On this special episode, Sameer turns the tables on Jenny and puts her in the guest chair to talk about the new book she wrote with Stanford Professor Glenn Carroll – Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs, out April 2026. Based on decades of research, Glenn and Jenny’s book takes on the myths, clichés, and wishful thinking about organizational culture and replaces them with what works. In this interview, they give Sameer a sneak preview of some of the top tips in the book and how leaders can start building a great organizational culture today. Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/ *The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
On this special episode, Sameer turns the tables on Jenny and puts her in the guest chair to talk about the new book she wrote with Stanford Professor Glenn Carroll – Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs, out April 2026.
Based on decades of research, Glenn and Jenny’s book takes on the myths, clichés, and wishful thinking about organizational culture and replaces them with what works. In this interview, they give Sameer a sneak preview of some of the top tips in the book and how leaders can start building a great organizational culture today.
Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/
*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Jennifer Chatman: Hello, and welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer, where we help you create a work culture that actually works.
[00:00:08] Sameer Srivastava: Whether you're in the C-Suite or just starting out, an effective workplace culture is essential to achieving your organization's goals.
[00:00:16] Jennifer Chatman: I'm Jenny Chatman, a professor and dean at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
[00:00:23] Sameer Srivastava: And I'm Sameer Srivastava, also a professor at the Haas School. Together, we founded the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.
Jenny and I usually co-host the show together. But for our last episode of the season, I'll be flying solo as host because Jenny is flipping her role. Welcome to the guest chair, Jenny. How does it feel to be on the other side of the mic?
[00:00:46] Jennifer Chatman: Well, it feels a little scary, but mostly awesome. Thank you, Sameer, for letting us talk about our book on the pod.
[00:00:54] Sameer Srivastava: Jenny is joined today by Stanford Professor Glenn Carroll, with whom she recently teamed up on a new book that's launching in the spring. It's called Making Organizational Culture Great, Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs. Both Glenn and Jenny really helped shape the development of this entire field of organizational culture research, and the book takes on the myths, clichés, and wishful thinking about culture and replaces them with what really works based on decades of research.
Since we've had a few more specialized guests on the show recently, we thought this would be a good time to take a step back and talk to two genuine experts who can tell us about the big picture of what's happening. Welcome, Glenn.
[00:01:35] Glenn Carroll: Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here.
[00:01:38] Sameer Srivastava: Alright, Glenn, let's start by hearing a little bit more about you. What first pulled you into the study of organizational culture? What was your first aha moment?
[00:01:47] Glenn Carroll: I think the first thing that really intrigued me about culture was when I read a paper in graduate school by Art Stinchcombe, who was then a sociologist at UC Berkeley. He noted that the fraternities and sororities at Berkeley retained their cultures, which were very different depending on the era in which they were founded.
And if you think about it, I mean, the fraternities and sororities have dramatic demographic turnover that's very lumpy, and everybody leaves and goes at the same time. And so, I was intrigued by the idea that this culture would remain fairly constant over decades or even longer, even though you had all this dramatic turnover. And I thought, "Wow, culture's really an interesting phenomenon."
[00:02:31] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah. And that idea of imprinting has been so influential in our field. Jenny, how about you? What was your aha moment about culture?
[00:02:38] Jennifer Chatman: Well, mine was much less sophisticated than Glenn's. I actually didn't read a paper, but I noted that people around me, the adults around me, had wildly different reactions to their work. Some were extremely thrilled about going to work every day, and others found it monotonous and dreary. And so, I was interested about that factor, and it didn't seem like there were any particular personal characteristics that differentiated these folks.
And so, I really looked to the organizations and what they were doing and started thinking about how organizations differentiate on the kind of work experience they provide for different employees. And that's, sort of, the way that I angled into the field.
[00:03:29] Sameer Srivastava: Great. So, I want to talk a bit more about your disciplinary backgrounds. I am, as people also know, a sociologist by training, as is Glenn. Jenny, you're a social psychologist. We've all worked across disciplinary boundaries, and it can be super stimulating and rewarding, but also challenging in some respects.
So, I wanted to hear a bit more about how the two of you started working together and how you really started to blend your different disciplinary perspectives.
