Asher's Blog

Culture is the memory of repeated decisions.

We have all heard that culture is important. The idea appears in conversations about nations, families, communities and companies because any group of people eventually develops a way of behaving that feels normal. That normality affects how people communicate, respond to authority, resolve conflict, treat failure and decide what deserves recognition.

Organisations often try to define culture through carefully selected values, onboarding presentations and statements displayed on office walls. These things can be useful because they give people language for the kind of company the founders intend to build. However, culture is not established when a value is announced. It is established when people observe the same principle guiding decisions repeatedly enough that they begin to expect it.

Employees remember what actually happens.

They remember whether the company kept its word when money became tight. They remember whether a leader accepted responsibility or shifted blame. They remember what happened to someone who took a thoughtful risk that did not work, and what happened to someone who produced a good number by behaving badly. They remember who received praise, who was promoted, which mistakes were forgiven and which standards disappeared whenever they became inconvenient.

These memories become instructions. Over time, people stop asking what the company says it values because they have learned what the company repeatedly chooses.

That is culture.

Culture is what happens without a meeting

Some decisions receive deliberate attention. The leadership team discusses them, reviews alternatives and communicates the final direction to the organisation. But much of culture is formed through behaviour that people barely notice while it is happening.

It is formed in how colleagues greet and appreciate one another, how quickly people respond when another team needs help, how managers speak when a deadline has been missed and how leaders behave when the company is under pressure. It is visible in whether difficult information travels upward quickly or is hidden until it can no longer be ignored.

Repeated behaviour eventually becomes automatic. If leaders consistently ask questions before assigning blame, people learn to surface problems earlier. If every mistake receives an angry reaction, employees learn to protect themselves before protecting the company. If meetings begin late and decisions are rarely documented, the organisation learns that time and clarity are not genuinely important, regardless of what the employee handbook says.

This is why culture can develop even when nobody is consciously trying to create it. Every organisation has a culture because repeated decisions continue teaching people how the place works. The only question is whether that culture has been shaped deliberately or allowed to emerge from convenience, personalities and unresolved dysfunction.

Founders should care about the ordinary moments because those moments are repeated more frequently than major speeches. A founder may discuss excellence at a general meeting once every quarter, but the team observes every week whether incomplete work is challenged and whether careful work receives recognition. The repeated experience will always be more persuasive than the occasional declaration.

New employees discover the real culture quickly

Many businesses explain their culture during onboarding. The new employee receives documents describing collaboration, innovation, ownership, customer focus and integrity. Within the first few weeks, however, the employee begins to compare the stated culture with the operating culture.

It does not take two months to discover the difference. In the first week or two, a perceptive employee is already gathering evidence.

The employee notices whether people can question a manager, whether departments share information and whether promises made during recruitment are honoured. They observe how decisions are made, how success is discussed and whether a person receives support after asking for help. They learn whether “ownership” means genuine authority or merely responsibility without the freedom to act.

If the company says it values openness but leaders punish disagreement, the employee learns to remain quiet. If the company says teams should collaborate but performance systems reward only individual outcomes, the employee learns to protect personal metrics. If the company says customers come first but internal convenience repeatedly wins, the employee learns that customer focus is a marketing phrase.

New employees do not learn culture primarily by memorising the values. They learn it by studying what established employees have learned to do in order to survive and succeed.

This means onboarding cannot be separated from management. A polished introduction may create a good first impression, but the behaviour of the employee’s immediate leader will determine what becomes believable. The company must ensure that the culture being taught is the culture managers are equipped and expected to demonstrate.

Pressure reveals which values are real

Culture becomes clearest when the organisation is under pressure. When there is enough time, money and goodwill, many companies can appear patient, generous and thoughtful. Scarcity tests whether those qualities are principles or conveniences.

How does the company behave when revenue falls, a major customer is unhappy or an important project fails? Does communication become more honest or more secretive? Do leaders become clearer, or begin changing priorities without explanation? Are employees treated with dignity when difficult decisions must be made?

Pressure does not always create a new culture. It often reveals the culture that was already present but less visible.

