John Cutler: belief

Transcript context

…Coming back to a thought I had as you were talking earlier about values and culture, it's interesting that wasn't on your list of just the power and importance of, I don't know, strong value, strong culture. Have you found that that's just not essential? What are your thoughts on- No, I think it's kind of the fabric that creates those other things. It's the fabric that creates coherence. Coherent around what? If culture is what we're doing, is what we're acting and the way we act is sort of a function of some of the belief systems and the culture and the value systems that we have, maybe I just almost take it for granted that that's sitting underneath those particular things. But here's an example where sometimes nuances matter. I'll just use Amplitude. We had some values and we had HOG, humility, and it's this idea of ownership and a growth mindset to do these things. Ownership defined in an individualistic culture is going to look very, very different than ownership defined in a collectivist culture. What I find with companies is that ... and certainly we struggled to communicate this too, and I think we were pretty good at communicating where we sat on this particular thing, but a lot of times people write up these cultural documents and they're just like, "Well, this is our culture. We're into ownership." It's not saying much, saying that you believe in ownership without the addition of ... what we would do successfully and Spencer and other people do successfully is talk about the behaviors that represented that level of ownership, then that tells you something about what the culture is. Maybe when I was answering that, I kind of took that for granted. But there's a set of beliefs and values that sit underneath all those things, I bet. When you think of the companies you work with over the years, and you don't have to answer this if you don't want, but when you think of the companies with the best culture or the best way, or some of the best companies in terms of how they build product, who comes to mind?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.