Culture & Employee Experience
Designing culture intentionally — rituals, values, listening systems, and signs you’re losing it.
For: Founders, HR, leadership
Designing Culture Intentionally: From Posters on the Wall to Operating Behaviors
Every company has a culture. Most are accidents. This is how to design culture as an operating system — values that behave like rules, rituals that ship…
Psychological Safety as a System: How to Engineer the Conditions for Truth, Speed and Learning
Amy Edmondson's research at HBS and Google's Project Aristotle converged on the same finding: psychological safety is the single biggest predictor of team…
Employee Listening Systems: From Annual Surveys to a Continuous Feedback Loop That Closes
Annual engagement surveys are dying — slow, low signal and rarely acted on. Modern listening is a system: census surveys, pulse, lifecycle, always-on, and…
Rituals that build culture — beyond the offsite
Why daily and weekly rituals shape culture more than annual events, the research on collective effervescence, and the 7 ritual patterns that scale.
Culture debt — what it is, how to measure it, how to pay it down
The cultural equivalent of technical debt, the four debt types, and the only intervention that consistently moves the needle: removing people who model the…
Employee experience as product discipline
Treating internal experience the way product teams treat customer experience — journey maps, moments-that-matter analysis, and the EX team org structure that…
Values that do work — past the wall poster
Why most stated values don't shape behavior, the structural tests of a working value, and the cadence that keeps values alive past the rollout.
Broken HR advice #1: 'People are our greatest asset'
Why this 70-year-old phrase quietly corrodes trust — and what mature people leaders say instead.
Broken HR advice #2: 'We're a family'
Families don't fire each other. Why this framing produces worse outcomes for everyone — including the loyalists.
Broken HR advice #8: 'Quiet quitting is the problem'
It isn't. It's a symptom. Why naming the problem 'quiet quitting' moves the responsibility to the wrong person.
Case study — the Netflix culture deck, 15 years on (what to copy, what to leave)
The 2009 Netflix culture deck is the most influential HR document of the last 20 years. Half its prescriptions made companies stronger.