Every company has a culture. The question is whether they designed it or whether it designed itself.

In most organizations, culture is treated as an emergent property, something that develops organically from the personalities of the founders, the pressures of the market, and the accumulated habits of the team. It is described in values statements posted on walls and websites, articulated in onboarding sessions, and referenced in annual reviews. And in most organizations, the lived culture bears only a passing resemblance to the stated one.

This gap is not hypocrisy. It is a design failure. Culture, like any system, behaves according to its actual structure, not its intended one. The stated values may emphasize innovation, but if the incentive structure rewards predictability, the culture will be conservative. The mission statement may celebrate customer centricity, but if internal metrics prioritize production efficiency over customer satisfaction, the culture will be inward-facing. People are rational actors. They respond to the signals the system actually sends, not the ones leadership wishes it sent.

This is why culture is a design problem. Not in the superficial sense of designing office spaces or selecting perks, but in the deeper sense of designing the systems, incentives, and decision-making structures that shape behavior at every level of the organization. Culture is what people do when no one is watching. And what people do when no one is watching is determined by what the organization consistently rewards, tolerates, and punishes.

Consider what happens when a company says it values bold thinking but consistently promotes the people who avoid risk. The message is clear, regardless of what the values statement says. Bold thinking is not actually valued here. Risk avoidance is. Employees learn this quickly, and they adjust their behavior accordingly. Within a year, the culture has shifted, not because anyone decided to change it, but because the system's actual signals overrode its stated ones.

The same dynamic plays out in how organizations handle mistakes. A company that claims to value learning but publicly penalizes failure is teaching its people to hide mistakes rather than learn from them. A company that claims to value speed but requires seven layers of approval for any decision is teaching its people that caution matters more than momentum. In each case, the culture is being designed, not by the values statement, but by the operational reality.

This matters enormously for product companies. The quality of what an organization produces is a direct reflection of the culture in which it was made. A culture that rewards speed over craft will produce products that feel rushed. A culture that punishes dissent will produce products that reflect only the dominant perspective, missing the insights that come from productive disagreement. A culture that treats design as a downstream function will produce products where the design feels applied rather than integrated.

I have worked with enough organizations to recognize the signatures of different cultures in their products. You can see it in the details. A product where the engineering is superb but the user experience is clumsy tells you that the culture prioritizes technical achievement over customer empathy. A product where the marketing is sophisticated but the product itself is mediocre tells you that the culture invests more in perception than substance. A product where every touchpoint feels considered, from the unboxing to the support interaction, tells you that the culture treats the customer's experience as a shared responsibility across functions.

The companies that produce consistently excellent work have not simply hired excellent people. They have built cultures that make excellent work possible. This means designing systems that align incentives with outcomes, that give people the authority to make decisions at the level where the work is done, that create genuine accountability without creating fear, and that treat the quality of the work itself as the primary metric of success.

This is harder than it sounds because it requires leadership to confront the difference between the culture they want and the culture they have. Most leadership teams can describe their ideal culture in vivid detail. Fewer can accurately describe their actual culture, because the actual culture is revealed not in what leaders say but in what the organization does.

A useful exercise is to ask a simple set of questions. What behavior was most recently rewarded here, and what does that tell us about what we actually value? What behavior was most recently tolerated that should not have been, and what does that tell us about where our standards are soft? What decision was most recently made by default rather than by intention, and what does that tell us about where our systems are weak?

The answers to these questions describe the real culture, the one that shapes the work, the one the customer experiences. And unlike the values statement, these answers can be changed, not by rewriting the words on the wall but by redesigning the systems that produce the behavior.

Culture change is not a communications exercise. It is a structural one. It requires changing what is measured, what is rewarded, what is tolerated, and what authority sits where. It requires consistency over time, because people do not believe new signals until those signals have been reinforced through repeated experience. And it requires honesty, a willingness to acknowledge the gap between the stated culture and the lived one without defensiveness.

The companies that get this right do not talk about culture constantly. They do not need to. The culture is visible in the work, in the way meetings are run, in the way decisions are made, in the way people treat each other and the customer. It does not require explanation because it is self-evident.

Culture is not the soft stuff. It is the operating system on which everything else runs. Design it with the same rigor you bring to your products, and the products will reflect it. Leave it to chance, and it will design itself. And the results of that accidental design will be visible in everything your organization produces, whether you recognize them or not.