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Organizational Culture
What culture actually is, how it forms, and why it so often resists the intentions of the people who believe they set it.
Chapter contents
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Culture and Scale 3 entries Why small organizations do not have culture in the usual sense, what changes near fifty people, and how founders transmit or fail to transmit a standard.
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How Culture Reproduces 3 entries Transmission by imitation rather than instruction: the first month, promotion decisions, and what new people learn before anybody explains anything.
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Reading and Changing Culture 4 entries Diagnosing what is actually operating, why culture programmes fail, and the small number of levers that move a culture in practice.
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The Nature of Culture 3 entries What culture is as a working object: behaviours rewarded, tolerated, and repeated, and why the stated version and the operative one diverge.
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What You Tolerate 3 entries The standard is set by the worst permitted behaviour. Exceptions, the productive violator, and the gap between stated values and promotion decisions.
Entries filed directly to this chapter
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01
Stories and Who Gets to Tell Them
Organizations carry a small set of remembered episodes that function as case law. They are selected by whoever is repeating them, and leadership rarely knows which ones are in circulation.
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02
Promotions Are the Only Culture Statement Anybody Believes
Every other signal is discounted. A promotion is costly, irreversible, and made under real constraint, which is precisely why the organization treats it as the truth about what is valued.
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03
The First Month
A new person learns how the place actually works within about three weeks, almost entirely by observation, and the reading they form then is the one they operate on for years.
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04
Subcultures
Organizations do not have one culture. They have a set of them, one per supervisor, and the variance between units is usually larger than the variance between organizations.
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05
Culture Is Not Climate
How people feel about working somewhere and how the place behaves under pressure are different objects. They can move in opposite directions, and organizations reliably measure the wrong one.
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06
The Stated Culture and the Operative One
The gap between the two is not hypocrisy and is rarely noticed by the people who created it. It opens because stating a value is free and enforcing one is not.
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07
What Organizational Culture Actually Is
Culture is the set of behaviours an organization rewards, tolerates, and repeats until they require no thought. Everybody inside knows exactly how far it sits from the stated version.
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