Gardens, Gravity, and Gods

An Operator's Notes on Corporate Culture

Hi friends, with this article I’m trying something new and including an article voiceover as well as a companion ‘podcast’ to this article for those who may want an alternative take to the written word. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Culture shapes companies like gravity shapes planets - invisibly but inescapably. You don’t feel it until your path is locked. Once you’re in orbit, it’s hard to course-correct. That’s why culture can’t be a vibe. It has to be a system. Left unspoken, it still pulls—just not always in the direction you want to go. The only way to change its force is to first understand it.

As entrepreneurship booms and founders build their own corporate 'nations', we've exhausted ourselves talking about what culture should be, neglecting the practical mechanics of how to build it well.

Culture forms—whether you design it or not. And once it takes shape, it pulls every decision, every interaction, every new hire into its orbit. That’s why naming culture matters. Not to make it pretty. But to make it legible—and therefore shapeable. What you can’t describe, you can’t redirect.

I’m not here to define the perfect culture, or hand out a toolkit. This isn’t a how-to. It’s a field guide. A reflection on what I’ve seen, what holds up under pressure, and what patterns emerge when companies grow faster than their culture can evolve. These are notes - just notes - from inside the system—shared not to prescribe, but to reveal. They’re not sequenced for symmetry—just held together by the thread of lived experience.

Culture can be hard to define—but unmistakable when felt. For me, the work of articulating it isn’t academic; it’s practical. You can’t build what you can’t describe. As a builder, I’ve learned that the act of naming culture sharpens how we shape it—and that shaping it well is the rarest kind of competitive advantage.

In all, I’ve learned that culture cannot be copied. True culture is grown from experience, not installed. It must be tended to and not strangled. It may begin with a founder’s/leader’s intent, but it doesn't stay theirs for long.

Here’s where culture starts to show itself—quietly, and often in contradiction to what’s been written down.

On Recognition and Reality

Ask someone about their company's culture and you'll likely hear "integrity," "family," or "innovation" recited like a memorized prayer - in many cases unsuccessfully. But culture isn't in the saying - it's in the doing. It's in how teams handle missed deadlines, how they celebrate wins, how they navigate disagreements.

Culture manifests in three layers. First, there’s the surface—what companies say, from mission statements to values posters. Then comes the system—what actually gets measured, rewarded, or promoted. Beneath both lies the subconscious—the often-unspoken beliefs and instincts that drive decisions in crucial moments. Most culture work fails in the gap between these layers: when what’s said diverges from what’s done, and when what’s done isn’t what actually matters.

That the culture could not be ‘retained and recited, does not mean that it doesn't exist. Culture exists whether intentionally shaped or not. The question is never whether a culture exists, but whether the culture that people’s daily actions nurture is the one your organization needs.

Culture reveals itself most clearly in moments of tension. The clash between stated values and actual decisions illuminates true culture more clearly than any handbook.

Organizations often mistake artifacts for culture – the carefully crafted values statements, the office design, the onboarding documents. But culture lives in practice, in the small moments of choice. It's whether people actually use those meeting rooms as intended, whether the values are invoked in difficult decisions, whether the shortcuts people take align with or undermine the stated ideals.

The most telling cultural moments often come at 6 PM: Who stays? Who goes? Who apologizes for leaving? Who quietly judges? These unspoken patterns reveal the most truth. In fact, the more a company writes down its culture, the more it risks fossilizing it. Yet without documentation, culture becomes purely interpretive.

On Time and Revelation

Culture reveals itself in layers. The first month shows you the surface – the rituals, the tools, the obvious patterns. The second month reveals the tensions – where the ideal and real diverge. But it's the third month when you start to see the deep structure – the underlying assumptions that drive decisions.

This layered revelation explains why quick cultural fixes almost always fail. You can't change what you haven't yet seen, and you can't see it all at once.

On Time and Transformation

Early-stage companies have a unique opportunity to shape culture intentionally, but this window closes faster than most founders realize. By the time you hit say, 50 employees - as the common adage goes - cultural patterns have already begun to calcify. You can only fine-tune culture from this point onwards.

There's something almost religious about how culture operates in the strongest companies. They have their creation myths (origin stories), rituals (all-hands meetings), sacred texts (founding documents), prophets (veteran employees who "get it"), and heresies (behaviors that violate core values). The difference between vibrant and stagnant cultures often lies in whether they treat these elements as doctrine or dialogue.

As companies mature, culture evolves at different speeds across an organization. Engineering may still move with startup speed while Finance operates like an enterprise. This tension, though uncomfortable, drives necessary conversations about which cultural elements to preserve and which to evolve.

The best cultures don’t feel engineered—they feel inevitable. But that “inevitability” is a trick of memory. It’s what happens when small decisions compound, when habits turn into defaults, and when people stop needing to explain how things work because they just do. Ease is never accidental, it is earned. It’s the product of hundreds of shared choices, micro-adjustments, unspoken agreements—repeated until they become instinct. What feels natural is almost always the result of something deeply intentional.

