Company Culture Is Really Important, But The Way We Talk About It Is Wrong

Blog post, hunterwalk.com, June 25, 2022. By Hunter Walk. Standfirst: “What Makes A Culture ‘Bad’ Isn’t Just That You Don’t Like It.”

Key Takeaways

• The central move is a vocabulary correction. Walk argues the industry is “very sloppy when we say ‘oh, Company X has a bad culture’ because more often we really mean it’s just one that doesn’t appeal to us and isn’t objectively bad.” The right word for those is polarizing, not bad.
• His definition of a good culture is procedural, not aesthetic: “‘Good’ cultures are clear, consistent, scalable, actionable, well-matched to the company’s business model, and legal.” By that test Amazon and Coinbase have good cultures he personally wouldn’t join — clarity is the virtue being measured, not appeal.
• Bad is reserved for four specific failures: inconsistency between stated values and actual management/hiring/reward practice; lack of self-awareness (so candidates can’t tell what’s valued and insiders can’t improve it); incentivising or permitting illegal or unethical behaviour; and conflict with the company’s own strategy and objectives.
• Aggressive cultures are a risk factor, not a defect. He concedes that “more aggressive, less respectful, binary-outcome cultures can attract people willing to break rules to win” — but calls that a probability, not a fundamental quality of the system.
• The best line, and the reason culture deserves the care: “Code can be rewritten. Products can be built, modified, sunset. Investors can be bought out. But culture is like super cement that’s oozed into every nook and cranny, often beyond the reach of a jackhammer.”
• The practical payoff is a three-axis vocabulary: effective vs. ineffective, good vs. bad, and ‘for me’ vs. ‘not for me’ — three questions usually collapsed into one.
• He won’t invest without it: “a culture is going to form regardless so you might as well be deliberate about it” — and it is the first hires who solidify, mutate or challenge the intended one.

Connections

• Kyle saved this into the note that became Company Culture Mother Tongue. The draft’s premise — that culture is a language a company speaks — lines up with Walk’s clarity/self-awareness test: a culture you cannot articulate is one nobody can learn.
• The “super cement” line is the strongest available argument for why Company Culture is a founding-stage decision rather than a scaling-stage one.
• Bears on Hiring and Management: Walk’s four failure modes are all consistency failures between what is said and what is rewarded.