Summary
In this live podcast recording, Joe and his co-host explore what makes company culture thrive. Joe argues that while companies can succeed with toxic culture, improving culture reliably produces 1.5x to 10x better results. At the atomic level, a company is just people’s relationships and people’s decisions — so even small improvements in how decisions are made or how meetings feel create massive leverage.
Joe identifies the root of all cultural dysfunction as two unspoken questions: “Who’s in charge?” and “How much do you love me?” — meaning clarity about authority and people feeling seen. He advocates structural changes over direct interventions, using examples like requiring “action needed” at the end of every correspondence to eliminate faffing. The key principle: empower people in a decentralized way while maintaining quality and safety.
The conversation also addresses why leaders struggle with culture — they often can’t imagine a great culture because they haven’t figured out their own inner world. A company’s culture reflects its leadership’s consciousness. Joe shares examples of calling out teams without shame, the power of transparency as an antidote to politics, and why hearing people’s objections before making decisions — even if you make the same decision — dramatically improves buy-in.
Key Concepts
- All cultural dysfunction comes from two questions: who’s in charge and how much do you love me
- Structural changes beat direct interventions
- A company is just relationships and decisions
- You can’t build a culture you can’t see in yourself
- Transparency is the best antidote to politics
- Hearing objections before deciding — even if you decide the same thing — changes everything
- Empower people in a decentralized way
- Calling people out without shame works
Key Quotes
“All disagreements and arguments come from two questions: who’s in charge, and how much do you love me?”
“Most companies can’t tell you how decisions are made in their company.”
“It’s really hard to create a great culture if the culture in your head is toxic.”
“If you just give a moment to hear objections and make the same decision, people will understand the decision you make much better than if you don’t listen at all.”
“Nobody minds being called out if they’re not being shamed.”
“Culture doesn’t take time. It takes consciousness.”
Transcript
to be in a company where people are actually thinking about these things they first have to think it’s possible people feel like oh I can build AGI I can build A10 billion company and then you’re literally like okay so how can we build a culture that’s 20% better and they’re like yeah no I don’t know if that’s possible it’s people welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease today we’re going to do things a little bit differently for those of you who are listening to the recording uh this is actually a live recording we are Joe and I are here at my home right now and we have a live audience of about 20 25 30ish people and we’re going to do a live podcast in front of the audience with some people streaming and then we’re going to follow it with a Q&A you know these days there’s a lot of churn there are a lot of brand new companies doing brand new things that weren’t even possible a couple years ago or a couple months ago and there’s also a lot of companies going bankrupt going out of business there’s a lot of people running around trying to make heads or tales of the markets of AI of the changing political landscape and you know companies live and die by the decisions they make the speed they get to market the the tech they create the all of these things that could could be seen as all Downstream of culture the culture in a company could be seen as the determinant of all these other factors that determine whether you thrive or or close shop so let’s talk about culture it’s interesting what’s 100% clear is that companies without good culture Can Survive and Thrive you can go into a completely toxic work environment and the company can be grown at unbounded speed and I went into a company recently that is growing at that kind of speed that7 billion of Revenue like in the last year that wasn’t there just massive speed and I sat down with the Technology Group the group that’s basically creating the engine of this company and we did this uh exercise where we just looked at what how would we measure culture what would be happening in the if the culture was right and we just asked the question how much better would your results be if the culture was improved by 100% or 200% without fail every single person thought that the culture would change the company and you know over 1.5x to 10x it just depended on what we were measuring and who was guessing so it what I know is that though you can get away without a great culture what you can’t get away with is or what you what you can’t deny is is reasonable is that culture helps you be successful yeah something that’s interesting about that is that for all those people who said absolutely culture would change everything I’m curious internally in their head what each of them thought that they meant yeah so we clearly defined it in this particular case it was creating the models and it was literally it was clearly defined in how the thinking was happening how the uh experiments were happening etc etc so it was like a very clearly defined Thing by the folks and they all agreed on the terms and the definitions which I think is something that’s really important and what happens often when people go in and work on culture they don’t work on the measurements and really think about how do we measure this and how do we know if we’re successful or not right because you can say I’m successful because my revenues