This is a chapter from one of my favorite 

, the central theme from this chapter is something I’ve been thinking ever since my daughter was born.

Most of us have—or had—an idyllic image of what our families would be like. The children
will be well-behaved, they’ll adore and respect us, we’ll enjoy spending time together, and
they’ll make us proud when they are off in the world without us by their side.
And yet, as any experienced parent will tell you, wishing for that kind of family and
actually having that kind of family are two very different things. One of the most powerful tools
to enable us to close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture. We
need to understand how it works and be prepared to put in the hard yards to influence how it is
shaped.

As parents, we share a common worry: one day, our children are going to be faced with a
tough decision … and we are not going to be there to make sure they do the right thing.
They’re going to get on a plane and fly to a far-flung country with their friends. Or get to
college and see a chance to cheat on a test. Perhaps they’ll face a decision whether to choose to
be kind to a complete stranger—to do something that will make a huge difference in that
person’s life. All we can do is hope that somehow we’ve raised them well enough that they
come to the right conclusion by themselves.

But here’s the question: how do we make sure that happens?

It’s not as simple as setting family rules and hoping for the best. Something more
fundamental has to occur—and it has to happen years before the moment arises when our
children are faced with that difficult choice. Their priorities need to be set correctly so they
will know how to evaluate their options and make a good choice. The best tool we have to help
our children do this is through the culture we build in our families.

Enterprises and families are very similar in this respect. Just like your parents wanted
you to make good decisions, business leaders want to ensure that midlevel managers and
employees everywhere in the company make the right choices every day without requiring
constant supervision. This is nothing new: as far back as ancient Rome, emperors would send
an associate off to govern a newly conquered territory thousands of miles away. As the
emperors watched the chariot go over the hill—knowing full well they would not see their
associate again for years—they needed to know that their understudy’s priorities were
consistent with their own, and that he would use proven, accepted methods to solve problems.
Culture was the only way to make sure this happened.

Culture. It is a word we hear so much of on a day-to-day basis, and many of us associate it
with different things. In the case of a company, it’s common to describe culture as the visible
elements of a working environment: casual Fridays, free sodas in the cafeteria, or whether you
can bring your dog into the office. But as MIT’s Edgar Schein—one of the world’s leading
scholars on organizational culture—explains, those things don’t define a culture. They’re just
artifacts of it. An office that allows T-shirts and shorts could also be a very hierarchical place.
Would that still be a “casual” culture?

Culture is far more than general office tone or guidelines. Schein defined culture, and
how it is formed, in these terms:

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so
frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things
another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do
to be successful.

Those instincts aren’t formed overnight. Rather, they are the result of shared learning—
of employees working together to solve problems and figuring out what works. In every
organization, there is that first time when a problem or challenge arises. “How do we deal with
this customer’s complaint?” “Should we delay introducing this product until we’ve been able
to go through another round of quality testing?” “Which of our customers is the top priority?”
“Whose demands will we pay attention to, whose can we ignore?” “Is ‘good enough’ an
acceptable standard for deciding when a new product is ready to ship?”

In each instance of a problem or task arising, those responsible reached a decision
together on what to do and how to do it in order to succeed. If that decision and its associated
action resulted in a successful outcome—“good enough” product quality made the customer
happy, for example—then the next time when those employees faced a similar type of
challenge, they would return to the same decision and same way of solving the problem. If, on
the other hand, it failed—the customer stormed off and the employees’ manager reprimanded
them—those employees would be extremely hesitant to take that approach again. Every time
they tackle a problem, employees aren’t just solving the problem itself; in solving it, they are
learning what matters. In the language of capabilities from the previous chapters, they are
creating an understanding of the priorities in the business, and how to execute them—the
processes. A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an
organization.

As long as the way they have chosen keeps working to solve the problem—it doesn’t
have to be perfect, but working well enough—the culture will coalesce and become an internal
set of rules and guidelines that employees in the company will draw upon in making the
choices ahead of them. If these paradigms of how to work together, and of what things should
be given priority over other things, are used successfully over and over again, ultimately
employees won’t stop and ask each other how they should work together. They will just
assume that the way they have been doing it is the way of doing it. The advantage of this is that
it effectively causes an organization to become self-managing. Managers don’t need to be
omnipresent to enforce the rules. People instinctively get on with what needs to be done.

