26 cultural values companies get wrong

From accountability to transparency, leaders share where culture can go off track.

Nine ways to spot a team on fire before you join it.

An interview process is the organisation on its best behaviour. Whatever you can see smouldering from the outside is, by definition, the part they could not hide while actively trying to impress you.

Surprising Ways to Reduce Turnover in High-Pressure, High-Skill Jobs

A study of ICU nurses over more than two years reveals how hospitals may be misreading the retention problem.

Overload drains people; meaningful responsibility anchors them

This does not mean hospitals should simply pile more work onto nurses

Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional

Or: how organisations accidentally became very good at ignoring their best people.

Do You Recognize Burnout in Your Organization?

Burnout isn’t a personal failing. It’s a structural problem that leaders must solve.

How to hire people who are better than you

If you don't hire people better than you, the organization gets bigger, not better. But how do you hire for something you don't understand?

Project Mario - Colossus

The inside story of how DeepMind’s experiments in AI safety governance transformed Demis Hassabis from an idealist into a realist

Game Theory Patterns at Work

Foundations: Games, Rationality, and Traps In organizations, strategies and execution are interdependent. Outcomes depend not just on what you do, but on what others do, and what they expect you to…

Welcome to the Room

A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella When I was Promoted to Technical Fellow, I was “invited to the room”, joining Microsoft’s other Senior Executives. It was really something. Achieving t…

A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella

The Power of Affirmation at Work

How leaders can build a culture where employees feel valued.

Your Closest Relationship Isn't With Family or Friends, Viral Theory Says

Everyone loves a good relationship theory, especially one that feels uncannily accurate. This one hit home for anyone who hates their job.

Inside Cursor

Sixty days with the AI coding decacorn

When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow

Picture this: A Slack channel for an open-source project that prominently displays "Be excellent to each other" in its community guidelines. Six month

These aren't moral failures—they're predictable system dynamics that we can recognize, understand, and potentially prevent.

In any community with strong values, there's social currency in being seen as embodying those values.

To Change Company Culture, Focus on Systems—Not Communication

Leaders spend too much time on tone and narrative. Instead, they need to model the new culture they’re trying to create.

Nukes, Nubs And Coners: The Unique Social Hierarchy Aboard A Nuclear Submarine

Getting assigned to your first sub doesn't make you a submariner and once you become one you'll find yourself in a social structure unlike any other.

Reflections on OpenAI

Reflections on Palantir

A retrospective of an eight-year stint.

Can you run a company as a perfect free market? Inside Disco Corp

For over a decade, a $20bn manufacturer has been conducting a radical experiment. No one has a boss or takes orders. Their decisions are guided by one thing, an internal currency system called Will

Nabeel S. Qureshi

Personal writing and other things by Nabeel Qureshi.

Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People

Anna Binder, Asana's Head of People and the company's first HR hire, shares her step-by-step approach to intentionally building the company culture.

9 viral phrases that explain China’s work culture

From “lie flat” to “let it rot,” common terms have taken on new meaning in recent years.

Cultures Clash at Salomon Smith Barney — Stories.Finance

Richard Bookstaber was Salomon Brothers’ chief risk officer in 1997 when the firm was bought by Travelers and merged with Smith Barney, Travelers’ retail brokerage. He describes the resulting clash of cultures.

What I learned at GitLab that I don't want to forget

After a little over 5 years, I'm going to be leaving GitLab for my next adventure. It's no surprise to those of you who have been following me that I have absolutely loved my time there. I'm so proud of what we built—and I'm still proud and awed by

How can you tell if the company you’re interviewing with is rotten on the inside?

How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside? This seems to be on a lot o…

Does your company suffer from broken culture syndrome? | MIT Sloan

Whether it’s caused by culture clash, cultural inertia, or total toxic collapse, broken culture syndrome can sink an organization. But there’s a way out.

