The hottest Organizational Culture Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Technology Topics

The Rise and Fall of Intel: Lessons from Innovation and Organizational Challenges

Gad’s Newsletter • 44 implied HN points • 16 Dec 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Intel struggled to adapt to changes in technology, especially with the rise of mobile devices and AI. They stuck to their old strategies and missed many opportunities to innovate.
  2. The company faced challenges because of its rigid organizational structure. Intel's way of doing things made it hard to cooperate with others and change, which limited their ability to compete.
  3. Intel's company culture went from being driven to perfection to becoming more bureaucratic and slow. This change hurt their ability to innovate and respond to new challenges in the industry.

Human mRNA

The Uncertainty Mindset (soon to become tbd) • 39 implied HN points • 12 Jul 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Human mRNA refers to people who connect different groups or teams within an organization. They help share important information that would otherwise stay hidden.
  2. These connectors are valuable because they can translate information between different teams, making it more useful for everyone. This translation helps ideas flow across contexts that may not usually interact.
  3. Encouraging this type of work is important for innovation. Companies should recognize and support these human connectors to help bridge gaps and foster creative solutions.

What guarantees are you making?

Sunday Letters • 79 implied HN points • 11 Sep 22
🕹 Technology Organizational Culture
  1. Always clarify what guarantees you are making in your work or software. This helps everyone understand what to expect.
  2. Dependencies can be tricky, so be careful of relying on assumptions that might change. What works now could break later.
  3. Document processes and rotate responsibilities to avoid putting too much reliance on one person. This keeps the team healthy and resilient.

The Hagakure #64: The Heart of W. Edwards Deming

The Hagakure • 113 HN points • 24 Aug 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. W. Edwards Deming emphasized the importance of systems thinking and statistical process control in achieving quality and quantity in production.
  2. Deming's heart and compassion played a significant role in inspiring hope and confidence in the people of Japan, contributing to their rapid post-war recovery.
  3. Leading with compassion, embracing interconnectedness, and nurturing living systems over optimizing machines are key lessons from Deming's story.

Notes on Service Level Objectives

A Small, Good Thing • 19 implied HN points • 24 Mar 25
🕹 Technology Organizational Culture
  1. Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are important for understanding if services are reliable, but many organizations find them hard to use effectively. It's like a tool that sounds great but often doesn't work as well in practice.
  2. Adopting and managing SLOs usually requires a lot of effort and support from the whole team, not just the SREs. If the company culture isn't ready for it, SLOs often get ignored.
  3. There's a big gap between the theory of SLOs and how they're applied in real companies. Many teams struggle with choosing the right metrics and getting everyone to care about reliability over new features.
Get a weekly roundup of the best Substack posts, by hacker news affinity:

3 Ways To Thrive.

The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past • 25 implied HN points • 19 Jan 25
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Finding balance is important. It means weighing the old ways against new ideas to grow and adapt.
  2. Unity helps teams succeed. When everyone shares a common goal and works together, they can achieve more than just individual talents.
  3. Integration is about blending different perspectives. It means accepting and using diverse opinions and ideas to create strong solutions.

"Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast"

The Radar • 19 implied HN points • 10 Oct 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Organizational culture is more than just values or behaviors; it's the prevailing attitudes, routine behaviors, and shared norms of an organization.
  2. To change a culture, leaders need to champion stated values persistently until they become ingrained in behaviors and routines.
  3. Creating a culture shift takes time and commitment; leaders can't simply dictate a new culture, it requires sustained effort to embed new values and behaviors.

A Tentative Manifesto for the Future of Organizations—2

Pluriversal Planet • 19 implied HN points • 13 Jun 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. The manifesto calls for organizations to slow down, pause, and reflect on their actions and impact.
  2. Wayfinders are organizations striving to move beyond human-centered designs towards life-affirming organization designs.
  3. Organizations should shift focus from processes and technology to relationships and communities, embracing pluriversality and interconnectedness.

Inside the culture clashes of F1 & Google

Make Work Better • 59 implied HN points • 07 Mar 24
🎭️ Culture Organizational Culture
  1. Organizations tolerating bad behavior by leaders can lead to a breakdown of cultural norms and values.
  2. Google's once revered culture has come under scrutiny, revealing a slow-moving bureaucracy and lack of innovative products, prompting a need for reevaluation.
  3. Job cuts and layoffs at Google have negatively impacted employee morale and hindered the ability to do brave, inventive work.

The Platinum Rule

Fish Food for Thought • 10 implied HN points • 11 Jun 25
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. The Platinum Rule suggests treating people how they want to be treated, not just how you would want to be treated. This approach can help improve teamwork and morale in any organization.
  2. Understanding what motivates each team member is vital for their success. Everyone has different ways they like to receive feedback and support, so be sure to ask them what works best.
  3. Creating a culture that embraces individual differences leads to better performance and trust. When people feel understood and supported, they're more likely to do their best work.

