6 min

Company Culture: How to Stop it Before it Spreads WorldatWork's NSFW Podcast with Charles Epstein

    • Management

Culture is a good and important thing, particularly these days with the workforce spread out and stretched thin. It’s inauthentic culture that’s problematic -  something that’s cooked up by company leadership that doesn’t survive contact with reality, or by an outside consultant who parachutes in and after a month’s time distills it into its purest powdered form. I describe my encounter with just such a consultant, or luftmensch: an unserious person seriously attempting to sell air. It would take me years to see and value the difference between a company culture created in perfect laboratory conditions vs. one that emerged organically and adapted to changing reality.     

Culture is a good and important thing, particularly these days with the workforce spread out and stretched thin. It’s inauthentic culture that’s problematic -  something that’s cooked up by company leadership that doesn’t survive contact with reality, or by an outside consultant who parachutes in and after a month’s time distills it into its purest powdered form. I describe my encounter with just such a consultant, or luftmensch: an unserious person seriously attempting to sell air. It would take me years to see and value the difference between a company culture created in perfect laboratory conditions vs. one that emerged organically and adapted to changing reality.     

6 min