It was a frustrating thing to witness, because it was clear there was still so much potential in the situation. I've spent a long time since studying what makes

It was a frustrating thing to witness, because it was clear there was still so much potential in the situation. I've spent a long time since studying what makes companies successful at scale, and culture seems to be the key piece. Not even a specific kind of culture, just one that most people at the company feel part of. Many people together can accomplish a great deal more than they could alone, and culture forms the basis of the communication network that allows them to figure out how to work together. Basically, people who trust each other have a lot less communication overhead. Culture alone doesn't make a company scale, there's a lot of process you usually need, but you can't successfully implement those processes without a shared sense of culture. RIM did a lot of this, where they brought in process experts to improve efficiency across locations. But Waterloo itself was successful, so it was left alone until well into our first round of layoffs, and at that point the culture there had fragmented a fair bit. I'm very sorry to hear you are going through a similar situation. It may be too late, but I do have one cultural silver bullet to offer: Storytelling Companies (or really any group of people) that scale successfully almost always do a fair amount of storytelling. Both in the myth making around their origins, like Steve Jobs and Apple, and in day-to-day employee experience. Storytelling is one of the oldest methods of sharing culture with someone, and throughout human history, the primary one we have relied upon. Telling someone a story helps them know what you care about, both in the content of the story, and the way you choose to tell it, which builds empathy, which is key to trust. This why some companies fell apart completely when they went remote, because usually people who like each other will tell stories when they are in a room together, but they won't start a zoom meeting to tell the same story. While I do have some specific processes I've adopted related to storytelling, I've become more and more convinced that ANY way you facilitate storytelling will help you build culture. So if you have the opportunity, make time for storytelling with your co-workers, and encourage your leadership to do more of it.