Scaling engineering teams: Building career ladders

Brick by Brick • 18 implied HN points • 27 Jan 25
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Creating a clear career ladder is crucial for growing engineering teams. It helps everyone understand how to advance and what is expected from them.
  2. Collaboration is key when building this ladder. Getting input from the team can help define roles and ensure everyone feels involved and valued.
  3. Regularly reviewing and updating the career ladder keeps it fair and relevant. It’s important to adjust it as the team and company grow to continue supporting everyone’s development.

Who before what

Tech Ramblings • 19 implied HN points • 30 Apr 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Choosing the right people is crucial for success. Having a strong team matters more than knowing exactly what to do first.
  2. Wells Fargo thrived because they recruited talented leaders who embraced change, while Bank of America struggled with weak leadership.
  3. This 'who before what' principle also applies to personal relationships. Make sure the people you bring into your life add value and support your growth.

Building CAUSL - Episode 7: Onboarding at Lightspeed

CAUSL Effect • 19 implied HN points • 02 Apr 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Onboarding at a new company can be really tough. It often takes new employees months to fully understand the business and their role.
  2. It's common for new hires to feel overwhelmed, especially when they have to learn everything quickly. Having a structured process can really help ease this transition.
  3. By creating an efficient onboarding system, employees can get settled in just weeks instead of months. This makes the experience much smoother for everyone involved.

Collective Fallacy

Fish Food for Thought • 16 implied HN points • 07 Feb 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Collective fallacies like groupthink can stifle innovation by leading to unanimous decisions driven by desire for group harmony.
  2. Social loafing in group settings reduces individual effort, hindering creativity and underutilizing diverse skills.
  3. Herd mentality can suppress creative ideas by promoting conformity to majority opinions, inhibiting risk-taking and diverse perspectives.

How To Start a New Role - Part 2

Fish Food for Thought • 4 implied HN points • 24 Dec 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. When starting a new role, it's really important to listen more than you speak. Spend your first days understanding the team and the work they do instead of rushing to make changes.
  2. Use the 90/10 rule for communication: listen 90% of the time and speak only 10%. This helps you gather insights to make better decisions later.
  3. Focus on stopping projects that don't add value rather than starting new initiatives right away. This helps clarify priorities and shows you're willing to make tough decisions for the benefit of the team.

Revisiting Apollo 1 in a Post-ZIRP World

New Frontier • 1 HN point • 09 Feb 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. The Apollo program teaches us the importance of overcoming failure and learning from mistakes to prevent future disasters.
  2. In a Post-ZIRP world, tech companies need to shift focus to profitability and hard work, moving away from the easy funding rounds of the past.
  3. Embracing a 'Tough and Competent' mentality, focusing on efficiency by reducing unnecessary meetings, avoiding overengineering, and returning to mission-driven cultures can help companies thrive in the changing landscape.

The life and nature of a process

Building Rome(s) • 7 implied HN points • 18 Mar 23
🕹 Technology Organizational Culture
  1. Processes and systems are not necessarily opposites; in reality, systems are formed by combining effective processes over time.
  2. In the journey from processes to culture, there's a struggle between different perspectives like hedgehogs and foxes which influence how processes evolve.
  3. Balancing attention to detail (hedgehog) and simplicity (fox) is key in progressing processes and becoming a successful Technical Program Manager.

🐿️ The Why Game - The IPT Newsletter

Squirrel Squadron Substack • 0 implied HN points • 26 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Organizational Culture
  1. Keep asking 'Why' until you reach root causes so you can be sure work actually serves the outcomes you care about, like profitability.
  2. Playing the 'Why Game' with engineers is a quick way to check whether daily tasks map to strategic goals and to expose gaps between the kanban board and real business value.
  3. Relentless 'Why' creates double-loop learning that turns failures into systemic fixes by revealing cultural problems, but it should be asked thoughtfully to avoid defensiveness.

Surface Geography of Leadership Land (1/2)

Adventures in Leadership Land • 0 implied HN points • 18 Aug 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Leadership Land has diverse terrains like Boss Forest, Career Swamp, Desert of Good Intentions.
  2. Institute of Conventional Wisdom is a prestigious place for leadership best practices but may hinder innovation by turning secrets into common knowledge.
  3. Leaders in Leadership Land face challenges due to the Fog of Uncertainty and must navigate through conflicting interests and build trust.

How to Drive Meaningful Change - Crafting your proposal

Joseph Gefroh • 0 implied HN points • 03 Mar 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. When driving meaningful change, it's crucial to formulate your idea and gain approval from various stakeholders within an organization.
  2. Thorough research is essential before proposing any idea to ensure credibility and avoid unknown unknowns that might lead to rejection.
  3. Crafting a compelling narrative is just as important as presenting facts; having a structured story helps decision-makers understand the problem, solution, and value of the proposal.

The World's Worst Organizational Culture 😱

PeopleStorming • 0 implied HN points • 30 Mar 21
🎭️ Culture Organizational Culture
  1. Organizational Improv workshops sometimes play a game called World's Worst to envision the worst possible versions of things. This game can help teams understand what 'best' should look like in various aspects of their work.
  2. Participants in the game can creatively come up with vivid examples of utterly horrendous cultures or practices in organizations, which can be both entertaining and insightful.
  3. Teams can apply this game to different scenarios within their organization, such as identifying the world's worst brand for marketing, product launch for the product team, or customer service representative for the support team. It can lead to fun and enlightening discussions.

