Culture Is a Craft

My daughter hovered near the front door, peering out the window, doing her latest dance routine in front of the mirror in our entryway and then moving to the window again to check the porch. "When does UPS get here?" she asked, while she crossed her feet, slapped her arms, and dropped a spin move. "When it gets here," I smirked, with my best dad-joke non-answer.

Soon after the package arrived. She ripped open the box and unceremoniously dumped the contents on the floor. Out came a small pile of clear plastic discs. She lined them up in fours, counting as she went. "Four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four!" She was in eighth grade, mind you, so this was, I hoped, not the purpose of the purchase. "I thought you already knew how to count," I offered, in another lame rejoinder. "It's for my science-fair project," she said. "They're my cultures!"

In science, cultures are designed to grow things. You have, no doubt, had a swab poked up your nose for a COVID test–– or something similar for a step culture. Where does the swab go afterward? Into a liquid or gel, where the ingredients in the culture interact with the ingredients on the swab and produce a predictable effect.

Cultures can be good or bad, but not in the way you'd think. A culture is good if it grows things. It's doing its job. That is why Peter Drucker's quip that culture eats strategy for breakfast matters: he was underscoring the value of having something that can grow multiple things of value over having one thing of value. A culture is bad if it doesn't grow things. Like my daughter's project, you have to create the conditions for growth, not leave the dishes in the garage with no light or let them get contaminated.

Not a substance you dunk people in

An organization's culture is made visible by the behaviors, artifacts, and routines people experience consistently. They are immersed in this milieu of human activity and adjust their own behavior according to the cues they get and the rewards or consequences that follow. New employees go through an orientation where they learn what is appropriate and what is not, whether you design it for them or not. Culture is a dynamic, complex orchestration by a group of people over time. Being complex and dynamic makes it hard to manage, but it's not magic or mysterious. It's understandable, observable, and shapeable.

As a shapeable outcome, culture is a craft, like carpentry, pottery, or textiles. It is part people science, part leadership technique, part art. It's a material you can shape with intention, skill, and experience to create a good outcome. Culture is also a craft in another other sense: a vessel that carries your organization toward its goal. Like a boat, built with the right characteristics for your people to travel to your north star. When the conditions around you change, you may need to build a new boat.

Mandate or Recipe

At Hulu we had a culture manifesto called "What Defines Hulu," written by our CEO, Jason Kilar. It positioned us as consumer-centric and technology-driven, in contrast to the stereotypical Hollywood approach which he deemed to be bogged down by big egos and endless deal-making. Hulu was a joint venture between three giants of the entertainment industry, and when it was first announced as NewCo one snarky reporter nicknamed it ClownCo. The world did not think Hollywood was likely to disrupt itself, so Jason had bulletin-board fuel for the early team.

Over time the original manifesto got out of sync with our desire to be innovative and collaborative. The original idea was to identify the key ingredients that would guide our culture and allow the team to bring it to life. So it was always intended more as a recipe than a mandate. We had grown from a small team of challengers in cast-off office space to a complex, multinational company trying to attract the best talent on the planet, and we needed ideas from everyone. So we evolved the manifesto through a new-hire orientation activity called "What Defines Hulu Now," in which each monthly cohort of Nulugans interviewed people across the company and made a short video of what they found, screened at an all-hands with a Q&A afterward. We memorialized the original on a plaque in the lobby, next to the photo wall.

The photo wall was inspired by the offices of Wieden+Kennedy. Every new hire got a personal photo shoot soon after arriving, with props that represented their whole selves, so we could avoid glamour shots and stiff corporate portraits. The montage is an extraordinary exhibit of hidden skills, passions, and hobbies, and as the company grew it stretched down two long corridors. We thought of it as a cultural artifact of our strategy to build a pixel-perfect viewing experience: to get a great overall effect you focus on the individual parts, then step back and see the whole.

The name Hulu comes from a Chinese word for gourd. In ancient times gourds were hollowed out to hold precious things; doctors carried medicine in them. When our first employees neared their five-year anniversaries, we made a new kind of hulu, a wooden box filled with handwritten notes from colleagues and friends at work. Those notes are the precious things. Eight years after I left, I saw someone on LinkedIn celebrating their fifth anniversary with a photo of the box. I asked in the comments whether it still had the notes inside. It did.

Paper towels

At Hulu we had extensive discussions about chairs, plants, parties, and paper-towel dispensers. What's more important, hygiene or frugality? Just how easy should it be to dry your hands? Should we spend $3,500 on a Dyson Airblade, or deal with the finicky plastic cogs and rough paper of a standard wall dispenser? Why not just put a roll on the counter? We were a company that delivered a pixel-perfect entertainment experience. Shouldn't our employees' bathroom experience match?

Occasionally Jason would dig into a seemingly random item like this to stimulate a lively discussion about values. It was sometimes surprising, bizarre, and even annoying, but it built alignment through tangible artifacts of our decisions. Senior leaders are more visible than anyone else, and his intense focus on a minor detail was a way to make a value concrete and specific so everyone could grasp it. With relentless attention to behaviors that represented our values, the culture activated the strategy, and the company grew from zero to a billion dollars in annual revenue in six years.

The simplest question a leader can ask about culture is: are the decisions we make adding up to an experience in which people behave successfully? From that position of curiosity it's easy to observe and measure your culture, and easy to adjust it. The problem isn't that culture is hard to measure. It's that our values are not always clear or aligned. Most values are beneficial, so anyone would agree a list of them sounds good. Is frugality a good value? Sure, until it prevents an investment that would have paid back double. Values alone are not culture. They are a forcing function for dialogue and better decisions, and if left unmanaged even a virtue can be twisted into a negative force.

After studying thousands of company cultures, Charles O'Reilly and his colleagues at Stanford found that strong cultures share high consensus and high intensity around one or two central norms, held so firmly that members will tell one another when they aren't living up to them. Weak cultures are diluted across many norms of similar, average intensity. If everything is important, nothing is important.

So here is a working definition for creating culture that works for your organization. Culture is a complete system of organizational elements that work in concert to demonstrate an intentional focus on certain values. Build it around your context and customer, not the founder's first pitch deck. And then, like any craft, keep your hands on the materials and shape them into the form that works best.