Ideology and Company Culture
What is company culture? It it more than a combination of perks and team activities? We intuitively know that there is more to it than that, but how much more? All of it.
There are three levels of company culture, in descending order of influence: ideological, organizational, and practitioner. Ideological addresses the sense of who the company is and what it means to belong to it. Organizational is about how the company communicates and collaborates inside and outside itself, and is best framed as a question about organizational developmental stage (see also Business Models by Developmental Stage in this section). Practitioner refers to the conventional practices and priorities that regulate everyday problem solving, goal setting, and decision making, and is broadly framed in terms of lifecycle cultures of optimization vs cultures of innovation. In this article, we will consider the ideological level as without it you cannot have motivated and engaged employees.
As individuals, we belong to and are lured by many social groups — family, friends, current employers, future employers, clubs, religions, politics, class, neighborhood, nation — all making demands on our values, time, and resources.
A primary job of the company culture is to raise the priority of the company as a social group as much as possible among those competing groups. How can it do that?
Company culture needs to connect with the larger purpose of human life. The purpose of human life, and the source of anyone’s ultimate happiness, is in sacrificing a part of themselves for the sake of their band and their tribe, in return for community belonging, reputation, and reward. In all cultures, everywhere, a person is only really respected and honored and feels self-worth, to the degree that they face some downside for the sake of others. Heroes, knights, gladiators, warriors, prophets, entrepreneurs, maverick scientists, whistleblowers, rebels, dissidents, revolutionaries…
Therefore, company culture must transmute the travail of work into a story of self-sacrifice for the higher and nobler flourishing of the group as the savior of their customer community.
Members must feel that they are helping — really that they are saving — their customer community from something bad. The top end of this spectrum is actually laying down your life to save your community, which is why firefighters are portrayed as archetypal heroes in modern urban communities. Even armies — especially armies — need to operate within a structure like this. Politicians who rip armies from this context to fight foreign wars without a soldier’s ability to feel the tangible threat to their family and homeland are really forcing heroes to become mercenary murderers and damn them to a tormented conscience ever after.
Social groups create belonging, membership, and identity through reciprocal and hierarchical indebtedness, which for companies must start with a candidate feeling special and lucky at getting hired. On an absolute moral level, we are all equal, but a society and a culture is created by networks of feelings beholden to each other, and beholden to our teams and managers, and they to the executive, and ultimately, to a our customer community. That is what it means to be “honored” to serve — its our response to the gratitude we receive from the community when we contribute to something greater than ourselves. Nonprofits and other volunteering groups that do not work for profit are driven by this motive entirely. Think how much more commitment and productively your company could generate if it could tap into this primal instinct to help your ingroup. “Culture is contribution.” Most startups begin as volunteer operations.
There’s a lot to work out here, but it should be enough to realize that what passes for “culture” in most companies is superficial and pathetic and unlikely to motivate people or give them meaning.
