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The study of culture is important for two reasons: it determines the productivity of groups and it determines their mental well being. After the basic needs are met, mental well being becomes paramount, and the “reason for being.”

Culture develops in three ways:

• The founder sets the pace and tone for the organization. This could be for an organization or a country. In the case of a country, it could be a bunch of people who get to write the constitution.
• The guy in charge. This could be the CEO or the head of a department. Yes, different departments can have different cultures in the same organization. Same goes for teams too. A country/company may have its culture and values documented, but if a looney tune takes charge (quick, how many can you list!) the country/company is slowly but surely trashed and development goes backwards in time. This is a new form of time travel, but I digress.
• The “mob.” In the absence of a strong leader “democracy” takes over. Opinions reign over facts, superstition reigns over science. Meetings are chaotic and decisions are slow. Bureaucracy reigns. It is a lot of work to organize information and takes a lot of rhetoric to convince a lot of people about the right thing to be done.

There are a lot of opinions about what is the “right culture.” The right culture is whatever works best for the customer and for the psyche of the people working in the organization. If every individual can live their life to the fullest, it is a great culture, no matter what someone else thinks.

You don’t invent culture, you discover it. You can’t adopt a cultural trait because it sounds cool, it has to come from within. Then you nurture it, until someone comes along who is strong enough to defy Newton’s laws of motion (applied to culture), to shake things up. This happens in corporate turnarounds. It also happens in very successful companies, sometimes in the wrong direction.

Corporate brainwashing of those who are not a cultural fit rarely works.