went up and to the right but there’s a lot of reasons so your revenues go up into the right but there are definite ways to measure culture that often times people aren’t thinking about yeah something that’s really interesting when we’ve when we’ve gone into companies together one of the first things that you’ll often do is you’ll have everybody say a couple words or just one word about what kind of team they want to work in just to make sure everyone’s on the same page and what I’ve been surprised by is how on the same page everybody tends to be how similar those answers are straight off the bat when people describe in a single word what kind of team they want to be on yeah so that was the I remember going to one of the first times I did this in a company I was sitting in an executive team and I basically said I want to hear one to three words of what you want in a company in a team and and once they did it I just asked does everybody agree or disagree with that and there wasn’t one thing that somebody said where there was disagreement they disagreed maybe on the semantics of the word and then when we defined the word correctly so everybody knew what the word meant then they agreed and I have done that now in dozens of companies and I haven’t had anybody not one time say no I don’t want that I want a supportive team someone’s like no I don’t want a supportive team I want a adversarial team so we all all humans want to work and be a part of great teams great families we all want it doesn’t mean that we can know how to get it know how to create it but we all want it and which to me is one of the most fascinating things is that when I talk to CEOs and managers and leaders the their thought process is something to the effect of like I have to figure out how to manage my team into greatness but the truth is that everybody on their team wants it so what’s going on there what’s happening that makes it that people want that there this natural impulse like as As Natural as a kid’s impulse is to walk is a team’s impulse to do great work I know everybody in this room right now they want to do great work nobody’s like you know what would be great is if like I had a life where I just did mediocre work for the rest of my life nobody nobody says it and yet somehow all this effort in into management to try to get the results when the the natural pull is there for every team so so given that everybody wants generally the same thing everyone wants to be a fun on a functional team and and enjoy themselves then the distance must be somewhere else where where does bad culture come from how how does that come to be if if everyone wants ultimately the same kind of a thing yeah that there’s I I hate where this quote comes from I I but but I love this quote um so I’m not going to say where it comes from I’ll let everybody do the research on it but the the quote is all disagreements arguments uh come from two questions who’s in charge and how much do you love me and the base of all cultural misunderstanding comes from those two things it’s people feeling unseen and it’s people trying to figure out how like who’s in charge how do we get it done what’s what’s the mechanism and when you see that clearly when you see oh because if I was just sitting there on LinkedIn I think it was like two or three days ago and I LinkedIn has this new thing where they’re asking you hey you’re invited to answer this question because you’re somebody who should answer this question and it was about how to create good company culture and everybody was like great communication easily defined roles clearly defined roles they were doing the thing that which is they’re not wrong by any stretch those are really important things but all of those things everything that was listed is is really trying to answer those two core questions how much do you like me and and um and who’s in charge and what’s fascinating to me is if I go into a typical business and by typical I mean 95% of the businesses I’ve been in and I say okay how do you make decisions here they can’t tell you the answer which is fascinating when you think that all a company is really at the atomic level of a company it’s people’s relationships and people’s decisions right you maybe you have have some like capex you know you have some you have some Capital you have some money you have some technology but that came from people’s ideas and decisions and people’s relationships that’s where it comes from and and most companies can’t tell you how decisions are made in their company and most companies have a meeting culture which is a great measurement of relationship how good the meetings are and they have meeting cultures where everyone’s like I have to go to a meeting so just think about that if that’s all that a company is is just the relationships people are having and the decisions and all of a sudden you find a 10% better way to make decisions or your meetings Jump by I don’t want to go to the meeting to oh that was a pretty good meeting to oh I love my meetings I I can’t wait to go to these meetings like what does that do to Performance of a company it’s it’s like a ridiculous multiplier one one important variable there is how aware are we about the fact that everything that we’re trying to do in managing the organization is actually trying to answer those two questions like to what extent are we aware that like are we lost in the weeds around the way accountability process are supposed to run and trying to get it right or are we constantly reminded of what kind of a team do we want to be on what’s the end point here so that we can all be aligned in the ways that we get there I think there’s something there’s a prerequisite to that to to to be in a company where people