What is Culture?

If the success of your career and company involves achieving results through others, and those others happen to work for you or buy from you, understanding how a culture works and how to work it is the most critical information you can have.

There are three cultures in business: managers, employees and customers. We’re not talking about a bunch of managers, employees and customers. When these groups formed relationships with your company, they became cultures and became far more self-protective, far more intelligent and far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence.

A culture is an independent organism with its own purpose and the power to make or break any management plan – and any manager. How much power? A company that understands how a culture really works is a company that gets emotional commitment from its manager culture, protection and evangelism for corporate goals from its employee culture, and branded by its customer culture.

A culture exists whenever a group of people shares the same basic living circumstances and so band together to share beliefs about the common rules of survival and emotional prosperity. A culture is an information-gathering organism designed to protect itself. This purpose gives it a motivation fundamentally different from that of the company.

Even though it seems that a through line logically links success of the enterprise with survival and emotional prosperity for the cultures that work in them and buy from them, that logic would depend on the cultures perceiving a reliable connection between what happens to the company and what happens to the culture. This is rarely the case, and it is rarely the culture’s fault.

Because a culture exists to protect itself, its antennae are working constantly, its credibility detector is infallible, its perceptions are alarmingly accurate and its memory is elephantine. You can’t bribe, bluff or bully a culture into sustainably believing or doing anything. You can’t tell it what to believe or stop it from existing. But you can take comfort from knowing that a culture is the utmost rational organism – an objective, agnostic and open belief system. Your manager, employee and customer cultures will give your company whatever you want; you just have to give the cultures whatever they want first. Understanding what they really want is the difference between their defiance and its compliance.

There are many bad decisions that a company can make but few that can’t be made good by a culture’s decision to course-correct it. There are many good decisions that a company can make, but few that can’t be made great by a culture’s decision to protect it and evangelize it to others. But it is not the responsibility of the cultures to understand the business logic. It is the responsibility of the business to understand the cultures’ logic.