Leadership Domino Effects

The Radar • 0 implied HN points • 04 Aug 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Leadership impact goes beyond actions of an individual leader; it's influenced by organizational structure and resources.
  2. Even in a strong organization, bad leadership can cause significant damage, impacting talent retention and overall performance.
  3. Developing a kind and caring culture in organizations is challenging, often hindered by traditional management paradigms valuing toughness over empathy.

Things Our Ghosts Tell Us

The Radar • 0 implied HN points • 13 Jul 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Theory is important, but experience is much more valuable, especially the knowledge gained through mistakes.
  2. A combination of theory and practical experience is extremely effective for learning and development.
  3. Failure is a powerful teacher, but it's crucial to create a culture where mistakes are embraced as learning opportunities.

Why Are Most Organizations so Slow?

Logos • 0 implied HN points • 18 Dec 22
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. A company's culture can really slow things down. If leaders just talk about high standards but don't practice them, things won't improve. It's important for everyone to be held accountable and for a fast pace to be a real priority.
  2. The way an organization is set up can affect its speed. Having a clear structure with established processes helps decisions get made faster and reduces unnecessary politics, allowing teams to be more responsive.
  3. People can also be their own bottlenecks. Perfectionism, lack of confidence, and inexperience can all make tasks take longer than they should. Encouraging quick, effective work over chasing perfection can help increase productivity.

Good feedback, bad feedback, and coaching

Logos • 0 implied HN points • 14 Oct 22
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Good feedback should be relevant and helpful, while bad feedback often lacks understanding and is not constructive. It's important for the person giving feedback to engage fully with the work being done.
  2. Coaching is more effective than just giving feedback. It involves guiding someone on how to approach problems better, which leads to long-term improvement.
  3. Companies need to change their structure to promote good feedback and coaching practices. This includes recognizing those who are good at coaching and ensuring managers are familiar with their team's work.

✅ Unlocking the strategic value of internal communications

Wadds Inc. newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 25 Mar 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Internal communications can really help businesses succeed when they align with company goals. It's important for management to see how this work connects to the bigger picture.
  2. Practitioners in internal communication should focus on improving their skills and knowledge. This helps them gain respect and be able to make a bigger impact in their organizations.
  3. A recent study shows that most companies aren't using internal communications effectively. There’s a lot of room for improvement to make it work better for everyone involved.

How Leader Humor Drives Employee Innovation

Voohy Leadership Insights • 0 implied HN points • 24 Aug 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Leaders who use humor can boost their team's creativity. When bosses make jokes, it helps employees feel more engaged at work.
  2. A supervisor's reputation matters a lot. If employees think their boss represents the company's values well, they are more likely to be inspired by the leader's humor.
  3. Leaders should be careful with their humor. Making fun of the company or its people can hurt morale, but finding joy in mistakes can encourage a positive atmosphere and lead to more innovation.

Boosting Gender Diversity: What Really Works?

Voohy Leadership Insights • 0 implied HN points • 06 Jun 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Organizations really need to check if their diversity practices are effective. Just doing lots of activities isn't enough; they need to lead to real change in gender representation.
  2. Flexible work options alone don’t guarantee more women in leadership roles. It's important to tackle underlying cultural biases that can affect women's career advancement.
  3. Sometimes, the most impactful diversity practices are less visible, like using diverse interview panels. Focusing on hidden processes can make a big difference in promoting gender equality.

How to Foster a Knowledge-Sharing Culture within Engineering Teams

The Healthy Engineering Leader • 0 implied HN points • 17 Jul 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Fostering a knowledge-sharing culture helps engineers stay updated with new skills and technologies. Regularly sharing insights can keep the team learning and growing.
  2. Knowledge sharing involves team members exchanging expertise and information with each other. This collaboration can lead to better problem-solving and innovation.
  3. Creating opportunities for sharing, like workshops or regular meetings, encourages more open communication. It helps build trust and strengthens relationships within the team.

Engineering Teams: More Than Just a Family or a Sports Team

The Healthy Engineering Leader • 0 implied HN points • 15 May 23
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. Engineering teams should focus on a mix of teamwork and a sense of belonging, similar to families and sports teams. This helps create a strong culture where everyone feels valued.
  2. It's important to understand that engineering teams have specific goals and a clear hierarchy, unlike families. This helps keep everyone focused and accountable.
  3. Diversity in engineering teams brings unique perspectives, which can enhance problem-solving and creativity. This is different from how families and sports teams are typically formed.

The Spotify Model

It Depends / Nimble Autonomy • 0 implied HN points • 11 Feb 24
💼 Business Organizational Culture
  1. The Spotify model allows teams to be created, dissolved, and mixed to stay flexible and innovative. This helps companies quickly respond to new opportunities without major disruptions.
  2. Chapter Leads manage individuals across different teams instead of managing teams directly. This allows for better skill matching and helps team members grow by working on various projects.
  3. Failing is part of learning. In the Spotify model, teams celebrate when they realize their mission isn't needed, as it teaches valuable lessons and encourages experimentation.