What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all

Companies—just like gangs, armies, and nations—are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily microbehaviors of the human beings that compose them.

Keep What Works

There are three keys to assigning meaning:

Object lessons.

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud? Modern companies tend to focus on metr

One way to think about designing your culture is to conceive it as a way to specify the kinds of employees you want. What virtues do you value most in employees?

Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is.

If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that.