[00:03:55] Jennifer Chatman: Well, Glenn was my professor and…
[00:03:58] Glenn Carroll: I'm showing my age now.
[00:04:01] Jennifer Chatman: And, you know, he was a sociologist. I was very psychologically minded, and the course that I took of his, it was a Ph.D. course in macro-organizational behavior, which is the sociological side of the field. It really expanded my mind and got me thinking, not just at the individual level, which would've been the question, how do different people experience different organizations differently? But also, what is it that organizations do that could be different?
So, I felt like his perspective, the macro perspective, really informed my interests in things like culture and groups that can be looked at separate and distinct from the individuals that comprise those groups or those organizations. So, it really gave me a, kind of, level-of-analysis upgrade, if you will, to study under Glenn. So, it was only natural, I think, that we would come together on this because he's the one who, kind of, pulled me out of my myopic social psychological perspective to have a bigger view of what culture's about.
[00:05:08] Glenn Carroll: Well, you know, the same is true in reverse, as well. So, I didn't really think about individuals all that much. And then Jenny, in her dissertation, developed the Organizational Culture Profile, which is a way to assess and measure cultures quantitatively. And that just blew my mind, that you could do this from individual data, and provided a real benchmark and a way to think about culture based on fairly hard, objective, quantitative data that we really didn't see very much in the literature then. And it's still the standard for assessing culture right now, the OCP.
[00:05:40] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah. I want to just take a step back and ask about the definition of culture, and at least my observation is that one of the reasons why culture research has been a little bit fragmented across disciplines is that each discipline defines it somewhat differently. Have you two been able to work out a common definition that speaks to both social psychology and sociology, or do you have slightly different definitions?
[00:06:03] Jennifer Chatman: Well, I think our definitions are similar. Glenn, you can tell me if I'm mistaken here. The simple version of it is, organizational culture, so not culture writ large, but organizational culture, is the pattern of beliefs and behaviors that are shared within a particular social unit, being the organization in this case.
[00:06:23] Glenn Carroll: Yeah. So, you know, more colloquially, it's the way people behave and the way they think it's appropriate to behave in an organization.
[00:06:30] Sameer Srivastava: Great. Well, so let's now talk a little bit about the beliefs that practitioners have about organizational culture. Just taking a bird's-eye view of the field overall and how culture is thought about and enacted in organizations, what do you think is the number one myth about culture that you really wish would die out?
[00:06:48] Glenn Carroll: So, for me, and I don't know if this is a myth, it's a practice as much as it is the idea that, you know, when we go deal with culture, we want to solve cultural problems. What we do is we create an off-site retreat. We gather the executive team there, and we somehow work through, in the two or three days, a set of common values, you know, 6, 7, 10, and then we come back and announce these values, and that's it.
That's the end of the story, like, "Here are our values." That's not a bad thing to do, but that's a start, and only a start, and really, everything else that follows is much more important.
[00:07:23] Jennifer Chatman: Well, and I think one of the biggest mistakes about culture that managers have is that they think culture is something that happens to organizations that they can't deliberately drive. And it is true that, sort of, no matter what you do or don't do, a culture will form. Anytime people are meeting together on a regular basis where important things are at stake, like their status or their job responsibilities, cultural norms will form. You don't have a choice about that.
But what you do have a choice about is whether those cultural norms actually help you in achieving collective objectives like your strategy, or, left undirected, those norms can actually constrain a group's or an organization's ability to achieve its strategic objectives. So, the, kind of, necessary deliberateness in driving organizational culture, I think, is something that managers should be attentive to, and the ways of building a strong culture need to go beyond the offsite that Glenn mentioned and need to be integrated into the work that the organization is doing anyway.
It just is a, kind of, filter that you would use to prioritize the behaviors that are particularly important in a particular strategic area.
[00:08:44] Glenn Carroll: I often make the comparison between being a parent and raising your child. So, your kid's going to have a personality no matter what. The question you face as a parent is, do you want to try to shape it into something of your liking, or at least avoid your disliking? And almost everybody on this podcast, I'm sure, would say yes. And yet at the same time, you realize that's not an easy process. If you tell your teenager to do this, they're probably going to do the opposite of that.