are actually thinking about these things they first have to think it’s possible so the amazing thing is is as one of the questions earlier we were talking about is people feel like oh I can build AGI I can build A1 billion company I can make printable Rockets 3D printable Rockets go into space cheaper than NASA can and then you literally like okay so how can we build a culture that’s 20% better and they’re like yeah no I don’t know if that’s possible it’s people it’s just like a mindblowing reality and and the reason that that is is because that most folks haven’t really figured out often how to have a great marriage or a raise their kids well or be with themselves in a way that’s great it’s very hard to create a great culture if the culture in your head is toxic right it’s really hard to create a great culture if every relationship is a dramatic fire ball of pain and suffering and so so often times it’s what the reality can’t be created if you can’t see the reality in yourself yeah we’ve talked about how a company is often the culture of a company can be the reflection of its of its leadership or is yeah generally yeah I haven’t seen it not be the case yeah that the the consciousness of the leadership is seen throughout the company absolutely yeah though I’ve also heard you say before you know like this is for a small company you know the leader changes their Consciousness and then the company quickly follows for a much larger organization there’s definitely some lag oh yeah so what are what are some of the leverage points let’s say let’s say somebody’s running a 10,000 person company and they’ve just done a whole lot of inner work and their Consciousness has shifted and they’re starting to see things very differently how what are the leverage points when you’re working with an organization to change the culture in that organization and help it catch up to to what is possible and what you the reality that you’re creating so there’s so many leverage points to work with and so many levers to pull the thing that I think people don’t see typically is that there is two main forms one is what I would call like a direct intervention so that would be something where I’m going to hire somebody I’m going to fire somebody I’m going to coach somebody I’m going to undress or talk down this team or something to that effect I’m going to give a bonus those are direct interventions those are far less powerful than structural changes This Is How We Do meetings this is how we make decisions this is what we put on the walls this is how we communicate so an example of this in in our company you know this that one day I was reading emails and I was frustrated and so anytime that I’m frustrated inside the company I don’t say how do I change this I say how do I change this so it never happens again in the company you know if if I see incompetency somewhere I don’t say how do I help that person not be incompetent I say how do I make it so that incompetency doesn’t happen inside the company generally so I was reading these emails and I noticed the following Behavior which was we could kind of do this or this I don’t know and somebody else going oh that’s a cool idea I guess but there’s also this thing and I I call that faffing I don’t know if that’s the appropriate and then and so we just put one structural change in which is at the end of every correspondence you write action needed colon what the action is who supposed to do it when they’re supposed to do it by and in doing that all the almost all maybe 90% of the faffing stopped and that was the purpose of it and so that’s structural so every email written we don’t do email but our correspondents every of them has action needed and it just changes that behavior it’s just how we do things now the way to think about what how you make those tools however is how do I Empower people and how do I ensure quality if you can do those two things in a decentralized way then then it works right and so in in our company now I don’t we don’t even think about lower or higher but say the least paid person the person with the least responsibility in the company can tell me what to do and when to do do it right and I can tell anybody they can tell anybody and we can all say no and that we have a system for how we don’t get overwhelmed but everybody can do that every and not only can they they have to they you you it’s not you get to be empowered you are empowered or you don’t work here and so you’re constantly looking for these mechanisms that Empower people yeah yeah what you said in a decentralized way and what the the email culture kind of example brings up is that by setting certain structures you basically decentralize the decision-making you decentralize autonomy you decentralize Authority in in what examples would Central it’s also a centralized decision though there was there was a way that it’s like from one place you’re just like we’re not doing fafy emails we’re doing emails with action items and clear deadlines correct and there can be some push back there can be some you know refactoring of that process as people try it out try different things experiment yeah in what cases is uh a centralized intervention uh like like what are some classic examples of a centralized intervention working really well and going poorly and then the same with say a decentralized intervention like a structural change yeah so if you look at this as far as companies generally the more decentralized a company gets usually they beat their competition so GM was once the most decentralized car company Toyota became the most decentralized car company there was taxi cabs then there was Uber the more decentralized it gets typically they win that only happens if they can do two things