There are many examples of firms with powerful cultures.
Pixar, for example, which is known for highly creative and critically acclaimed
children’s films such as Finding Nemo, Up, and Toy Story, might not seem that different from
other animation studios on paper. But Pixar has developed a unique culture.

To begin with, its creative process is very different. Many film studios have a development department to come up with the ideas for movies, and then they hand those ideas out to directors to make a film. But Pixar does it differently. Instead of the group creating ideas
and assigning them to directors to execute, Pixar recognizes that directors are naturally going
to be more motivated to build out their own ideas—so it focuses on helping directors refine
them. The Pixar development team provides daily input to build a story, and they do this for
every film in progress across the company. That process includes no-holds-barred feedback
from people who are not involved in the making of each film. They can be brutally honest
sessions. Yet Pixar’s employees have come to respect that honesty because everyone at Pixar
agrees on the same goal: making high-quality, original films. That’s the priority. Unvarnished
feedback is valued because it helps to make better movies.

These processes and priorities have coalesced into Pixar’s creative culture. Because
working this way in film after film has been so successful, the culture has crystallized and now
people don’t feel they should hold back from criticizing a film’s story because it might derail
the timetable. They know it’s more important to produce a great movie.

That’s not to say that the way of working together at Pixar is the way that every
company in the film industry should work. Rather, we can simply say that the folks at Pixar
have used this way of working very successfully, year after year. Now the employees don’t
even need to ask how to behave, how to make decisions, or how to make this trade-off against
that one. Pixar has become in many ways a self-managing company, thanks to its culture.
Management doesn’t need to dive into the details of every decision, because the culture—
almost as an agent of management—is present in the details of every decision.

As long as the company’s competitive and technological environments remain as they
are today, the strength of its culture is a blessing. If the environment changes substantially,
however, then the strength of the culture will make it hard to change things, too.

Schein’s articulation of how culture is created allows executives to create a culture for
their organization—provided that they follow the rules. It starts with defining a problem—one
that recurs again and again. Next, they must ask a group to figure out how to solve that
problem. If they fail, ask them to find a better way to solve it. Once they’ve succeeded,
however, the managers need to ask the same team to solve the problem every time it recurs—
over and over again. The more often they solve the problem successfully, the more instinctive
it becomes to do it in the way that they designed. Culture in any organization is formed
through repetition. That way of doing things becomes the group’s culture.

Many companies see the value in assertively shaping their culture—so that the culture,
rather than the managers, causes the right things to happen. Once it has been shown to work,
they write it down and talk about it, as often as possible. Netflix, for example, invested a great
deal of time in defining and writing down its culture—one that may not suit everybody. Not
only is this available to employees, but it’s freely available online. It includes:

 No vacation policy: take as much as you want, as long as you’re doing a great job and
covering your responsibilities.

“Outstanding” employees only: doing an “adequate” job leads to your getting a “generous
severance package,” so the company can hire an A-player in your place.

Freedom and responsibility” vs. command-and-control: good managers give their employees
the right context in which to make decisions—and then the employees make the decisions.


But management can’t just spend time communicating what the culture is—it must make
decisions that are entirely in alignment with it. While Netflix built an early reputation for doing
this, it’s not uncommon to see a company release a document about culture, and then
completely fail to live up to it.

Famous examples abound—Enron had a “Vision and Values” statement. It aimed to
conduct itself in line with four Values (each starting with a capital letter): Respect, Integrity,
Communication, and Excellence. Respect, for example, had the following detail (as reported in
the New York Times): “We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not
tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t
belong here.”

Clearly, all the way from the top, Enron did not live the values it espoused. If you don’t
articulate a culture—or articulate one but don’t enforce it—then a culture is still going to
emerge. However, it is going to be based on the processes and priorities that have been
repeated within the organization and have worked.

You can tell the health of a company’s culture by asking, “When faced with a choice on
how to do something, did employees make the decision that the culture ‘wanted’ them to
make? And was the feedback they received consistent with that?” If these elements aren’t
actively managed, then a single wrong decision or wrong outcome can quite easily send a
firm’s culture down entirely the wrong path.


