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Dharmesh Shah: Relentless Attention to Culture

Name: Dharmesh Shah: Relentless Attention to Culture
Uploaded: 2016-02-13T00:02:47+00:00
Duration: 54 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this talk, Dharmesh Shah challenges the common belief that culture should be left unspoken, arguing that the opposite is true: culture must be…

13 Feb 2016 · 1 min

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In this talk, Dharmesh Shah challenges the common belief that culture should be left unspoken, arguing that the opposite is true: culture must be discussed constantly and iteratively. He explains that as a company grows, new employees do not automatically absorb the existing culture, so leaders must continuously define, communicate, and refine cultural values. Shah likens culture to software rather than hardware—dynamic, updatable, and subject to regular iteration—suggesting that organizations should treat cultural development as an ongoing product effort rather than a static set of founder‑defined rules.

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First thing you learn this, I kind of hinted at this in the beginning parts, is that, like, the immediate reaction is like, okay, well, the first rule of culture is you do not talk about culture. Right? That was the immediate reaction I got from the employee base. What I've learned since then is in order for it to work, you have to talk about it incessantly. Like, incessantly. You have to keep like, this is what it is. Because as you're growing, you think that, like, oh, well, everybody kind of gets this. Like, we've been around. No, they don't. I guarantee you they don't get it. And as you're adding new people, so you have to keep talking about it first, decide what it is, and then communicate it constantly. The other one, this is back to software. Some people, it's like, okay, well, these are our values and this is what it is, and this is the way it's going to be, because our founders said so 20 years ago, or whatever it is that doesn't work. Culture is more like software than hardware. Less, I guess, from a parallel perspective, you should be iterating on it and building it just like you would a product.