So, you need to be very understanding of how these things work, and patient, and realize they're socially reactive as well. So, you can't just order people to do what you want. You have to be attentive to the process of work. So, personality is to the person as culture is to the organization, in my view.
[00:09:30] Sameer Srivastava: Great. Well, I want to pick up on something Jenny was just talking about a minute ago, around strong cultures, and first, just to have one of you define that term, and maybe give us an example or two of some strong-culture organizations. But then, sometimes a leaders have this belief that strong cultures can turn into rigid cultures. So, how can a culture be both strong and adaptive at the same time?
[00:09:52] Jennifer Chatman: Well, a strong culture is where people agree about what the high-priority behaviors are, and there's, kind of, intensity behind it, meaning that if you don't adhere to those behaviors, you'll experience some, kind of, sanction, whether it's rejection from the group or admonishment or something. So, people have to both agree about what's important, and they have to care, there has to be intensity. This is a nice, idea that Charles O'Reilly really brought to the literature in thinking about a strong culture.
And just incidentally note that the culture can be strong, kind of, independent of the content of that culture, which is another thing that managers often confuse. They'll just, sort of, say, "Oh, we have a really strong culture," but we don't know whether they're saying that there's a distinctive element to it that's strategically relevant or that it's just people agree about what happens around here. You know, the, sort of, poster-child example that everyone talks about with regard to strong cultures is Southwest Airlines.
And the reason they talk about Southwest Airlines is because Southwest has benefited quite significantly from its culture and from being very deliberate about its culture. And what they don't know is that the culture actually emphasizes something that's very strategically relevant, which is urgency and speed. And it boils down to their strategic advantage in turning the planes systematically faster than all their competitors.
So, we would say about Southwest that it both has a strong culture and a strategically relevant culture.
[00:11:28] Glenn Carroll: I'd give another example of Netflix. So, Netflix, without a doubt, has a strong culture based in Silicon Valley on radical candor and transparency. And if you look at what that means or how that's been applied to their strategy, their strategy shifted dramatically from mail-order CDs to streaming and now to the in-house production of movies and TV shows. And yet their culture hasn't really changed throughout that. It's a strong culture, but it's not rigid in terms of constraining the strategy in terms of what they want to do and where they see their opportunities.
[00:12:03] Jennifer Chatman: I think something that leaders underestimate as well is that if one criterion for an effective culture is that it's strategically relevant, meaning that you prioritize the behaviors that are actually important for getting across the finish line strategically, then that right away logically implies that every time you change your strategy, you ought to reconsider your culture in light of the behaviors that might need to look a little bit differently.
And even though I would say that at a, kind of, grand level, Netflix hasn't changed its culture, right? You know, candor and taking responsibility and so forth, the specific manifestations of those cultural precepts have shifted as they have changed their strategy.
[00:12:48] Sameer Srivastava: So, both Netflix and Southwest are great examples of how culture can actually drive performance outcomes. And there's, of course, a growing body of research linking culture to performance. Could you summarize what we know from that literature and what are the mechanisms through which culture affects performance?
[00:13:07] Glenn Carroll: So, in my thinking about it, there's really two basic ways in which culture affects performance. The first is through what I call strategy alignment, which is, we have our strategy, and then we have a culture, and do the principles in the culture reinforce the strategy? As in, if we say we're about innovation, does the culture do things that allows people, facilitates, encourages, and rewards innovation?
The second way in which culture affects performance is through just enhancing the commitment and coordination of people to the organization. So, no matter what's going on, they stay committed and they're willing to see the organization through whatever period of turmoil or crisis there may be. There are lots of different variants in which that works out, but those are, kind of, my ways the two basic pathways in which culture affects performance.
[00:13:54] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah, the only thing I would add there is that there's some research that shows that organizations that emphasize content elements of culture that focus on adaptability and innovation, kind of, universally do better financially, which, sort of, says it means that your culture absolutely cannot be rigid, and you have to be adaptable over time. You have to build in a capacity for adaptation and change.
[00:14:22] Sameer Srivastava: Great. So, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the concept of culture fit, something that a lot of organizations spend quite a bit of time screening for and selecting people on the basis of. But we also know from the work of Lauren Rivera at Northwestern and others that sometimes, culture fit in organizations is just used as a means to hire socially similar people. People you want to go have a beer with, or who played lacrosse in college like you did.
