviously an incredibly successful company, but I haven't heard about other large companies with similar model. I know Github had kind of similar culture in the beginning, with flat hierarchy, but that changed at some point. Then there's Zappos which is famous for their holacratic approach, but earlier this year I've read some articles saying that internally they move away from that model.
  - oblio 6y ago
    There aren't, and as you guessed, they're exceptions for a reason.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Valve has a strong hierarchical structure, where informal relationships makes the decisions that would (in other companies) be made by people in formal positions. All groups of people have implicit hierarchies. Some have explicit hierarchies as well.
corytheboyd 6y ago
I’m with you... I’m quite tired of hearing about culture in the work place. I’m hoping it was mostly tied up in SV which I am departing from soon. To the SV startups I have interacted with (both myself and through friends) culture can be used as the excuse to hire “people like us”.
- golemotron 6y ago
  Yes. If you have to talk about culture, you don't have it.
- loceng 6y ago
  Culture is like macro economics - it's an illusion made up from micro economics. Likewise it's individuals' behaviour and interactions that will form a culture, and though you can put policies in place - like with macro economics - to try to influence maximize certain qualities - however that kills off nuances, flexibility, and variance of individual that's necessary for sovereignty to maximize the individual's contributions. A person will either blend in, integrate successfully into a culture - evolving it hopefully for the better - or their behaviour will lead them to being exiled unless they can learn, grow; my worry has always been if toxic, manipulative individuals capture the review and management positions - which is why I'm interested in non-hierarchical structures, however some still needs necessary; the never-ending tension between liberal and conservation, more hands on vs. more hands off approaches.
maria_weber 6y ago
I don't understand how this can be the top comment. This is just a string of generalizations without any references, not even anecdotes, or explanations. Someone venting steam, essentially. Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh. Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory. What corporate BS?
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  The flip side is forced culture. Watch some videos of corporations making workers sing and essentially peer pressure everyone in participating was cringeworthy. Some people just want to go to work and do their job.
- echelon 6y ago
  There are lot of fringe political folks on HN that would prefer everyone shuts up and works. Or that want to turn everything into a moral crisis. But to them I say, at least we can vote where we want to whittle our lives away, right? Choose the people and products we work with and on. You're free to work at "do your work" Coinbase if you want. Or "everyone is now a vegan" WeWork. You can choose to build spy tech, ad pipes, weapons systems. It's all up to you. People complaining about culture (or defending it) might be making different choices than you.
- brabel 6y ago
  You're so deep in the BS yourself you can't even see it anymore? Office politics BS is commonplace and it's part of human nature in a place where humans interact socially, but that becomes a lot harder when you're working remotely (no references to give you about this statement, but I believe a lot of people have been saying this in the past few months). Can you really not believe that people can do work without a manager telling them to? I think that if that's all you know, yeah, can be difficult to adjust... but I am fairly certain most people would adjust just fine to a situation where they are their own manager: they have a job to do, a target to achieve, and they have to figure out how to get there. Some level of administration is always needed, but that doesn't require a manager as we normally have them. Just another worker whose focus is on metrics/people.
jexe 6y ago
I'm curious how you define culture that you call if over-rated. To me, culture is the individual accountability and focus on results that you describe, plus humility, freedom to take initiative, mentorship, empathy, perseverance, personal growth, conflict resolution... and this absolutely is defined by the people you choose to work with and behavior of the leadership. I used to be in your camp and think culture was a ridiculous thing to focus on, now I'm in the camp where I believe it's the most important part of successful teams.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Culture is (per definition) the underlying unspoken rules that makes a group of people behave the way it does. So what you are describing isn’t culture. They are actually examples of rules you could have in a culture.
antod 6y ago
> Culture is over-rated. Many years ago I experienced a company lose an authentically good culture, and turn into an average shitty one in less than a year. I have to disagree. Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.