Valve handbook low res

Creating Culture

An Imperfect Recipe

Psychological Safety, Risk Tolerance and High Functioning Software Teams | HackerNoon

A few years ago, Google decided to research what was the key ingredient that made some software teams at the company more successful than others. Much to their surprise the key trait that was most correlated with successful teams wasn’t technical prowess, personalities or the…

Product Management Is a Company, Not a Department

Do you rely too heavily on product management to ensure your product is successful? Joe Kinsella explores the importance of everyone in a startup being in PM.

Inner Workings of Product Management at Product Led Growth Companies - OpenView

Product is at the epicenter of everything a product led growth (PLG) company does. So how does the product organization and its PMs need to adapt? Find out here.

6 Rules for Building and Scaling Company Culture

For your business to survive, it needs character and purpose.

Are you outspoken at work? How to use your voice – and not get fired

Hello, my name is Andrew, and I can’t stop disagreeing.

Why T-Shirts Matter

During my tenure at LinkedIn, I’ve held a wide variety of roles and responsibilities within the company. Some are fairly public (as described on my LinkedIn profile). Others are the the typ…

Startup Culture Is Not About Ping-Pong Tables

Culture isn’t about whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 500 giant. It’s about values and mindset. It’s about how you approach the decisions you make.

Culture

Our overriding objective is excellence. When we say excellence, we mean constant improvement. Our mission of understanding how the world’s markets and economies work requires an extraordinary team, defined by the best individuals and the best portfolio of people, operating in an…

The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures

Innovative cultures are generally depicted as pretty fun. They’re characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. They’re seen as being psychologically safe, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical. And research suggests that these behaviors translate…

The Difference Between Good And Bad Organizations

"In a poor organization ... people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes."

Inside Kraken’s Culture War Stoked by Its C.E.O.

Jesse Powell, who leads the crypto exchange Kraken, has challenged the use of preferred pronouns, debated who can use racial slurs and called American women “brainwashed.”

We don t do that here

The rise of ‘bai lan’: why China’s frustrated youth are ready to ‘let it rot’

Phrase bai lan gains popularity as severe competition and social expectations leave many young people despondent

The GitLab Handbook

GitLab Handbook Company About GitLab Values Mission Vision Strategy Communication Culture TeamOps CEO Readme Office of the CEO Key Reviews Group Conversations E-Group Weekly Environmental, Social, and Governance Handbook About the Handbook Handbook Changelog Handbook Roadmap…

8 Principles for Building a High-Performance Culture | The Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog

Leadership Now is a leading source for leadership development and analysis. We believe that anyone can make a difference by leading from where they are.

The Founder’s Guide to Discipline: Lessons from Front’s Mathilde Collin

Front's CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin shares why a founder’s discipline matters more than vision, unveiling her own best practices and templates for communication, time management, fundraising and team building.

‘Give away your Legos’ and other commandments for scaling startups

Molly Graham helped forge a work culture at Facebook that's withstood huge amounts of growth. Today, she's something of a rapid scaling expert. Here's the key to doing it right, she says.

This is How to Repair a Toxic Work Culture

Feeling safe is the magic ingredient to a healthy work environment. In this article Nir discusses novel research on how to eliminate toxic work culture.

10 questions to ask in a job interview that will really expose a company's culture - Fast Company

Simple questions that can speak volumes about your prospective employer.

How to Build a Culture of Generosity at Work

Here are six practices to help your team ask for and give more help to each other.

What leader(s) over your product career truly changed how you approach prod

I learned from bosses & peers, including some famous peeps like Reed Hastings, Patty McCord, and Dan Rosensweig. But mainly I learned by doing, supercharged by feedback from many "Friends of Gib."

Are you outspoken at work? How to use your voice – and not get fired

Hello, my name is Andrew, and I can’t stop disagreeing.

A Software Engineering Culture Test

See a shorter, and updated version of this test here: The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions on Engineering Culture [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pragmatic-engineer-test/]. I've talked with dozens of software developers about what they like and dislike about their…