On Rebels and Rebellion

The relationship between companies and their rebels traces a familiar arc: courtship, conflict, and often, rejection. Companies eagerly recruit for “entrepreneurial spirit” and “innovative thinking,” only to later treat those same qualities like organizational antibodies—labeling them as threats, isolating them, and ultimately pushing them out.

Some organizations develop a peculiar taste for what might be called decorative disruption. They love hiring rebels as the face of change—so long as they stay cute and contained. They want the edge without the risk. The cool hair, not the hard questions. These are the companies that want to appear bold while keeping the core untouched. In time, the rebel either becomes part of the aesthetic, part of the problem, or a misfit solution that never quite sticks.

Culture behaves like an immune system - it helps organizations recognize and reject threats to their essential character. But like an immune system, it can become either too weak (unable to maintain coherence) or too strong (rejecting necessary change). When a startup veteran joins a large corporation promising to "shake things up." Initially celebrated, they often end up isolated or exited, labeled as "not a culture fit" - a diagnosis that says more about the organization's autoimmune response than the individual's capability.

The best rebels aren't trying to burn the house down; they're trying to renovate it. But renovation makes noise, creates mess, and requires temporary discomfort - three things that organizations often resist even when they know change is necessary.

The tragedy plays out predictably: Companies hire for transformation but reward conformity. They celebrate challenging the status quo in theory but punish it in practice. The very qualities that make rebels valuable - their fresh perspectives, their willingness to question assumptions, their hunger for improvement - become listed as development areas in their performance reviews.

Wise organizations learn to look where rebels point rather than shooting the messenger.

On Cultural Debt and Equity

Like technical debt, cultural debt accumulates in small compromises. A missed one-on-one here, an overlooked value violation there. And just like technical debt, it compounds with interest - small cultural compromises grow into major dysfunctions over time. The startup that overlooks aggressive behavior from a high performer soon finds that aggression normalized across teams.

Cultural equity, by contrast, builds through consistent deposits: the hard conversation had at the right moment, the principle upheld despite pressure, the time invested in proper onboarding despite urgent deadlines. These investments compound too, creating resilience that becomes invaluable during a crisis.

This tension between debt and equity plays out most visibly as companies scale. Each new process introduced to handle growth creates both possibility and peril. The casual "got a minute?" that once solved problems becomes a scheduled sync. The quick product iteration becomes a structured release cycle. And before you know it, the team is rallying against this as ‘bureaucracy’. But process is necessary for scale, therefore each formalization must be treated as a cultural investment, not just an operational necessity. A good process should amplify good culture, not replace it. Think of it like writing down a family recipe: The goal isn't to replace the chef's intuition but to make their wisdom accessible to others.

The art lies in knowing which cultural elements to systematize and which to let breathe.

On Language and Power

Corporate language carries hidden currents that shape behavior more than any official policy. “Strong leadership" often describes traditionally masculine behaviors, which when embodied by a female, can create unpredictable challenges. "Let's take this offline" can mean anything from "good idea, let's discuss" to "never mention this again." The fluent readers of these subtexts often gain unofficial power that no org chart captures.

Those who naturally fit the dominant culture often don't recognize it as a privilege. Like fish not seeing water, they experience corporate culture as neutral rather than as a specific cultural construct. Newer employees who are yet to or cannot fit in, may pay a constant "cultural tax" - the extra energy spent code-switching, translating their natural work style into the dominant cultural language. Like any tax, this reduces their available energy for actual work.

Meetings are a revelation here. Listen carefully - not for what's said, but for what phrases cause people to shift in their seats. Also, watch how bad news travels upward, how mistakes are discussed, how newcomers' ideas are received.

On Cultural Translation

Some people develop an almost supernatural ability to code-switch between organizational dialects. I certainly don’t. They understand that "move fast and break things" means something entirely different at a startup versus a mature company, even when the words are identical. This translation skill becomes increasingly valuable as careers become more fluid, global, and unpredictable.

Practical markers of strong cultural translation:

• The ability to predict unwritten meeting norms

• Understanding when to push and when to wait

• Knowing which victories to celebrate and which to downplay

• Recognizing the difference between stated and actual decision paths

Cultural literacy can't be rushed, especially for those looking to understand an organization before joining. It develops through attention, through countless small observations and adjustments. So, inquiries cannot be shallow and insights have to come from the right culture custodian so you can get an accurate picture. In the end, it's not about finding the "right" culture, but about understanding the nuances of different cultural ecosystems and how to move thoughtfully between them.

In the End, a Garden.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of any culture is what people feel they need permission for. The distance between what's technically allowed and what feels permissible marks the gap between official and actual culture. Some organizations require permission for sending all-staff emails; in others, junior employees regularly challenge CEO decisions in public forums. Neither approach is inherently right, but the difference matters enormously in practice.

Culture, like a garden, doesn’t shout when it’s thriving. But you feel it. In the ease of decisions. In the absence of fear. In the way people show up when they don’t have to.

A special shout-out to my gang from WOP XIII - CansaFis Foote Sandhya Domah Anna Reich, Deborah Ineye Olaniyan and Mary Elzey for reading early drafts of this essay 🤗