- jollofricepeas 6y ago
  Culture is an overused and overrated term that means nothing without detailed context. When people say “culture” they usually mean... - My company treats developers like rockstars; everyone else minus executives is treated like shit. “Ninjas & unicorns!” - My company doesn’t have HR or need it. “Who needs HR? It’s only for women, losers and SJWs.” - My company doesn’t have security and risk processes for handling user data or anything else. “Everybody’s root!!!” - My company has cool perks like a game room, free beer, no vacation limits and a chef on staff; but everyone is underpaid compared to market. “I know they pay me 85k to be a senior dev but at least I got beer!”
  - antod 6y ago
    Yeah, my example had none of that stuff. It was a place where people were made to feel welcome, got listened to, were trusted, cared about and helped each other, were free to be themselves, could freely and honestly express their opinions to execs without repercussions etc. People were given chances to grow into new roles, and their knowledge from the previous ones was valued (no roles were looked down on). It had the right amount of management (not too much, not too little), and they took good management seriously as something to empower people rather than control them. A lot of it was built from the ground up rather than imposed from above, and there was not a lot of money thrown at it. All that can be destroyed much faster than it can be built.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    To me, good culture means: - People are comfortable giving and receiving feedback - Expectations and priorities are open and honest - Work/life balance is seriously respected - Managers serve their reports, not the other way around
cortesoft 6y ago
> favour of individual accountability and a focus on results What results? Sure, making money is the final result we want to measure, but how do you determine how much each person contributes to the bottom line? So we need to set objectives so we can measure results, then we need some way to measure results, some way to compare results across different objectives, some way to evaluate if our objectives and measures are working.... And suddenly you have management and 'culture' I don't understand people who say we just need to 'focus on results'.... that is even more useless as saying "we just need to focus on making money" We all know the end result we want (making money), but the hard part is figuring out how. Take the example of a basketball team, where at least the objectives and measurement technique is well known... you have to score more points than the opponent. Even then, putting together a team is not simple. Which combination of players will produce the best outcome? Which players are good but on bad teams? What strategy should the team employ? Your concept of work being a series of contractual outsourcing arrangements already IS how our economy works. The issue is that most things we create can't be made by one person, so the contract to make something is subcontracted out to many people who sign contracts with the one main contractor... and suddenly you have a company.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  There is a difference between the management many people endure, and the management that both you and the GP strive for, which doesn't become apparent if you only look from the angle of "no management to start with". The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete. When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation. Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)
neilpanchal 6y ago
Bell Laboratories had a pretty cool culture from the interviews I've listened to. It is also interesting how culture changes from 6 people startup to 600 people mid-sized company. Culture is best when its pull rather than push; when a large company imposes culture on you, it is natural to feel that its foreign and you're forced to adopt it. Compare this with a small group of people that you truly enjoy being with, solving problems, expressing frustrations and listening to their woes - you can create a microculture of your own which I only see as a positive thing. I do think that its better in a physically close setting like an office-space than being completely remote.
dmode 6y ago
Culture is overrated ? I have worked at Oracle and Google and I strongly believe the culture and values define the giant difference between how these companies operate
- oblio 6y ago
  More than that, once you have more than 2 people in a room, a culture will develop. You can either let it grow organically or try to guide it at least a bit. And there is a reason we study for intellectual endeavors and train for physical ones.
mbrodersen 6y ago
Culture is all important. Not only for companies. Religious wars are culture wars. Left/right politics are culture conflicts. Discrimination are culture clashes. Culture is the underlying, unspoken rules that guide everything a company/country/group of people do. You can’t not have a culture. So make sure you have a good one.

