When I first joined Amazon in 2012, I’d asked a colleague, “What makes Amazon successful?”. “The culture”, she’d replied without batting an eyelid. That year Facebook also published a 148-page Little Red Book, a culture manifesto that “was a declaration of identity, solving the problem of scaling culture during explosive growth.” Netflix had already flashed their cultural badge in a widely shared culture deck on Freedom and Responsibility in 2009.

Culture is the primary tool to scale company operations as economies of scale or network effects (or whatever poison you choose) drives explosive business growth. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, goes the cliche. Maybe what this really means is that no matter what a great business jackpot you might’ve hit, if you don’t scale the way people operate the business, the business is unlikely to succeed.

Now, with all this talk about AI making people many times more productive, companies can afford to stay small and do more with fewer people. If this is true, will culture continue to be as important as it is today? Will we now teach robots our business ‘culture’?

What is culture anyway?

At the risk of repeating the obvious, more than the principles and manifestos that mark the hallways of growing companies, culture is a function of the people, the relationships they choose to form, and the norms they develop to make decisions. New members deduce the culture from the sum of social norms that they observe. We humans are unusually good at mimicking each other and extending our unspoken cultural learning. Leadership principles and manifestos just seem to provide the vocabulary to ramp up new members as quickly as possible.

But humans don’t always blindly accept what they see. Ironically, we rely on unspoken cultural transmission to develop our own filters for fairness. We judge human behavior based on the individual’s intention and the situation, not just the outcome. Most critically, our cultural values evolve fast, especially in the U.S., where diverse individuals meet and find the space to thrive. The culture that evolves fastest is the one that’s most likely to survive.

Soul of a New Machine

What does this mean for the “AIs” and robots joining the workforce? Will we leave them to be mechanistic, like a washing machine? Or would we codify them with our working principles, a la Asimov?

More than adding “personality”, it’s important for us to have the ability to codify our working principles and cultural norms in AI systems. Most of these norms are unspoken and many of us aren’t trained to explicitly communicate these to each other, let alone to AI systems or robots. Anthropic’s work on Constitutional AI comes closest to this, but they seem to have approached it with the goal of training Claude to be innately harmless, helpful, and honest.

This is a great baseline, but back to an earlier point, it’s important to have the ability to tweak and adapt the cultural constitution of AI systems to be more tuned to their environment and continously evolving. For example, a company would likely want to customize Claude towards its cultural principles. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI blog mentions that they, “are exploring ways to more democratically produce a constitution for Claude, and also exploring offering customizable constitutions for specific use cases.” However, it’s not clear to me how a different company would imbue Claude with its own cultural values. Would this be a system prompt or post-training and customization? Would the system prompt or training override the values that Anthropic injected into it?

This thought experiment also leaves me with a bunch of broader questions. For example, how will robots change us culturally? If our workforce is set to change radically, what would the cultural values of the new and evolved human and/or hybrid workforce look like?

First Principles

Before we codify anything into AI systems, I want to really understand what dimensions are worth codifying. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been researching how successful organizations “implement” culture, starting with the industry I’m more familiar with i.e. companies in technology and software, which operate in a fast-changing market with rapidly evolving customer expectations such as Netflix, Pixar, Apple, Walmart, Meta, and Amazon. These companies tend to pay obsessive attention to their customers/users/viewers and reward front-line innovation among their employees. But it starts with hiring the first few people…

The Units of DNA

Combining my interview bar raiser training at Amazon and experience from hundreds of interviews (on both sides of the table), companies that index on innovation tend to focus on three ingredients.

1. Attitude

Recently, a colleague, K, was explaining to me, “One of my most trusted mentors told me that I’m just not a natural fit for product management.” She went on to add, “My instincts are to rush into execution rather than pause to evaluate and assess. That’s why I gave up my career as a product manager and became an engineering manager.”

Whether this was the right decision for her or not isn’t for me to say. But this kind of thinking that strikes out whole areas based on the idea that “I’m built a certain way, don’t have the talent, and can’t pursue proficiency in X” is the kind of attitude that I find difficult to alter. Maybe I’m overly optimistic about human ability. Maybe it won’t even translate into AI ability. But I believe that we are all born with the ability to learn and adapt, and our attitude is the only thing that gets in the way.

2. Intellect

Satya Nadella may describe this as the ability to root cause and create clarity. In Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull describes it as the ability to connect distant, seemingly unrelated patterns. Both seem to converge on the idea that intellect correlates with the proficiency to identify and solve problems, sometimes within the given constraints, sometimes by knowing which constraints to test, and oftentimes by reframing the constraints.

3. Energy

Bill Belichick describes this well in the The Art of Winning. It’s the capacity to “know the job”, “stay attentive”, “stay committed”, and “put the team first”. The first three drive proficiency and the last one drives performance. But energy is the underlying driver for all.

The energy to know the job, stay attentive, and stay committed is like the energy of an athlete. Athletes learn the sport and what it takes to perform competitively. They are self-aware, recognize their areas of improvement, and practice to improve both their strengths and weaknesses. They are disciplined about showing up and being fully present at practice every day so that they can perform when game day arrives.

The energy of putting the team first is like the energy of a parent, who’s patient, authentic, and consistent with their “team”. It’s the curious energy of wanting to know each person and observing what drives them. It’s the caring energy of being kind and considerate. It’s the mental energy for being vocally self-critical. It’s the supportive energy that removes distractions or obstacles. And at the risk overloading the word, it’s the energy that sets the bar and holds it consistently. All this needs effort and practice and can easily tire us out, which is why I call it “energy”. This is the energy that fills the space between people. Like the Japanese idea of “Ma”, it enhances the elements that compose the whole.

Composing the DNA

Setting aside attitude, which may be non-negotiable, I would hire someone who spikes on either intellect or energy. However, I’ve found that intellect is rarely the constraining factor in team performance. It’s energy. Recognizing the kind of energy that’s missing and addressing its absence is the job of the manager.

Even when AI agents become proficient, I imagine that humans will be better positioned to (a) define what performance means, and (b) recognize what’s missing in the team to achieve that performance. If humans continue to own the definition of performance, they are also likely to remain ultimately accountable (and legally liable) for observing, root causing, and addressing what’s not working.

One takeaway for me in this research chapter has been that genuine curiosity about people is so rare that it could be a defining trait of successful leaders in the 21st century. I’d load up on such curiosity, and even more so, the energy to learn and care about the human condition and aspirations.