Three Lies You Have Been Told About Company Culture

Aga Bajer
7 min readAug 14, 2020

You’ve probably heard it a million times:

“Designing and building a strong company culture is fundamental to success. But it’s also super hard.”

Sounds about right?

Well, it’s not. It’s a blatant lie. Three lies, to be precise, skillfully rolled into one.

Lie #1: Culture change is the hardest work you will ever do.

Many of the leaders I meet through my work as a culture strategist seem to have resigned themselves to the “fact” that building a healthy culture, or — God forbid! — changing a culture is harder than building a spaceship.

I was at a conference once where the president of a large group of companies was asked what he would do if one of his companies had a toxic culture.

“Frankly speaking, I’d rather sell it than try to fix it.” — he admitted.

While disappointed, I was not surprised. Almost every “guru” writing or speaking on culture depicts it as an unwieldy, starving beast ready to gobble down your strategy — preferably for breakfast.

Here’s an excerpt from an otherwise great book on culture:

“Culture change is…

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Aga Bajer

I write about how to unlock the power of your company culture. Founder of CultureBrained™️+ The CultureLab Podcast Host — agabajer.com/podcast