rohan1024 6y ago

This is surely going to happen. It's going to take decades but sure it will. And when this will be the norm current structure will not make any sense to that generation.

ethbr0 6y ago

> whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results Absolutely agreed. Look at how effective Valve has been with a non-hierarchical culture!

nostromo95 6y ago
Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.
- tikhonj 6y ago
  Also, when they did deliver a Half Life game, it was incredibly well executed and novel in a way that could simply not happen at a different company with a different culture. Normally I'd dismiss claims like that as puffery, but here it's concrete: no other big studios have invested in a VR game at that scale. And, veering into less quantitative observations, I haven't seen any VR game—and not many "normal" games either—with the level of attention to detail that Alyx got. I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard. I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)
loceng 6y ago
Do you know if there are any good articles on Valve's non-hierarchical culture?
- arnvald 6y ago
  Not sure if you've seen their handbook? Search for "valve handbook" - it's an internal thing, but someone leaked it a few years ago and now it can be easily found, it explains their culture very well.
  - mbrodersen 6y ago
    The Valve handbook doesn’t reflect the reality at Valve. Not all employees have the power to fire other employees or decide the salary of other employees. The employees that do have all the power and the rest compete with each other to build beneficial buddy relationships with them.
easton 6y ago
Actually, this isn’t true. In The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx, Valve talked about how their 10 year dead period where no single player games were released was caused by their nonhierarchial structure. Half-Life 3 alone was started three times since HL2:E2 and people got bored and stopped touching it. They did work on several original titles and ended up cancelling them due to tech issues or boredom. Alyx, once it gained steam, ended up turning into a hierarchical project and the largest in the company history, and was the only way Source 2 ever got finished (since they now had people waiting on it to get the game working). And it worked, as we finally now have proof that VR is a great way to tell stories. The book is excellent, and goes on sale often on Steam. (A decent summary of the book is here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...)
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Hierarchical or not, keep in mind Valve was making an enormous amount of money the whole time. Steam is, by far, their most profitable business. They are also extremely selective when it comes to hiring (they are fairly small but get applicants from literally all over). So that some approach worked for Valve won't necessary work for RandomCo Inc where software is viewed as a cost center, simply because they can't attract the same caliber of talent.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  I was being ironic, but decided to write the comment in an ambiguous way as was honestly curious which tack HN would take. The Alyx story you link is probably a great example of the greatest strength being diversity: where diversity often means breaking your own rules when appropriate. Even the Roman Republic's Senate reserved the power to appoint an omnipotent dictator in times of need.
arnvald 6y ago
Are there any more examples like that? I think that possibly Valve is an exception rather than a prediction for the future - they're obviously an incredibly successful company, but I haven't heard about other large companies with similar model. I know Github had kind of similar culture in the beginning, with flat hierarchy, but that changed at some point. Then there's Zappos which is famous for their holacratic approach, but earlier this year I've read some articles saying that internally they move away from that model.
- oblio 6y ago
  There aren't, and as you guessed, they're exceptions for a reason.
mbrodersen 6y ago
Valve has a strong hierarchical structure, where informal relationships makes the decisions that would (in other companies) be made by people in formal positions. All groups of people have implicit hierarchies. Some have explicit hierarchies as well.

corytheboyd 6y ago

I’m with you... I’m quite tired of hearing about culture in the work place. I’m hoping it was mostly tied up in SV which I am departing from soon. To the SV startups I have interacted with (both myself and through friends) culture can be used as the excuse to hire “people like us”.

golemotron 6y ago
Yes. If you have to talk about culture, you don't have it.
loceng 6y ago
Culture is like macro economics - it's an illusion made up from micro economics. Likewise it's individuals' behaviour and interactions that will form a culture, and though you can put policies in place - like with macro economics - to try to influence maximize certain qualities - however that kills off nuances, flexibility, and variance of individual that's necessary for sovereignty to maximize the individual's contributions. A person will either blend in, integrate successfully into a culture - evolving it hopefully for the better - or their behaviour will lead them to being exiled unless they can learn, grow; my worry has always been if toxic, manipulative individuals capture the review and management positions - which is why I'm interested in non-hierarchical structures, however some still needs necessary; the never-ending tension between liberal and conservation, more hands on vs. more hands off approaches.

maria_weber 6y ago

I don't understand how this can be the top comment. This is just a string of generalizations without any references, not even anecdotes, or explanations. Someone venting steam, essentially. Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh. Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory. What corporate BS?

alfiedotwtf 6y ago
The flip side is forced culture. Watch some videos of corporations making workers sing and essentially peer pressure everyone in participating was cringeworthy. Some people just want to go to work and do their job.
echelon 6y ago
There are lot of fringe political folks on HN that would prefer everyone shuts up and works. Or that want to turn everything into a moral crisis. But to them I say, at least we can vote where we want to whittle our lives away, right? Choose the people and products we work with and on. You're free to work at "do your work" Coinbase if you want. Or "everyone is now a vegan" WeWork. You can choose to build spy tech, ad pipes, weapons systems. It's all up to you. People complaining about culture (or defending it) might be making different choices than you.
brabel 6y ago
You're so deep in the BS yourself you can't even see it anymore? Office politics BS is commonplace and it's part of human nature in a place where humans interact socially, but that becomes a lot harder when you're working remotely (no references to give you about this statement, but I believe a lot of people have been saying this in the past few months). Can you really not believe that people can do work without a manager telling them to? I think that if that's all you know, yeah, can be difficult to adjust... but I am fairly certain most people would adjust just fine to a situation where they are their own manager: they have a job to do, a target to achieve, and they have to figure out how to get there. Some level of administration is always needed, but that doesn't require a manager as we normally have them. Just another worker whose focus is on metrics/people.