A founder who wants a culture of trust must understand that trust is built most powerfully during difficult periods. Paying salaries when promised, communicating early about changes and refusing to hide bad news teach the team that leadership can be believed. If the company needs to reduce its workforce, handling the process with honesty, respect and fairness becomes part of the institution’s memory.

People may forget the exact language in a culture document, but they will remember how the company behaved when it had an excuse to abandon its values.

This does not mean leadership must pretend everything is fine. Culture is not protected by false optimism. Employees should receive an honest understanding of the situation and what is required of them. The standard is not that leaders must eliminate uncertainty; it is that they should not create unnecessary uncertainty through inconsistency, secrecy or avoidable panic.

A culture of innovation is a culture of response

Founders often say they want innovation, but innovation is not created merely by asking employees to submit ideas. The company’s response to experimentation teaches people whether taking intelligent risks is genuinely safe.

Every experiment contains the possibility of failure. If the organisation celebrates a successful risk but humiliates the person whose thoughtful experiment produces a negative result, employees will quickly learn that the safest strategy is to recommend only ideas with predictable outcomes. The company will continue describing itself as innovative while its people quietly avoid uncertainty.

This does not require founders to celebrate waste, poor preparation or repeated carelessness. There is a meaningful difference between a well-designed experiment that reveals an incorrect assumption and an undisciplined decision that places the company at unnecessary risk.

A healthy culture asks whether the risk was proportionate, whether the hypothesis was clear, whether the exposure was limited and whether the result created useful learning. When these conditions are present, an unsuccessful experiment may still be valuable because it prevents the company from making the same mistake at a larger scale.

The organisation should also examine how it reacts when an opportunity goes south. Does it immediately look for someone to punish, or first attempt to understand what happened? Does it document the lesson and improve the system, or simply tell people to be more careful? Does it distinguish between a wrong outcome and a poor decision-making process?

The answers define the company’s appetite for risk more accurately than any statement about innovation.

A business that wants to innovate must create a culture in which people can challenge assumptions, run affordable experiments and report disappointing results honestly. At the same time, the company must be clear about risks that cannot be treated casually, particularly where customers’ money, data, safety or regulatory obligations are involved.

Innovation needs permission to explore, but it also needs boundaries that protect the company from fatal mistakes.

Rewards tell people what the company means

Culture becomes tangible through reward. People pay close attention to who receives recognition, promotion, compensation and greater responsibility because these decisions reveal what the organisation truly considers valuable.

If a leader achieves a target while damaging collaboration, and the company rewards only the number, everyone learns that teamwork is secondary. If an employee quietly prevents a major problem but receives no recognition because the work was invisible, people learn that preventing failure matters less than appearing impressive after a crisis. If a high performer behaves without integrity and remains protected because the company needs their revenue, integrity becomes optional for sufficiently valuable people.

The reverse is also true. When the company recognises someone for taking responsibility, helping another team or admitting a mistake before it becomes expensive, it makes those behaviours easier for others to repeat.

Founders should therefore examine whether their reward systems match the culture they describe. Performance cannot be limited to individual output if the company depends on collective outcomes. A person whose work delays another team has affected the organisation’s result, even if their own task list appears complete. A leader should not receive an excellent rating for achieving a departmental objective while preventing another department from achieving an objective on which the company depends.

What gets measured shapes attention, but what gets rewarded shapes memory.

Language carries culture

The words people repeatedly use influence how an organisation thinks. Language can encourage ownership or create distance from responsibility. It can help teams describe problems clearly or allow them to hide behind vague explanations.

This is why founders should think about the language they want employees to encounter when they join. What words describe customers? How do teams speak about failure? Do people say that another department is blocking them, or do they explain the dependency and what they have done to resolve it? Does “I have completed my task” end the conversation, even when the intended outcome has not been achieved?

Language should not become an exercise in policing harmless expressions. The objective is to recognise that repeated words can preserve repeated assumptions. If a phrase consistently represents helplessness, carelessness or an attitude the company does not want to normalise, leadership may reasonably decide to replace it with language that encourages a better response.

