Culture Isn't Soft. It's the System Running Your Company

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Key Takeaways

Culture is an operating system, not a perk, guiding decisions when leaders aren’t present.
Clarity in culture reduces friction, speeds execution and empowers teams during constant change.

The past year has been relentless for founders and CEOs. Taxes shifted. Tariffs reappeared. Regulations tightened. Geopolitics escalated. And technology (especially AI) continued to rewrite how work gets done. For entrepreneurs, volatility is no longer an occasional disruption. It’s the environment you’re building inside.

So, when leaders gathered at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit this fall, the most urgent conversation wasn’t about forecasting models or the next productivity tool. It was about culture.

Not culture as in perks or “how we like to work.” Culture as in the invisible system that determines how people behave when the plan breaks down. When priorities collide. When leaders aren’t in the room to make the call.

But how do you create a culture flexible enough to adapt, resilient enough to absorb shocks and disciplined enough to execute in constant change? This surfaced repeatedly in conversations with CEOs like AT&T’s John Stankey, Starbucks’ Brian Niccol and Chevron’s Mike Wirth.

And Wirth’s experience offers an important lesson for entrepreneurs trying to scale without losing control. Culture doesn’t grow through inspiration. It grows through clarity.

Wirth became CEO of Chevron in early 2018 and was quickly tested. A global pandemic. Geopolitical conflict. Oil prices swung from negative territory to nearly $140 a barrel. Add a political environment that alternated between calling the industry irredeemable and denying climate change entirely, and you get a leadership stress test few founders would envy.

In moments like that, many leaders feel pressure to reinvent themselves. Chevron didn’t do that.

Instead, it relied on a long-standing framework called The Chevron Way. It defines the company’s purpose: to provide affordable, reliable and ever-cleaner energy that enables human progress and to be admired for people, partnership and performance. According to Wirth, respect for individuals, investment in people and a sustained commitment to diversity and inclusion sit at the core of that framework.

That didn’t make uncertainty disappear. But it did something far more valuable — it reduced confusion.

This is where many entrepreneurs misunderstand culture. They treat it as something that should remain loose so the company can stay agile. They worry that defining culture too clearly will slow innovation or limit creativity. In reality, the opposite happens.

Strong cultures are intentionally constraining. They narrow the range of acceptable behaviors so teams can move faster without constantly seeking approval. They remove second-guessing and create confidence about how decisions should be made, even when outcomes are unclear. Culture isn’t there to give people answers. It’s there to tell them how to decide.

When culture is vague, teams don’t feel empowered. They feel exposed. They wait and watch leadership closely for cues about what actually matters, because the stated values don’t offer enough guidance. In short, ambiguity doesn’t create freedom, it creates friction.

Founders often experience this firsthand as their companies grow. Early on, culture feels effortless because everyone sits in the same room and decisions happen organically. But as the organization scales, the founder can’t be everywhere. At that point, culture becomes the proxy for leadership. And if it’s poorly designed, it will work against you.

Another mistake entrepreneurs make is treating culture as a communication problem instead of a design problem. They invest in all-hands meetings, values and vision decks and carefully crafted language, assuming alignment will follow repetition. But culture isn’t absorbed through messaging. It’s shaped through decisions — especially the uncomfortable ones.

Who gets promoted when results are strong, but their behavior undermines trust? What tradeoffs are made when speed conflicts with quality? What stops being tolerated when pressure rises? Those moments teach people far more than any presentation ever will.

In volatile environments, culture is revealed not by what leaders say when things are going well, but by what they refuse to compromise when things aren’t. That’s when values either become operational or irrelevant.

This is why frameworks like The Chevron Way matter, regardless of company size. They aren’t branding tools. They’re operating systems. They create consistency across time, leadership changes and external shocks. They give people confidence to act without waiting for direction.

Sometimes entrepreneurs resist formalizing culture because it feels premature or bureaucratic. But culture will form whether you design it or not. The only question is whether it will support your strategy or sabotage it.

The leaders most focused on culture today aren’t trying to make their organizations more comfortable. They’re trying to make them more coherent. Because when strategy shifts faster than culture can support, execution stalls. Teams spend energy interpreting intent instead of delivering results.

And when culture lacks clarity, people default to self-protection instead of collaboration. They optimize for avoiding mistakes rather than creating value.

In an era defined by constant change, culture becomes either your most leveraged asset or your biggest liability. The founders who get this right don’t chase trends or rewrite values every year. They invest in clarity early. They define what matters before stress tests force the issue. And they build cultures that don’t just survive disruption but know how to operate inside it.

Key Takeaways

Culture is an operating system, not a perk, guiding decisions when leaders aren’t present.
Clarity in culture reduces friction, speeds execution and empowers teams during constant change.

So, when leaders gathered at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit this fall, the most urgent conversation wasn’t about forecasting models or the next productivity tool. It was about culture.

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