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Learnings

You can learn business.  My journey building M5 was all about accumulating knowledge to be a better entrepreneur, manager, and leader.  This blog is to help me keep some of the notes from that trip, and sharpen my thinking for the next one.

What the Hell is Company Culture?

12/11/2013

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David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite authors, gave a graduation speech called, “This is Water.” Cleaned up and shortened for youtube (worth the 9 minutes), Wallace starts by telling about an older fish greeting two young fish, “Good morning boys, how’s the water?” After he swims off, one young fish says to the other, “What the hell is water?”
I get lots of agreement and nods when I quote Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  Culture is what every profiled CEO in the NYT’s “Corner Office” talks about.  Culture is what the Admiral I met on the USS Harry Truman waxed on about as the key to his success.  But often, people don’t know what it really means, or how to work on it, even though it is everywhere.

And I didn't either.  Jack Daly once challenged me, “Do you have a culture by default or a culture by design?”  “Um,” I thought, in 2003.

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