If You Promote Bad People, You Promote Bad Culture

Most of my cynicism toward the corporate world is safely directed into my new book these days, so there’s not a ton of spillage onto the blog.  But I’m going to make an exception today and talk about corporate culture.  To understand some of the terms I’m about to use, you can buy the book, if you’re so inclined, but you can also see an original definition here in this post.

I originally intended for my notes on this topic to make it into the book, but one of the main uplifting themes of the book is that I see programmers creating a professional working arrangement in which the corporate idealist doesn’t exist.  And since deliberate company culture, which I’ll refer to as “corporate religion,” is largely theater for idealists, spending a lot of time talking about it in the book would be somewhat superfluous (I do mention it, but not extensively).  But that’s not to say that corporate culture and religion don’t matter.  And, all these half-formed notes I have ought to go somewhere.  So, here they are.

Corporate culture is more or less defined by three things: what it takes to advance within the company, and what it takes to stay in the same role within the company, and what it takes to be walked out by the company.  Paintball outings and “bring your pet to work” don’t define or even describe company culture.  Perhaps more surprisingly, neither do things like company “mission,” “values,” and “principles.”  These things, which constitute corporate religion, are mainly orthogonal to culture.  Corporate religion consists of ceremonies, outreach activities, and the official canon (mission statements and expressions of “official values”).  But none of these things are culture, any more than the Ten Commandments, New Testament, and church bake sales are the ‘culture’ of a rural evangelical town in the USA.

If you look up the definition of the word culture, you’ll have to scroll all the way down to definition number 5 to get to an actual definition of corporate culture.

The behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic,or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.

For our purposes here, we’re talking about the social group “people who have opted to work at this company.”  This means that we’re talking about behaviors and beliefs of employees when we talk about culture, and this is why culture and religion are disparate and sometimes orthogonal entities.  Corporate employees are forced to attend religious ceremonies and memorize the canon, but what they actually believe and do outside of structured activities is another matter altogether.  Plenty of people who show up to church every Sunday go forth immediately afterward and pound beer and gamble on football.

Read More