I believe most friction occurs because of not having a good culture to handle things in an environment with a certain degree of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity.1 Each individual has a unique culture.2 Which results from the different values and principles of each individual. Building a great company culture can help the company to stay cohesive and handle the rapidly changing environment well. Here are excerpts about company culture.
Trust in no way relates to an organizational principle but is instead an aspect of the corporate culture, something about which much has been written in recent years. Put simply, it is a set of values and beliefs, as well as familiarity with the way things are done and should be done in a company. - High Output Management
An organization is a machine consisting of two major parts: culture and people.- Principles
Bridgewater’s competitive edge is our pioneering workplace culture that relies on truthful and transparent communication to ensure the best ideas win out. We believe meaningful work and meaningful relationships emerge when you assemble high-performing teams and push them to engage in rigorous and thoughtful inquiry. - Bridgewater
We champion diversity because it is essential to our ability to think differently. We cultivate inclusion because we believe people do their best work when they can be their genuine selves. By continually examining abilities and performance, we provide all our employees with the development they need to fulfill their potentials as professionals and people. - Bridgewater
Culture is the generally unspoken shared rules of a community. - The Manager’s Path, p.198
Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion. Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. It’s living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall. We have the power, by living the values, to build the culture. - Brian Chesky
Shared culture, rules, procedures, and regulations
Beyond relaying facts, a manager must also communicate his objectives, priorities, and preferences as they bear on the way certain tasks are approached. This is extremely important, because only if the manager imparts these will his subordinates know how to make decisions themselves that will be acceptable to the manager, their supervisor. Thus, transmitting objectives and preferred approaches constitutes a key to successful delegation.
As we will see later, a shared corporate culture becomes indispensable to a business. Someone adhering to the values of a corporate culture—an intelligent corporate citizen—will behave in consistent fashion under similar conditions, which means that managers don’t have to suffer the inefficiencies engendered by formal rules, procedures, and regulations that are sometimes used to get the same result. - High Output Management (p. 50)
When the environment changes more rapidly than one can change rules, or when a set of circumstances is so ambiguous and unclear that a contract between the parties that attempted to cover all possibilities would be prohibitively complicated, we need another mode of control, which is based on cultural values. Its most important characteristic is that the interest of the larger group to which an individual belongs takes precedence over the interest of the individual himself. When such values are at work, some emotionally loaded words come into play - words like trust - because you are surrendering to the group your ability to protect yourself. And for this to happen, you must believe that you all share a common set of values, a common set of objectives, and a common set of methods. These, in turn, can only be developed by a great deal of common, shared experience. (p. 147)
Culture doesn’t mean that every single person holds exactly the same values, but it tends to guide a general overlap, and it creates a bunch of rules of interaction that you don’t have to think much about if you are deeply ingrained in that culture. - The Manager’s Path
In complex environments where the needs of the group must override the needs of the individual, cultural values are the glue that enables us to work as a team and make decisions when faced with uncertainty. - The Manager’s Path
“Engineers who graduated from MIT” is not a culture. “People who value technology innovation, hard work, intellect, scientific process, and data” might be. The first allows only an incredibly narrow subset of humanity to pass through it successfully. The second allows a much broader set of people to fit, while ensuring those people actually have the same values. - The Manager’s Path
Readings
[1]: Don’t Fuck Up the Culture