Recent years have seen some firms moving away from culture fit to the concept of "culture add." Where do you two come out on this question and this debate?
[00:15:00] Jennifer Chatman: Well, the first thing is that when people say "culture fit," they assume that you're talking about “high fit,” that someone fits the culture very closely. I think of it more as a just a generic attribute. What level of fit exists? And you can think about culture fit, meaning that you have a low level of fit, or culture fit, meaning that you have a high level of fit.
And I actually encourage leaders to think about a, kind of, portfolio model of fit, to avoid the, kind of, myopia that can come from homogeneity in people. So, for example, say you're thinking about changing your strategy and you realize that your culture needs to shift from being very change-avoidant to more open to innovation and change. But the people you have in your organization already are people who, kind of, like to stay the course and who are resistant to risk and change.
Well, one thing you could think about is hiring people who explicitly don't fit that culture. That actually look like they might fit the culture you're trying to cultivate, people who are more comfortable taking risks, people who have demonstrated creativity and innovation in their work experience. So, again, I think it's not helpful just to assume that fit always means high fit, and that it always means high fit on all attributes of an organization's culture. You can be very variegated in how you think about cultural fit.
Maybe we want someone who's, you know, high on risk but also is high on integrity, you know, they're not going to undermine our effectiveness, and the risks they take are somewhat measured. That's the way I think about it. But, you know, there's a long history of research on looking at cultural fit, and it mostly assumes that organizations universally just want to pursue people who fit perfectly with the current culture. And that's just really a mistake, because organizations need to be adaptive and respond to dynamic environments.
[00:17:07] Glenn Carroll: I would also say there's a more basic problem that sometimes occurs that I think Rivera's work points to, which is, people are not using the concept of fit appropriately, or organizations are not using it. If you just use it to hire your friends, that's wrong. Nobody ever intended for that to be the measure of fit. The measure of fit is, you have a set of very specific cultural values that are related to strategic success, that you develop a way to interview and select for based on those.
And you may or may not like the people who you select. It's just about selecting for the business priorities. And then on every other thing, this is where the culture add comes in, maybe you want max diversity. So, I have these seven values, I'm going to be very rigorous in selecting on these seven values, because that's the core of my company. And I guarantee you, companies like Google, they think that's why they're successful, because of their core values.
But then on everything else, you want to have as much diversity as you can to bring in all, kinds of, other ideas and challenges and things that are going to help you move forward beyond just what you have in the values.
[00:18:16] Jennifer Chatman: Well, and I'll just add that social psychologists can be implicated here. Probably the closest thing that social psychologists have to a law of human behavior is the similarity-attraction bias. And this is why fit can get so fraught so easily, it's because we prefer people who are similar to us.
And so, when you ask us to do some hiring, we go out and, right, we think we're doing a pretty good job. We wouldn't mind having lunch with ourselves now and then, so we just go gather people who are just like us. And, actually, leaders need to fight against that propensity, which is very human, for people to feel more comfortable with those whom they perceive to be similar to them, for exactly, for the reasons that Glenn raised.
[00:18:59] Glenn Carroll: I guess one example of a fit question I think is pretty interesting. So, people often say at the end of the interview, "Is this a person you'd like to have a beer with? You'd like to go to dinner with, or something like that?" And at Google, the question was, "Imagine you were stuck in LAX, LA International Airport, on an eight-hour delay or six-hour delay, and you were stuck with this person. Is this a person you would find interesting to talk to for six hours?"
And, you know, in Google's underlying view of the world, they want to have people who are curious and inquisitive and who are willing to be imaginative and explore all, kinds of, things. And if you can't talk to them for six hours, they're probably not that. And it's not necessarily, do you like them? Are you sitting there doing high-fives in the bar? It's like, you know, is this an intellectually interesting person who's going to challenge you?
[00:19:46] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah, I've heard another version of that from other firms, which is the Wichita test, which is if you're stuck in Wichita Airport, so maybe even more challenging than LAX. I was going to ask you to both reflect on this balance between cohesion and inclusion. As you both know, I also have a paper together with Amir Goldberg and a few others on fitting in or standing out, which talks about sometimes the benefits of being a bit of a cultural misfit.