jexe 6y ago

I'm curious how you define culture that you call if over-rated. To me, culture is the individual accountability and focus on results that you describe, plus humility, freedom to take initiative, mentorship, empathy, perseverance, personal growth, conflict resolution... and this absolutely is defined by the people you choose to work with and behavior of the leadership. I used to be in your camp and think culture was a ridiculous thing to focus on, now I'm in the camp where I believe it's the most important part of successful teams.

mbrodersen 6y ago
Culture is (per definition) the underlying unspoken rules that makes a group of people behave the way it does. So what you are describing isn’t culture. They are actually examples of rules you could have in a culture.

antod 6y ago

> Culture is over-rated. Many years ago I experienced a company lose an authentically good culture, and turn into an average shitty one in less than a year. I have to disagree. Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.

jollofricepeas 6y ago
Culture is an overused and overrated term that means nothing without detailed context. When people say “culture” they usually mean... - My company treats developers like rockstars; everyone else minus executives is treated like shit. “Ninjas & unicorns!” - My company doesn’t have HR or need it. “Who needs HR? It’s only for women, losers and SJWs.” - My company doesn’t have security and risk processes for handling user data or anything else. “Everybody’s root!!!” - My company has cool perks like a game room, free beer, no vacation limits and a chef on staff; but everyone is underpaid compared to market. “I know they pay me 85k to be a senior dev but at least I got beer!”
- antod 6y ago
  Yeah, my example had none of that stuff. It was a place where people were made to feel welcome, got listened to, were trusted, cared about and helped each other, were free to be themselves, could freely and honestly express their opinions to execs without repercussions etc. People were given chances to grow into new roles, and their knowledge from the previous ones was valued (no roles were looked down on). It had the right amount of management (not too much, not too little), and they took good management seriously as something to empower people rather than control them. A lot of it was built from the ground up rather than imposed from above, and there was not a lot of money thrown at it. All that can be destroyed much faster than it can be built.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  To me, good culture means: - People are comfortable giving and receiving feedback - Expectations and priorities are open and honest - Work/life balance is seriously respected - Managers serve their reports, not the other way around

cortesoft 6y ago

> favour of individual accountability and a focus on results What results? Sure, making money is the final result we want to measure, but how do you determine how much each person contributes to the bottom line? So we need to set objectives so we can measure results, then we need some way to measure results, some way to compare results across different objectives, some way to evaluate if our objectives and measures are working.... And suddenly you have management and 'culture' I don't understand people who say we just need to 'focus on results'.... that is even more useless as saying "we just need to focus on making money" We all know the end result we want (making money), but the hard part is figuring out how. Take the example of a basketball team, where at least the objectives and measurement technique is well known... you have to score more points than the opponent. Even then, putting together a team is not simple. Which combination of players will produce the best outcome? Which players are good but on bad teams? What strategy should the team employ? Your concept of work being a series of contractual outsourcing arrangements already IS how our economy works. The issue is that most things we create can't be made by one person, so the contract to make something is subcontracted out to many people who sign contracts with the one main contractor... and suddenly you have a company.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
There is a difference between the management many people endure, and the management that both you and the GP strive for, which doesn't become apparent if you only look from the angle of "no management to start with". The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete. When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation. Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)

neilpanchal 6y ago

Bell Laboratories had a pretty cool culture from the interviews I've listened to. It is also interesting how culture changes from 6 people startup to 600 people mid-sized company. Culture is best when its pull rather than push; when a large company imposes culture on you, it is natural to feel that its foreign and you're forced to adopt it. Compare this with a small group of people that you truly enjoy being with, solving problems, expressing frustrations and listening to their woes - you can create a microculture of your own which I only see as a positive thing. I do think that its better in a physically close setting like an office-space than being completely remote.

dmode 6y ago

Culture is overrated ? I have worked at Oracle and Google and I strongly believe the culture and values define the giant difference between how these companies operate

oblio 6y ago
More than that, once you have more than 2 people in a room, a culture will develop. You can either let it grow organically or try to guide it at least a bit. And there is a reason we study for intellectual endeavors and train for physical ones.

mbrodersen 6y ago

Culture is all important. Not only for companies. Religious wars are culture wars. Left/right politics are culture conflicts. Discrimination are culture clashes. Culture is the underlying, unspoken rules that guide everything a company/country/group of people do. You can’t not have a culture. So make sure you have a good one.