The parallels between a business and a family should be clear. Just like a manager who wants
to count on employees using the right priorities to solve problems, parents want to set those �
priorities, too, so that family members will solve problems and confront dilemmas
instinctively, whether or not the parents are there guiding or observing. Kids won’t have to
stop and think about what Mom or Dad wants them to do—they’ll just go about it because
their family culture has dictated, 

“This is the way our family behaves.”

A culture can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently. If you want your family to
have a culture with a clear set of priorities for everyone to follow, then those priorities need to
be proactively designed into the culture—which can be built through the steps noted above. It
needs to be shaped the way that you want it to be in your family, and you have to think about
this early on. If you want your family to have a culture of kindness, then the first time one of
your kids approaches a problem where kindness is an option—help him choose it, and then
help him succeed through kindness. Or if he doesn’t choose it, call him on it and explain why
he should have chosen differently.

That’s not to say that any of this is easy. First, you come into a family with a culture
from the family in which you grew up. There’s a good chance your spouse’s family culture
will have been fundamentally different from yours. Just getting the two of you to agree on
anything is a miracle. Then add kids to the equation—they’re born with their own attitudes and
wiring. Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but that’s exactly why it’s so important to understand
what type of culture you want and to proactively pursue it.

My wife, Christine, and I started, when we were newly engaged, with an end goal—a
specific family culture—in mind. We didn’t think about it in terms of culture, but that’s what
we were doing. We decided in a deliberate fashion that we wanted our children to love each
other and to support each other. We decided we wanted our children to have an instinct to obey
God. We decided we wanted them to be kind. And, finally, we decided that we wanted them to
love work.

The culture we picked is the right culture for our family, but every family should choose
a culture that’s right for them. What is important is to actively choose what matters to you, and
then engineer the culture to reinforce those elements, as Schein’s theory shows. It entails
choosing what activities we pursue, and what outcomes we need to achieve, so that as a family,
when we have to perform those activities again, we all think: 

In our case, for example, we knew we couldn’t simply order our children to love work.
Instead, we always tried to find ways for the kids to work together with us, and to make it fun.
I would, for example, never work in the yard unless I had at least one—and often two—kids
hanging on to the handle of the mower. For the longest time, they weren’t really helping at all.
Pushing a lawn mower with children hanging on, barely able to touch the ground, didn’t make
mowing easier. But that didn’t matter. What really mattered was that it allowed us to define
work for them as something that was a good thing. We did it together. It was fun, by definition.
And I made sure that they knew they were helping Dad, helping the family.

Before long, this value became embedded in our family’s culture; but it wasn’t by magic
or good luck. It was achieved by thoughtfully designing activities and doing simple things like
mowing the lawn together. We tried to be consistent about it; we made sure the kids knew why
we were doing it; and we always thanked them for it.

It is for this reason that as I look back at my life, I’m actually very glad we didn’t have
enough money to buy a perfectly finished house when our children were young. We stretched
so far to buy that first wreck of a house that we later couldn’t afford to pay tradesmen to fix it
up for us. Everything that needed to be fixed had to be fixed by us and by the kids. Now, most
people would think of this as a complete chore.

But inadvertently, we had moved our family into an environment rich in opportunities
for us to work together. As tempting as it might otherwise have been, we couldn’t outsource
it—we simply could not afford to. This meant there wasn’t a wall or a ceiling torn down, built
up, plastered, or painted without the kids helping us to do it. We applied the same principles as
with mowing the lawn—making it fun, and always thanking them. But in this instance, there
was additional positive reinforcement: every time the kids walked into any room in the house,
they’d see the wall and say: “I painted that wall.” Or “I sanded it.” Not only would they
remember the fun we had in doing it together, but they felt the pride from seeing what they’d
achieved. They learned to love work.

In solving the problems of fixing up our house together, we were helping to build the
Christensen family culture. Doing things together, over and over, led to a mutual
understanding of what things we prioritize, how we solve problems, and what really matters.
Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is
how hard you are going to try to influence it. Forming a culture is not an instant loop; it’s not
something you can decide on, communicate, and then expect it to suddenly work on its own.
You need to be sure that when you ask your children to do something, or tell your spouse
you’re going to do something, you hold to that and follow through. It sounds obvious; most of
us want to try to be consistent. But in the pressures of day-to-day living, that can be tough.
There will be many days when enforcing the rules is harder on a parent than it is on a child.

