In response to an older Medium post I wrote, an online friend of mine responded with this:
The idea of corporate culture has been hijacked by well-meaning people who don’t have a clue about building a successful business. Unfortunately, that move has been enabled by CEOs who use parties and perks as a pacifier to keep the kids placated. The result is people confusing an excellent culture focused exclusively on making employees happy with a culture of excellence focused on making the business successful.
That would be accurate, IMHO.
A couple of days ago in a Stowe Boyd “workfutures” post — which is usually pretty good except he views Derek Thompson as some kind of demigod — you’ve got this:
In fact, the organisations that trumpeted their shared values most loudly were the ones whose cultures were most toxic to innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
This ought to be no surprise, given how many high profile organisations singularly fail to live up to their supposed values.
But the myth of culture as shared values persists.
None of this should really be a surprise to anyone at this point. The way that white-collar (“knowledge”) work works in most places is pretty simple: there is a crew of people at the top in terms of financial…
