Defining your Company Culture

In last week’s poll most people voted for diving deeper into how Values and Principles can be defined and used to help improve decentralised product decisions. But before we jump straight into values we need to talk about company culture.

Culture can often seem esoteric but it impacts everything from information flow to people's behaviour. We are going to start by first defining the different types of corporate culture because you need to understand your culture and how things really operate before you can successfully in implementing new Values and Principles.

Ron Westrum defined three types of corporate culture:

• Pathological - information is power

• Bureaucratic - follow the process

• Generative - solve the problems

I dive deeper into the three different types, including examples, in the article on Company Culture below.

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Video of the Week: Building Design Systems that Work for Design and Dev

Parisa offers practical insights on securing stakeholder buy-in, fostering strong team partnerships, and balancing consistency with flexibility in large-scale applications. Through real-life examples, she breaks down how using an object-oriented design approach can help create scalable, reusable patterns that make collaboration smoother. Don’t miss it!👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: What area would you like us to focus on next week?

32.26% of people voted for Values & Principles, beating out Strategic Context in second place with 25.16%.

We also received a great comment asking for advice on how to help their companies to define the values and principles if they don’t exist. This is tricky because you really needs to have buy-in from the top down otherwise you end up with meaningless pleasantries that are put up on a poster on a wall but then ignored by everyone. But it is a great point so I’ll try to create actionable suggestions over the coming weeks as we dive deeper into Values and Principles.