they can make sure quality stays and safety so maybe quality maybe safety and fairness that those things happen and if they can do those with some very elegant rules then the decentralization works if they can’t do that I Napster then then the decentralized it fails to work right so so there’s a you can only decentralize to a point where you can control for those things and that’s where the central decision making needs to step in the centralized decision-making is how are we doing things what are the principles we’re living by how do we get things done what is the brand the core stuff and then how do we flow that into a company in a way that works how do we make it lightweight how do we make it elegant how do we make it uh that people have been participating in it so that they actually want to do the thing so they get see the power of the thing I was just in one of like the Fortune 100 companies and there was a letter from the CEO and I was in a group uh like one level down and they were reading the letter and they were laughing at this letter from the CEO and they were just saying like that has to be one of the most poorly written letters and the letter was basically saying hey we keep on doing these scores we keep on measuring this thing and one of the things we’re measuring is that we are becoming more bureaucratic and less we we execute less and so we need to that to change if I was writing that letter to my folks it would be like a marketing email oh what’s the thing that’s going to make them read this what’s the thing that they care about what’s the problem I’m solving for them this is this is these These are the customers these are the people these are the users how do I how do I look at what their their objections are how do I respect them the same way I’d respect a customer instead of well I’ve I’ve told them we are now going to be less bureaucratic and therefore it shall be less bureaucratic and the email itself was like the most bureaucratic email because it wasn’t it wasn’t like showing that respect it was well I’ve said it therefore it shall be and obviously it’s not going to work that way yeah another relevant thing here is you just you just described a situation where the CEO’s direct reports are laughing at the CEO behind the CEO’s back like how does that come to be and this is another thing that is very common out there where CEOs feel alone and everybody else but the CEO but the leader or at least but the top brass sees them as like evil or bad or like just there can just be some kind of tension between leadership and even even the people who are directly supporting them how how does that happen yeah so let me tell you a story and I’ll explain so the story is I I was working with a brilliant woman and she was working on in one of these big companies and doing some big Tech project and one of the like quintessential silic Silicon Valley narcissistic leaders was there and yelling at the team with some coaching one day she looks at this person while he is yelling at her team and she says to him um I really see how much you care and I see how frustrated you are that it’s not happening the way you want it to happen and I want you to know that everybody in this room wants to help you get your vision met it’s just hard for us to do it when you’re yelling at us and this is what this guy was a known Yeller everywhere and as I understand it that was the last time this guy yelled at her team what’s happening there is there’s many levels to it the first is that many CEOs what they grew up in was they had to be self efficient they they learned somewhere that they had to get it done they felt to some degree abandoned as a child so they’re recreating that story in their life of oh I have to do this I’m the one that has to get this done people don’t see me so there’s that happening on the other side the followers are expecting some sort of perfection from the leadership particularly because the leadership is not saying I need help like they’re not being vulnerable right because they’re self-sufficient that’s is what they’ve learned and they are also looking at the CEOs in this way of you need to be perfect and you can make me happy and if you approve of me then I will be good enough and you can make my dreams come true and that whole thing like if you look at if you could just measure how much talk is happening in an organization the CEO is the most talked about human in that organization just generally right so there is a way in which people don’t treat the CEO with the kind of respect that they treat their friends they don’t ask the questions they don’t they don’t show up as human with the CEO which amplifies this feeling of aloneness from them yeah and this also seems to filter down three companies too you know regional managers treat corporate the same way and they’re like yes why did they cut these people they didn’t even ask me right there’s there’s one other piece that happens there most companies will do this thing where they say oh we’re going to make significant decisions about you without talking to you about your org without talking to you because we can sit here around a table and map out everything and we know what’s best we’re not going to actually take a listen to the people on the ground and get their knowledge before we make the decision and it’s funny this is where people don’t feel heard if you just give a moment to hear objections and make the same decision people will understand the decision you make much better than if you don’t listen at all and so this is another thing that amplif I this over and over and over again I think in a lot of cases people are afraid of actually doing that like if you’re about to lay off somebody in your team and you talk to