With good intentions, many exhausted parents find it too difficult to stay consistent with their
rules early on—and inadvertently, they allow a culture of laziness or defiance to creep into
their family.

Children might feel “success” in the short term by getting what they want in beating up a
sibling, or talking back to a parent who finally relents to an unreasonable demand. Parents who
let such behavior slide are essentially building a family culture—teaching their child that this is
the way the world works, and that they can achieve their goals the same way each time.
You have to consciously work throughout the years your children are young to help
them see “success” in the things you want to be part of your culture. 

For example, when one of our sons was very young, we learned that children in his class were bullying another child at school, and nobody was doing anything to stop it. Kindness had been one of our goals, but it had not yet become part of our culture. We came up with a new family motto: “We want Christensens to be known for kindness.” We worked it into conversation—and, in particular, taught our son how he could help his classmate who had been bullied. We praised him when he helped his classmate, as well as any of our children when they demonstrated kindness to others. We made it part of our culture.

Over time, this had the effect we wanted. Each of our children became truly kind women
and men. Wherever they are, in whatever corner of the world they are in, I do not worry about
what they will do when confronted with a problem. The first thought in their minds will be
“We want Christensens to be known for kindness.”

Again, our choices for a family culture are not necessarily the right ones for everyone.
What’s important to understand is how culture is built, so that you have a chance to create the
culture you want. In thinking about this, it might be helpful to remember the process by which
strategy is defined. There are deliberate plans, and emergent problems and opportunities.
These compete against one another in the resource allocation process, to determine which
receive our highest priorities of time, energy, and talent. I observed that in my case, my
profession emerged. My deliberate plan, to become editor of the Wall Street Journal, was
swept to the side as other opportunities emerged—including my present profession as a
teacher. However, I am grateful that I have not allowed the kind of person that I wanted to
become to be left to chance. That was a very deliberate decision.

You should approach the creation of the culture for your family in similar terms. The
professional pursuits and interests of your children need to emerge—and, in all probability,
will be very different one from another. The culture of your family ought to welcome such
diversity. But I recommend that, for the foundational dimensions of your family culture, there
be uniformity. Getting this right will prove to be a source of happiness and pride for each of
you.

Doing this does require constant vigilance about what is right and wrong. For every
action a family member takes, imagine that it will happen all the time. Is that okay? Even
something as simple as a fight between your two children that you didn’t see. When one comes
running to you in tears, how do you respond? Do you automatically punish the other child? Do
you tell the crying child to shake it off? Do you call both of them together and punish both of
them? Do you say you won’t get involved? 

If whatever solution you choose seems to work, then each time that your kids run up against that same problem, they’ll know what will happen.They will begin to learn the consequences of fighting with each other. If you are consistent, then even when they are playing at a friend’s house, that’s the behavior they will carry with them.

And if you don’t? By the time many parents find themselves entering middle age with
teenage children, they realize that they’ve allowed one of their most important jobs to slip past
them. Left unchecked long enough, “once or twice” quickly becomes the culture. As these sets
of behavior embed themselves in a family culture, they become very hard to change.

All parents aspire to raise the kind of children that they know will make the right choices—
even when they themselves are not there to supervise. One of the most effective ways to do that
is to build the right family culture. It becomes the informal but powerful set of guidelines about
how your family behaves.

As people work together to solve challenges repeatedly, norms begin to form. The same
is true in your family: when you first run up against a problem or need to get something done
together, you’ll need to find a solution.

It’s not just about controlling bad behavior; it’s about celebrating the good. What does
your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility?
What do the kids know they have to do that will get their parents to say, “Well done”?

This is what is so powerful about culture. It’s like an autopilot. What is critical to understand is that for it to be an effective force, you have to properly program the autopilot— you have to build the culture that you want in your family. If you do not consciously build it and reinforce it from the earliest stages of your family life, a culture will still form—but it will form in ways you may not like. 

Allowing your children to get away with lazy or disrespectful behavior a few times will begin the process of making it your family’s culture. So will telling them that you’re proud of them when they work hard to solve a problem. Although it’s difficult for a parent to always be consistent and remember to give your children positive feedback when they do something right, it’s in these everyday interactions that your culture is being set. And once that happens, it’s almost impossible to change

This is a chapter from one of my favorite books, the central theme from this chapter is something I’ve been thinking ever since my daughter was born.

Chapter from HWYMYL