But when you have people who fit in very neatly and others who don't, how do you balance cohesion and inclusion so that people don't feel excessive pressure to fit a particular mold?
[00:20:25] Jennifer Chatman: Well, it makes me think of Jack Goncalo's work, where he talks about creativity emanating from people in places where there is not a strong norm to fit in perfectly. And he talks about those who are best at withstanding the rigors of the creative process as people who are less attentive to what others' expectations of them are. You know, it's a tough needle to thread. On the one hand, you want the benefits that come from a cohesive culture. On the other hand, you want people to feel some flexibility to not necessarily act uniformly.
And, actually, Frank Flynn and I once wrote a paper that was about the distinction between uniformity and conformity. So, you can conform to a culture of innovation. Your behaviors would look very different from everybody else's, whereas uniformity really requires that everyone behave exactly the same. So, there must be some, kind of, distinction like that where you allow people to manifest their behavior differently, but everyone agrees that that's a good idea.
[00:21:41] Glenn Carroll: Yes. I think that the trick is to get everybody to think, like, everybody here is really a member of the team. They really believe in the purpose. They're really committed to the rest of us. But we have different views about how to do that sometimes, you know, and that's a good thing and helps us move forward. But it's not like that's questioning loyalty. And so, that's when it gets to be problematic is when dissent seems to be about loyalty or commitment or purpose to the firm.
[00:21:41] Sameer Srivastava: Great. So, I want to now turn to the more managerial question. So, if you are a leader and you've read your book and you understand the importance of having a strategically relevant culture. How do you know if your company actually has a strategically relevant culture, one that's going to help it win? And can you give maybe an additional example or two of companies that have had strategically relevant cultures?
[00:22:31] Jennifer Chatman: So, I would recommend that a leader ask two kinds of questions to figure out if their culture is strategically relevant. The first question is, what is your current culture emphasizing? Right? Are you prioritizing being detail-oriented or being people-oriented? What are you really focused on here? And then the second question is, imagine you were fully executing… You're just, like, killing it in terms of executing your near-term strategy, the strategy you're looking to for the next one to three years.
And imagine what cultural priorities would be in place if you were fully executing on that strategy. Then you take those two lists, the current culture and the strategically needed culture, and you compare them. And there's probably going to be some things that are the same, right? That are working well, and some things that are a little bit off or not being prioritized or are being, you know, overly prioritized in the current culture, given what you need to do in a strategically relevant culture.
I mean, I think it's fairly straightforward, and it sounds, kind of, simple or even simplistic, but it really is a way of diagnosing the gaps between your current and your strategically needed culture. As for an example, I like to think about a former student of mine, Jennifer Cook, who Glenn also knows well, who did a masterful job of changing her culture in, kind of, record time. And we, sort of, document the story of Jennifer Cook at Genentech, which was the company that she was working in.
She had a very ambitious five-year strategy that her boss had basically given to her that required that she triple the business that she was running, one of the main divisions within Genentech. And she went through a very systematic culture change process. And rather than it taking five years to hit their strategic goals of tripling the business, it took them only 11 months. It was really a miraculous shift that occurred, and the goals were not just financial goals but goals for acquiring patients and consolidating their drug franchises, and so forth. So, it really is quite an incredible story.
[00:24:53] Sameer Srivastava: Glenn, anything you'd add?
[00:24:55] Glenn Carroll: So, Jenny did a great job about how to make the culture strategically relevant, but your question also asked about winning. And there's another piece to winning, which is, you know, you can follow the strategy, but the strategy needs to be a good one in the first place. So, if you follow the strategy and it's not a good strategy, you're not going to win. So, there's, like, two parts to that question. Do you have the right strategy, and does your culture help you follow it?
[00:25:19] Jennifer Chatman: And you all should know that Glenn has written a fantastic book on strategy. And the thing you need to know about culture is that you really can't define what your culture should be unless you have a very good handle on what your strategy is, and that that strategy is actually a good one.
[00:25:36] Sameer Srivastava: Great. So, I want to come back to the book again, because in the book you quote a statistic that 80% of managers say that their organization's culture needs to change. That seems like a relatively high percentage. What do you make of that? And do you think that's actually the case for all these organizations?