the team first to gather like advice and information then you might have very challenging conversations and make even harder decisions so sometimes it’s even easier just to make a decision that you don’t have the context for because getting the context would evoke emotions that are not comtable it’s easier in the way it’s easier not to potty train a dog yeah you know like I mean like that day it’s much easier than training the dog but the rest of your life you’re going to have like poop on your rug yeah I was so I was recently in another company and uh I don’t know something like two hours into the meeting I said basically I can’t trust this team to actually do the work that you all are saying you’re going to do and so I would like to address that before we continue because I don’t want to waste my time working with a team that I can’t trust and so the reason I was doing it was because there was some emails that were sent and they were supposed to respond some responded late some responded with a whole bunch of justification it it wasn’t just the kind of so we went around the room and we asked each one what made you do it late what made you justify what what was going on and they talked about one and each time they talked about the thing that made them do that I was like oh how does that happen in the whole company how do we structurally change that for the whole company CU you can’t be the only one doing it and so we found all these Solutions in that conversation a little bit later we’re talking about how to have great meetings and one of the people said well not all meetings can be festar you know like what if you have to really give people a talking to I was like well I just gave you a talking to an hour and a half ago how was that and they all just laughed because they knew right oh we we made that productive the thing nobody Minds being called out if they’re not being shamed if they’re not being told they’re bad and so again if you’re running a culture and you have a lot of self- Shame you have a hard time creating a a a company that isn’t full of shame but it’ll be easy to create politics yeah exactly poopy rugs exactly exactly so so yeah politics is a good thing to bring that that points to politics in a company if you’re if you can just say the thing and say it tactfully which to say tactfully is not to say politically but is actually just direct and vulnerably the thing is to like to do it with an open heart yeah it’s like hey I I know you all want to do a good job you didn’t you didn’t become vice presidents of this like1 billion doll company because you wanted to do work so I got you it’s like it’s coming at it with that open-heartedness yeah and as you cut through the Politics as that culture changes then what happens with transparency what happens with how much easier it feels to ask ask advice of the people who your decisions are going to affect in the company and be able to have those conversations and have them quickly efficiently and still make the decision yeah transparency is the best antidote to politics for sure the the best example of this and you can say a lot of good and bad things about their culture but Bridgewater which at least at one point was the largest hedge fund in the world they videotaped every single meeting so if you and I had a meeting we’d videotape it and if I talked about cat in that meeting he would get a copy of the videotape so it was complete transparency and the principle that they were working on was transparent markets are efficient markets and of course the lawyers were like no you can’t do that like that you know the evidence that this is going to create and and what it turned out to be was that there was less lawsuits because everybody knew they were being recorded so they didn’t do that dubious stuff they thought about everything they were doing because there was that deep transparency and the politics in the office were an interesting thing with the way that this culture ended up working was that from what I heard from some insiders was that it was like 66% of the people who got employed there were gone inside of 18 months but the people who stayed stayed and stayed and stayed and stayed for the with the company so they had this very solid core team but it was not a team that you would want to be in if you were not if if you were defensive when people gave you criticism because if you ran a meeting there and it was filmed you’d have three people saying oh here’s three ways you could have made done better in that meeting and if you want to win and you can like drop the ego that’s a culture you want to be a part of I don’t think it has to be that harsh I think every culture needs to be a little bit different given what they’re doing I think a culture of a AI researchers is going to need to be run a little bit differently than a culture of uh cleaning people people who are doing cleaning for high-rise buildings is going to need to be a little different than somebody who’s doing farm equipment I think there’s a lot of things there’s a lot of nuances there which I think is also one of the challenges for culture is you have to meet people where they are the same way you would coaching or in Friendship so something we were talking about earlier also was how for a lot of people a lot of people in leadership they’re hesitant to talk about culture in the way that they’re happy to talk about yeah profit anything else profits right yeah yeah yeah I what I want to talk a little bit more about that it’s the same thing these days there’s some idea that oh wow that we’re on this front edge of not wanting toxic cultures but nobody wants them it’s just they’re scared of being judged for saying it because then you don’t then you’re not really