What it is
Ben Thompson describes culture as the accumulated result of a company’s successful decisions. It’s what lets people act without asking permission every time, which is how a company scales. But when the world changes and those old decisions stop working, the same culture becomes a straitjacket.
What a company makes, and how it makes it, is tied up with how it’s structured. You can’t change one without the other.
How it shows up for me
I’ve seen both sides. A team where “the way we do things” saved everyone hours, and the same team two years later defending a process nobody could explain anymore. When I hear “that’s just how we do it here,” I ask which decision that was, and whether it still works.