[00:25:55] Glenn Carroll: Yes, I think that number comes from me. So, in the, you know, many years I've been teaching organizational culture to executive audiences, I often give them an advance question and ask them about their culture, and then ask them, "Do you think your culture needs to change?" And then I ask them what they'd do to make a change. And so, it's very remarkable to me that across all the years, across all the different companies, across all the different occupations, that number about who thinks we need to change remarkably comes in somewhere around 80% almost always.
Now, when you look at it underneath and talk to the people, it's not the same thing. They're not all talking about a wholesale change of culture. Sometimes it's fine-tuning here and there. Sometimes it's, you know, change this or change that, and sometimes it is a wholesale change. But it's the whole portfolio of possible changes.
But it just says people are somehow not satisfied, think there's something that we could do to improve there. And, you know, I find it remarkable, first of all, for so many of them to say that, and second, across all these different groups and the years, that the number is pretty close to 80%, is an empirical fact that continues to stand.
[00:27:07] Sameer Srivastava: Great. So, in thinking about culture change, you talk about all the different levers that leaders can pull, but in practice, you described three levers that leaders tend to focus on more than others, and to the exclusion of others. Those being agreeing on core values, tweaking incentives, or launching some new training or communication program. Why these three, and what are the most important overlooked levers?
[00:27:34] Glenn Carroll: So, that comes from the same set of questions that I usually ask them. So, in addition, I ask them, you know, "Would you change your culture?" and I ask them, "What are the first three things you would do?" And invariably, those are the three things that rise to the top. I mean, almost all… again, it's astounding. And yet if you look in our book, we have maybe, I don't know, 25 different levers that we think are good for sustaining and developing cultures.
And so, why do those three rise to the top? So, my reflection, my thought, is that those are three things that are, in many ways, pretty easy for managers to conceptualize doing because those are things that they do all the time and that they have almost total control over. So, they know how to call a meeting and get people to agree on things. They know how to set incentives. They don't necessarily know how to institute a job rotation program. They don't know how to change the decentralized organizational decision-making.
They don't know how to develop mentors for culture and to do any those things. It's not that they don't know how to do it, it takes a longer time period to see the consequences, the effects of it. So, it's not so immediate in its returns. And so, I always try to get to them and say, ″Look, these three things, they're good things, don't get me wrong. But you're thinking way too narrowly." Think about a much broader set, many more systemic principles and changes that you could put in place. They're going to help your organization over the long period.
[00:28:55] Sameer Srivastava: Jenny, how about you? Do you have any candidates for the most overlooked levers?
[00:28:59] Jennifer Chatman: I think people often say that when they want to change the culture that they need to move a bunch of people out and bring in a bunch of new people. And I think they fail to recognize that they probably haven't worked hard enough to help the people who are there see that another strategic approach would be more effective. Glenn mentioned my dissertation back when we started, and my dissertation was essentially a horse-race test about whether it's better to, sort of, make-buy decision.
Do you “buy” people who will fit the culture you're trying to create, or do you socialize the people who are already there to help them understand why to prioritize behaviors in a particular way? And this is a, sort of, ridiculous way of settling this. But my dissertation, sort of, did that in that we found that 15% of cultural fit came from who you hired, but 40% of cultural fit came from how people stepped up and changed their behavior based on all of the, kinds of, things that Glenn talked about, job rotation and other kinds of socialization opportunities.
So, I think leaders often underestimate how able people are to adapt to new behavioral priorities if you provide them with the strategic logic for why doing so is so important.
[00:30:23] Sameer Srivastava: So, one important idea in the book is you say that the goal of culture change is to design a system that runs without direct control. Can you just say a little bit more about what that means, and when you say that to leaders, how do they respond?
[00:30:38] Glenn Carroll: Yeah, so I'll give an anecdote around that. So, Reed Hastings, the founder and ex-CEO of Netflix, tells a story about how Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook at the time, shadowed him around for a day. And he said, ″You know, we do this often among high-level executives in Silicon Valley so we can learn from each other." He said, ″At the end of the day, you know, in a debrief with Sheryl, she was astounded." She said, "I sat with you the whole day through dozens of meetings, and you didn't make a single decision. Not a single decision!"