business then you’re not really don’t you don’t really care about the bottom line and the example of this recently was that I was I’ve been told from the team to like get on LinkedIn and do LinkedIn stuff every once in a while and so I’m doing that and I came across this post and recently you know there was the healthcare CEO who who got shot and somebody responded with what a great human being he was um that he rose through the ranks that he came from a small town that he was the American dream and there was 3,000 responses I did not get through all of them but there wasn’t one where where people didn’t care about the ethics there wasn’t one where people said hey it’s okay to kill people for money there wasn’t one where anybody Justified every single one was hey we have a responsibility to the people we serve we have a responsibility so and this is LinkedIn CEOs professionals oh yeah there was like comments of I had to stop using this person’s healthcare because I couldn’t agree with their with their thing and I and I spent 150,000 in health care every month for my employees it was CEO example of a CEO caring about their Employees Healthcare right and so and I I couldn’t scan I couldn’t find any that was just like no he totally justified thing there was none of that and it was such this realization for me of oh wait no everybody cares everybody wants to every CEO wants to be of service maybe not I mean I’m sure there’s some psychotic folks out there some I’m not saying that they know how to do it I’m not saying that they don’t get lost but but there is a deep desire in all of us and it’s just a scary thing to admit it’s kind of like in the 1970s you couldn’t say I’m an environmentalist and a businessman you either had to be an environmentalist or a businessman and then somewhere in the ’90s somebody was like oh look I can make a lot of money being an environmentalist and you could be both you could be a climate investor you all these things could happen and nobody looks at you and goes oh you want to save climate you must think about the bottom line everybody understands now you can do both and I think it’s the same thing except we’re just not admitting it yet it’s just hard for people to admit that this is the reality on the ground is that if you’re going to attract great talent if you are going to win in a race where great ideas and great relationships matter you need to care about you you have no choice but to care about culture yeah I think that really points to a fundamental inversion in the in the perspective of our society which is you know that if I optimize for short-term profits then later on I’ll be able to optimize for culture because honestly if you look at any human activity anything anybody ever does what are we making all the tech for what are we making the AI for what are we doing garbage collection for what are we doing art for all of it is ultimately for almost anybody I think they would agree so that they can have a better life with the people that they love and that is sometimes an endo that seems like a long-term goal and you have to do all these short-term sacrifices to get there and you can flip the entire thing out its head where if you have if you’re focusing on the culture of a company you can in principle have faith that you’re going to make better decisions you’re going to navigate the market better you’re going to be communicating Bu you’re going to have less politics you’re going to have I don’t think you have to have faith even you can just measure it see if it’s working I don’t I don’t need to have faith that I don’t have to H be a billionaire to start exercising culture is in everything you do you have to do the stuff anyways it’s how you do it that matters it doesn’t even particularly take more time doesn’t require more resources it’s just are you being thoughtful and how you’re doing it are you are you giving people what they want which is autonomy in recognition are you being clear about who’s in charge and how decisions are made those don’t take time those just take Consciousness it just take an intention rather than doing all this business in a way that sucks to get to the point where maybe in the future I’ll have the life that I want with the people that I love with my second company that I’ll spend half of my fortune on so I feel relevant I’ll create a culture that’s really good for everybody that yeah yeah and rather than that the invitation is to live the life that you want with the people that you love and do that today the way that you work together and then let everything else yeah and if you’re listening to this the the the great place to start is just sit down with your team and ask them how do they want to be a team together and then ask them okay so this is the team we want to be what’s stopping us what can we do to change that it’s it’s not complicated do you want to add anything about the council or anything like that oh yeah the council um yeah so what what I would just say one of the things for any of you who are in the room it’s an invite only but Mark is the person who’s creating this thing and one of the things we notice is that leadership in general needs to have a community of support usually when you’re doing leadership your situation is such that you can’t be completely transparent and obvious with the people below you or above you or at least it takes a while to learn how to do that and so we really want to create a a community of practice people who were interested in leadership being a form of self-discovery and creating environments where is really healthy for people and to learn from one another and so we have that happening if you’re interested Mark is the guy to talk to that’s it that’s y thank you everybody