The important part is to explain why. People should understand the belief behind the language rather than memorising a list of permitted words. A cultural rule becomes stronger when employees can apply its principle to situations the founder never anticipated.

Choose the critical few behaviours

Culture is too broad to build effectively through a long catalogue of attractive values. A startup should identify the few behaviours most critical to the kind of business it is building and the risks it must manage.

A company handling payroll and compliance may place exceptional emphasis on trust, accuracy, ownership and the timely fulfilment of obligations. A research company may need intellectual honesty and rigorous experimentation. A logistics business may depend on reliability, speed and frontline judgment. The values should emerge from what the organisation must repeatedly do well in order to keep its promises.

One of the things I have learned as a startup founder is to think through the critical areas of the business and ask what I most want people to understand when they come to work with us. What should they see in the first week? How should we communicate? Which words express the way we think? What behaviour should receive recognition, and what pattern should carry a consequence?

Selecting the critical few does not mean other good qualities are unimportant. It means the company understands that culture requires concentration. If everything is declared a value, people will struggle to know which principle should guide a difficult decision.

The critical behaviours should then be integrated into hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, promotion and leadership development. Candidates should encounter them during recruitment. New employees should see examples rather than only definitions. Managers should receive feedback on whether their teams experience the stated culture. Leaders should be evaluated more strictly because their repeated decisions carry greater cultural weight.

Culture becomes deliberate when the same priorities appear throughout the employee’s relationship with the company.

Founders are always teaching

Founders shape culture even when they are not speaking about it. People observe where the founder spends time, which details receive attention, whose advice influences a decision and how the founder reacts when challenged.

If the founder demands accountability but never admits a personal error, accountability becomes something exercised downward. If the founder asks employees to collaborate but allows senior leaders to protect information, the organisation learns that status creates exemptions. If the founder encourages thoughtful risk-taking but becomes angry whenever an outcome is disappointing, caution will spread.

Consistency does not require perfection. A founder will occasionally respond badly, communicate unclearly or make a decision that contradicts the intended culture. What matters then is whether the founder can acknowledge it and correct the pattern. An honest correction can itself strengthen culture because it demonstrates that the standards apply to leadership too.

The founder’s behaviour becomes disproportionately important because people use it to interpret ambiguity. When written policies do not cover a situation, employees ask, consciously or otherwise, what leadership would reward. The founder is therefore always teaching the organisation how to decide.

Culture must become larger than the founder

Although founders begin the cultural process, a mature culture cannot depend on the founder witnessing every decision. The company needs leaders who can interpret its values intelligently and apply them to new situations.

Stories can help. Organisations remember moments when someone protected a customer, admitted an expensive mistake or helped another team achieve an important outcome. Repeating these stories gives values a practical form. Systems also help because they ensure that the organisation’s intentions survive changes in personalities and pressure.

Yet culture should never become rigid tradition. Some repeated decisions may have formed habits that were once useful and are now limiting the company. As the market, technology and organisation change, leaders should ask whether a cultural norm still serves the mission or merely feels familiar.

The company must be able to preserve its principles while improving their expression.

Decide what the organisation should remember

Culture is not built in one retreat, one handbook or one speech. It is accumulated through decisions that become examples, examples that become expectations and expectations that eventually become instinct.

This is why leaders must pay attention to repetition. How do we respond when something goes wrong? How do we treat people under pressure? What happens when an intelligent risk fails? Which behaviours receive reward, and which ones do we repeatedly allow despite saying they are unacceptable?

The organisation is remembering the answers even when leadership is not.

Founders can be intentional by choosing the critical behaviours, explaining why they matter and connecting them to real decisions. But intention becomes culture only through consistency. People need to see the values survive pressure, inconvenience and the temptation to make exceptions for powerful individuals.

Eventually, employees should be able to make good decisions without asking the founder because the organisation has developed a reliable memory of what it believes.

Culture is that memory. It is what yesterday’s decisions teach people to do today, and what today’s decisions permit the company to become tomorrow.