In my experience, executives are usually so separate from the rest of the company (insulated by multiple layers of management) that to hear them talk about the

In my experience, executives are usually so separate from the rest of the company (insulated by multiple layers of management) that to hear them talk about the company culture feels a lot like hearing Queen Elizabeth talk about the culture of Britain: how would she know? Executives are so zoomed out, and culture is so ground-level, that I don't think people in those high level roles really even know what the culture of their companies are most of the time. I agree with this blog article insofar as you cannot define what a culture will be, the way you define OKRs or go to market strategies. A couple anecdotes: At a former company, roughly the size of Basecamp, a VP of business development said this to me, essentially word for word: "The culture of ${companyName} is getting to $30 million ARR within the next 6 months." This was in the context of me telling him that developers were not happy with the direction of the company culture. His framing told me that he was talking about something definitionally different than I was when I talked about culture. Incidentally, that company imploded, though it does continue to limp on. At another company, the CEO repeated at every all-hands meeting that our company had a "culture of performance". I always wondered how the hell he would know that, since the only time he interacted with anyone at the company outside the VP level was when lecturing at the all-hands meetings. He was no doubt qualified to discuss the culture of vice presidents and the c-suite, but how could he possibly describe what the other 99% of the company was like? My point is that executives think they can define what a culture is, but they can't. Nobody can. You can only describe what a culture turns out to be. You can try to change it, but it's not ever going to be entirely in your control, ex officio, like it's a dress code or something.