Alan Weiss’s Monday Morning Memo® – 8/17/26
It’s interesting how everything winds up being part of “culture” these days, as if we’re all graduate students in anthropology. We think of good cultures and bad cultures, or rewarding cultures and toxic cultures.
The etymology of “culture” relates to the Latin for “cultivate.” It referred to agronomy. In the 16thCentury it morphed into the cultivation of the mind, and in the 19th Century became a descriptor for entire groups of people. We now apply it to specific organizations, religions, academic institutions, even neighborhoods, and non-profits. “The culture of the organization frustrated creativity and honesty.”
I’m a reductionist, not someone as skilled in fine tuning and complexity as a luthier. Thus, I’ll suggest to you a simple definition which I believe to be all-embracing: Culture is that set of beliefs which governs behavior. That definition appears in a lot of books. (I know, because I wrote all of them.)
If you seek to change a culture, you have to change the beliefs which are governing behavior. Not the pseudo-beliefs stated in the annual report or on the hallway posters, but rather the beliefs reflected by the actual behavior of the people with influence. (I once ended an argument with my client, the CEO of a hospital, who maintained that the organization’s values were obvious to anyone, despite the fact that morale was very low. I asked him if he thought people believed what they read on the walls or what the saw in the halls. Après-enlightenment, I corrected things for him for $120,000, which was a bargain.)
So for everyone who feels that culture is pushing their buttons and pulling their strings and creating immovable roadblocks, let’s perform a volte-face. We can change the behavior of people we influence, directly or indirectly, by instantiating our beliefs and values through our own actions. If you’re “customer-driven,” for example, then you take customer calls personally, you don’t automate or delegate the responses.
And if you truly want to change behavior, you don’t apply coercion or normative pressure. You demonstrate that the new behaviors are in everyone’s self-interest and you constantly exemplify them.
In other words, you clearly say and demonstrate, “Follow me.”
A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people. —Mahatma Gandhi
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. —Ray Bradbury
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts. —Charles Darwin
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. —Thomas Wolfe
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