Corporate Culture

How important is corporate culture?  Extremely important, in my opinion.  We should care about culture to a great extent because organizational success directly depends on it. Organizational culture affects and implicitly regulates the way members of the organization think, feel, and act within the framework of that organization. Culture can be interwoven with strategy in order to create a structure and environment that empowers employees to want to succeed. Also, a strong corporate culture can remove a lot of ambiguity for employees. If an employee has a question about how to proceed in a wide variety of unclear circumstances, a strong culture can often inherently provide the answers. 


Without a doubt, it is tough to implement a new corporate culture, but once it is in place, it is accepted and not often questioned.  Culture can be a very subtle, but effective method of delivering messages to employees. A culture where the leaders at the top are dictating and communicating new rules and policies is much less effective than a culture that enables certain strategic peers to deliver that same message.

I think having a clear and consistent corporate culture might matter more at organizations that are experiencing a great deal of change, or in organizations that have fairly new leaders. In both of these instances, employees can lean on the culture to tell them what to do and how to act in uncertain times. This will at least provide a certain level of stability for employees in the face of uncertainty.


BP’s corporate culture has been on display in recent months due to the oil spill in the gulf. As more facts come to surface, it’s easier to see BP’s true culture. It seems to me that management was very much driven by financial goals and may have pressed field managers to take too much risk at the operational level. If this were a stronger culture, lower-level safety personnel would have been encouraged to push back on upper management in times like this. But it doesn’t seem that the culture fostered this type of activity.

A corporate culture that I respect and admire currently is Threadless (the company my wife works for). Threadless is an online t-shirt company that does an excellent job of creating a collaborative and open work environment. The physical space is very open which encourages employees to talk and share ideas and every department is given a budget to create their workspace. The physical work space also includes a central area with all sorts of games and music and opportunities for employees to interact. Also, employees are encouraged to IM with each other throughout the day. From my interactions with the employees, it is obvious that everyone is excited about coming to work and putting out a quality product. I don't think the company would be nearly as successful as they are without the continued emphasis on culture.  For more on Threadless, check out this video: