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Company culture doesnt affect performance. Thats not a hot take, thats what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report: The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe that improving their firms culture would increase the value of their company. So are 92% of executives wrong? And are millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted each year on culture efforts? The short answer? Yes and yes. The full answer is a bit more complicated. Why the myth persists Leaders cling to the idea that culture drives results because it feels controllable. You can write new values, host an off-site, or hire a chief culture officer. Its far easier to reprint the employee handbook than to rewire incentives, decision-making, or priorities. Culture talk offers the illusion of progresssomething visible, moral, and manageablewhile the real performance drivers remain untouched. Company culture is still deeply misunderstood Many leaders talk about culture as something you havea vibe, a set of values, a moodrather than something you do. But culture is not a static asset; its the emergent result of how decisions are made, what gets rewarded or punished, and which behaviors the system makes easy or hard. When executives say we need a culture of innovation, but still require six layers of approval for new ideas, theyre confusing aspiration for infrastructure. Leaders arent being honest about their culture, or with themselves Research from MIT Sloan Management Review (2020) found no correlation between a companys stated values and the lived experience of its employees. In other words, what leaders say their culture is and what people actually feel day-to-day are worlds apart. Firms with large culture gaps see lower productivity and impaired alignment. The misalignment fuels cynicism and distrust, undermining managerial credibility and depleting morale. Employees in these organizations report reduced commitment and higher turnover. Instead of confronting that gap, many double down on optics: slogans, all-hands pep talks, or off-sites meant to rebuild trust. But culture isnt changed through words or ritualsits changed through systems. Decision rights, information flow, meeting cadence, and incentives form the real architecture of behavior. Until leaders are honest enough to align those structures with their rhetoric, culture initiatives will keep delivering the same result: symbolic satisfaction with no measurable performance gains. Leaders arent being strategic about their culture Every era has its cultural role modelthe company everyone else is told to emulate. In the 90s it was Jack Welchs GE. Then it was Apple, then Amazon. Now its Jensen Huangs Nvidia. Each time, executives rush to borrow their rituals and slogans, hoping to import a little of their magic. But lets be honest: your company isnt that companyand it shouldnt be. Culture is simply how strategy gets lived. Which means a best culture doesnt exist, only a fit cultureone that reinforces your distinct strategy and constraints. Copying someone elses culture while pursuing a different strategy isnt just naive, its counter-strategic. The culture obsession is a distraction The corporate world is hooked on culture because its comforting and it makes leadership feel human and moral. But culture talk often becomes a way to avoid harder truths: bad strategy, misaligned incentives, broken systems, and unclear ownership. In our experience as a consulting partner to some of the worlds largest and most complex companies, a culture problem is usually a smokescreen for problems that leaders have long known about and shirked responsibility for: a nice way to avoid assigning blame or deflecting responsibility. And when we analyzed 1,700 public companies and their Glassdoor ratings, we found that the No. 1 topic among negative reviews were complaints about leaders and management. So, poor leadership produces poor cultures. What to do instead Before rushing to rewrite values, produce swag, or drag people to town halls, leaders first need to hold themselves accountable. Do they actually behave in the way they hope others will? Do they collaborate with their peers as one company or is that really just a slogan? Does the way they allocate resources match what they claim to prioritize? Are the people theyre promoting really the best culture bearers or merely squeaky wheels or political players? Then, leaders should consider culture as the shadow cast by the operating model they design and manage. If you want to change the shadow, you have to move the object casting it. That means redesigning how decisions get made, how information travels, and what gets measured and rewarded. Culture is not a lever to pull; its a reflection of the choices leadership makes every day about how work actually happens. So yes, culture matters, just not in the way most executives think. You dont fix performance by fixing culture; you fix culture by fixing performance. Because in the end, culture lives in the rules you enforce, not the words you endorse.
Category:
E-Commerce
Executives like to say they are integrating AI. But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation: they add a chatbot here, an automated report there, and call it transformation. Thats the same mistake companies made in the early days of the web: building websites as brochures instead of re-thinking their business models around digital interaction. AI is not a feature. Its an architectural layer that will reshape every workflow, decision, and product. Those who treat it as decoration will fade, those who treat it as structure will lead. From automation to agency As product strategist Connor Davis noted, every great company will soon have an agentic layer, a system that not only automates tasks but also orchestrates them across functions. The distinction is crucial. Automation is about efficiency: doing existing tasks faster or cheaper. Agency is about delegation: letting the system make decisions, coordinate actions, and even manage other software on your behalf. Think of it as moving from tools that execute commands to assistants that understand context. The leap is subtle but profound. When a finance team uses an LLM to summarize quarterly reports, thats automation. When the same system proactively flags anomalies, adjusts forecasts, and alerts the CFO with recommendations, thats agency. Companies that understand this shift are already reorganizing around it. They are not adding AI to workflows: they are building workflows around AI. What an AI-first roadmap really means To be AI-first doesnt mean using the latest model or adding generative features. It means designing products and processes that assume continuous intelligence at their core. Andrew Bolis captured this well: AI will become the orchestration layer across every SaaS tool. Instead of humans jumping between apps, agents will execute intent across systems. Thats the future of enterprise software. Todays SaaS stack forces humans to be the middleware: copying data between CRMs, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Tomorrows agentic layer will do that work automatically, turning enterprise systems from silos into a single, adaptive organisms. And heres no less than a biologist telling you so, and a few years in advance. This evolution mirrors what happened when APIs transformed the web. At first, companies built isolated web apps: then APIs connected them. Now AI agents will do the connecting and the deciding too. The three pillars of an AI-first architecture From what were seeing across industries, AI-first organizations share three foundational traits: A data substrate, not a data warehouse Traditional data systems store information; AI-first systems understand it. That means building contextual layers, from embeddings, to knowledge graphs and retrieval systems) that make data retrievable in natural language and usable in real time. A semantic interface If your team still clicks through dashboards, youre behind. The AI-first enterprise interacts through language: voice, text, or context-aware prompts. The interface becomes conversational because the workflow becomes cognitive. An agentic layerEvery AI-first company needs an orchestration layer that can act autonomously within defined boundaries. Agents handle not just information retrieval but task execution, generating code, scheduling, procurement, customer response, and compliance checks. The challenge isnt whether they work: its how much you trust them to decide. The cultural reset executives must lead This is not a technical project: its a cultural one. Building an AI-first organization requires leaders to unlearn decades of linear thinking about processes and hierarchy. The question is no longer how can technology support our employees, but how can employees supervise technology that works alongside them. The manager of the near future wont just oversee people: theyll coordinate agents. Executives who think in terms of software adoption will miss this entirely. The right question isnt which vendors AI tool to buy , but which decisions youre ready to delegate to a machine. That shift demands a new kind of governance: clear ethical boundaries, data transparency, and oversight mechanisms that ensure AI recommendations remain auditable and explainable. Companies that fail to define those boundaries early will end up with AI that works but works for the wrong goals. The new competitive advantage The competitive edge in the AI era wont come from access to the biggest model or most GPUs. It will come from organizational adaptability, or the ability to incorporate AI decision-making without losing accountability. In every industry, a similar pattern will emerge: the incumbents will integrate AI as a feature, the challengers will rebuild their stack around it. The difference will show up in speed: companies that treat AI as infrastructure will compress decision cycles from weeks to hours. Those that dont will move at human speed while their competitors move at machine speed. But dont confuse velocity with chaos. The best AI-first companies arent automating indiscriminately: theyre orchestrating intelligently. They design human-in-the-loop architectures where humans remain the moral and strategic governors, and AI handles execution at scale. Building the agentic future responsibly The temptation, of course, is to delegate everything. After all, if agents can optimize marketing spend, supply chains, and code deployment, why not let them? The reason is simple: trust is earned, not automated. AI agents must be auditable: their decisions explainable and reversible. Without that, an organization risks the black box syndrome that has already plagued large-scale AI deployments. Ive written before about this risk in Fast Company: when you build on systems you dont understand, you surrender control. Agentic systems make that surrender seductive. They dont crash, they comply. And thats precisely why theyre dangerous if left unsupervised. Remember the paperclip maximizer Practical steps for executives For leaders beginning their AI-first journey, heres a roadmap: Start with one value chain Pick a process with measurable outcomes such as customer service, logistics, or internal reporting, and prototype an agentic version. Dont start with chatbots, start with impact. Form an AI governance board Blend technical and ethical oversight early. Youll need both to scale safely. Invest in retraining Your teams dont need prompt engineers: they need problem-framers who understand what can and cant be delegated. Keep data open inside the enterprise AI thrives on accessibility, not silos. Build policies for responsible internal sharing. Measure decision latency, not output volume The real gain from AI-first design isnt producing more: its deciding faster. From feature to foundation AI is no longer the icing on the product: its the yeast in the dough. It changes everything from the inside out. Companies that understand this will design architectures where agents and humans collaborate seamlessly, data flows freely, and decisions happen in real time. Those that dont will keep bolting AI onto outdated systems and wondering why nothing truly changes. The agentic future isnt coming: its already here. The only question left is whether your company is ready to stop piloting and start delegating.
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E-Commerce
It became clear in the late 2010s that Amherst Colleges science center had aged far past its prime. As the concrete building fell into disrepair, school leaders suspected a demolition was in order. Old, poorly insulated, and inadequate for the technical demands of todays research, it seemed like too steep a challenge to repurpose, says Tom Davies, the schools Executive Director of Planning, Design, and Construction. Especially after a new science center opened on campus in 2020. It was a stranded asset with essentially no value, he says. But what our consultants were able to show is that it does have quite a bit of value. [Rendering: Herzog & de Meuron] In the course of exploring options, engineers and the architectural team at Herzog & de Meuron devised a different future for the building, firmly rooted in its past. They decided that the hefty concrete frame could be stripped down, and two comparatively lightweight floors of mass timber could be added on top to create additional space. This approach, which stays within the schools commitment to reduce its carbon footprint, was approved, and the repurposed building will soon reopen as a new student center in the fall semester of 2026. [Rendering: Herzog & de Meuron] The Amherst project exemplifies the potential of found capacity, a concept advocated by Justin Den Herder, vice president and principal at global engineering firm TYLin, which worked on science center renovation. He believes theres extensive opportunity in this form of mass timber top-off, but theres simply not enough familiarity with this material, or enough examples, to spur additional investment and development. Engineers like Den Herder have concluded that much of the older building stock in big cities, built with solid foundations able to hold additional weight, could easily support a few additional floors, especially if they were constructed of more lightweight material. More modern office projects, value engineered to cut costs, likely wouldnt have this capacity. I would be willing to say the majority of buildings could accept this, said Den Herder. I think the number of buildings that couldn’t accept at least one story in mass timber are probably certainly in the minority. An architectural rendering of the Amherst “Living Room” and study space (left), and an in-progress photo of the construction (right). [Images: Maria Stenzel (photo)/courtesy Amherst News] Mass timberrising in popularity due to its biophilic properties and lower carbon footprintfits this use case perfectly. A number of recent projects utilizing this concept of stacking additional floors on existing buildings suggests a new direction for those seeking added density in our downtowns. Europeans have been doing these designs for years. Theres even a Dutch design concept, optoppen (topping up in Dutch) that describes these kinds of developments. A coalition of industry partners has gathered a portfolio of dozens of existing projects, and created tools to evaluate the potential of such projects in cities like London. The 80M building in Washington, DC.[Photo: Ron Blunt Photography] But its starting to see more recognition in the United States, with a few recent high profile projects. In Washington, D.C., the 80M building, which opened in the fall 2022, added three mass timber floors atop a downtown office, which were quickly leased by BP and the American Trucking Association. The project didnt require costly reinforcement of the existing foundation, says Steve Trapp, executive vice president for Columbia Property Trust, and the wood interiors and 12-foot-tall windows with commanding views of the nations capital offered a compelling, unique office environment for tenants. [Photo: Ron Blunt Photography] Other projects rely ess on mass timber, but take a similar approach to expanding the square footage of an existing building. The Terminal Warehouse renovation in New York City, designed by CookFox, will add six floors of new office space, clad in glass and metal, atop a brick warehouse during renovations set to commence this year. Another recent project in Manhattan, 787 11th Avenue, added additional floors with floor-to-ceiling glass atop a 20s-era building that initially served as an automobile showroom. [Photo: Ron Blunt Photography] Adding floors in this manner can work well, says Trapp, especially for something like a warehouse-to-office conversion, since the original structure has such a solid foundation. Columbia was also behind the Terminal Warehouse project. However, the current office market, with demand down and vacancy rates over 20% in many U.S. cities, means theres little to no appetite at the moment to stack new floors and add space when theres already too much. If we had the right investment conditions, we would absolutely go forward with [similar projects], says Trapp. Mass timber has really taken off since 80M was conceived. We just havent had the right circumstances. But the proof of concept for projects like 80M suggest the idea would work well when the economics become more favorable. And mass timber additions remain ripe for residential projects. Den Herder says that in New York City, for example, the building code allows for adding a few additional stories on many townhomes and brownstones, offering a potential pathway for more densification, especially in the outer reaches of boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn. By changing the lens by which you view a building renovation, this kind of vertical addition with mass timber can help save a building, instead of demolishing it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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