And he wrote in the book, “No Rules Rules,” he said, ″You know, I just smiled." I said, "That's the way we want it to be." And the whole idea is that if you build a culture, the people in it will make decisions not exactly how you would do them, but they'll take into account the things you want, and they'll be running in the right direction. And if everybody's doing that, it makes it easier for the executives as well as making the company more effective and aligned with what they're trying to do.
And so, in that sense, it's scary, especially in a crisis, to take your hands off the wheel. And Jenny and I wrote a case on Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream where they did this. But, like, sometimes that's the best thing to do, especially if you have a strong culture in place.
[00:31:54] Sameer Srivastava: Well, as Jenny knows, we always end our podcast by asking our guests to articulate their three main takeaways from this discussion. And Jenny, you're now on the other side in the hot seat, so I'm going to ask you if you could take a shot at summarizing, together with Glenn, the big three takeaways from this discussion.
[00:32:12] Jennifer Chatman: Well, I realize now this is not easy, what we ask our guests to do. But let me give it a try. The first thing is, one should be deliberate about culture and serious about it. It is consequential, and so leaders should treat culture like any other business process that they're serious about. Sometimes when leaders ask me in my executive courses, you know, "What's one thing that I should do to improve my culture?" I say rather cynically, "Well, you should get a spreadsheet."
And what I mean by that is they should track their culture-change process just like they would track anything else that they cared about. And there are ways of doing that, which we talk about in the book. But it doesn't just mean… and this is the second one, that you do this for two or three things. You have to be consistent and comprehensive in the changes that you make in an organization. We have a strong culture, I like to think, at the Haas School of Business. Sameer, you can validate that or not. But at last count, there's something like 180 different processes that are associated with our defining leadership principles, right? It's not just one or two things.
It's like across the board, you can't turn in any direction in the organization without running into the culture and what's prioritized. So, I guess, that would be the second thing.
And then the third thing is, culture can change. You don't have to accept the culture that's there. You can actually direct it. You can cultivate it. If you can actually direct your teenage children, as Glenn is suggesting, by the same logic, you can change your organization's trajectory as well.
It may take a while. You'll have to invest. You'll have to get a spreadsheet. You'll have to be serious about it. But you definitely can change organizational culture. Let me stop there because I'm sure I left something out, Glenn.
[00:34:03] Glenn Carroll: Well, so, no, I think that's a great set of three to end on. I would just add one thing, which is a complementary item, which is that, you know, for social scientists, most of these processes involved are not all that mysterious or even divisive. There's not a lot of disagreement on them. So, we, kind of, understand what happens in a strong culture versus a weak culture, and we understand why. And we can communicate that. Our book tries to do that, and I hope we succeed in doing that. But the hard part is really the managerial part, it's enacting that and doing that in a consistent way over time.
It's one thing to say, you know, "Go out and give this speech and do this and that." It's another that you give that speech a hundred times to a different set of people, giving the same message, because you, as a leader, might be really bored with that message, but it's very important that the people hear it and hear it from you in the same way you deliver it to other people.
So, the execution of this stuff is much harder than understanding the science of it. Our book is an attempt to communicate the science so that when you do go out and execute, you're operating from a position of confidence, knowing that what you're doing is the right thing. But it's not easy, that's for sure.
[00:35:15] Sameer Srivastava: Well, we usually try to hold our guests to just three takeaways, but for the two of you, I think it's appropriate to make an exception and allow that fourth one. So, thanks again to both of you. That was super insightful. And thanks to everyone for listening.
Well, that’s a wrap for Season 4. And we’ll see you next season on The Culture Kit, with Jenny back in the role of co-host.
[00:35:35] Jennifer Chatman: Thanks, Sameer.
[00:35:36] Glenn Carroll: Thank you
[00:35:40] Jennifer Chatman: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer!
[00:37:45] Sameer Srivastava: The Culture Kit podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online so others who have workplace culture questions can find us too!
[00:36:04] Jennifer Chatman: I'm Jenny.
[00:36:06] Sameer Srivastava: And I'm Sameer.
[00:36:06] Jennifer Chatman: We'll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.