Corporate Culture Is More About Propaganda Than Relevance, All-In

No one has ever been able to define the term, really.

In my early days of blogging about work, I wrote about “culture” a ton. I gradually stopped, because I realized the term cannot be defined very well — it’s a suitcase word, which carries multiple definitions across multiple people and roles in an organization — and I also realized no executive really cares that much about it aside from a thing you briefly mention in speeches here and there. Then, COVID happened and further blew up “culture” discussions, so I wrote about it even less.

From January to August of ’23, I worked for a “culture consultancy” company. Essentially, this company was a bunch of ex-sales guys from another company based in PA, and they had all followed the CEO to this company. There was almost nothing “cultural” about it — definitely not internally, where people barely made an effort to get to know your name, but not even in how we dealt with clients, where we basically offered them air cover for headcount reduction, etc. We got a new boss at that company in June ’23, he despised me almost from the jump, and I was gone three months later. He was the type of guy who constantly talked about “getting access to decision-makers” and “targeting the C-Suite,” which was high irony because our product was…