I sent this podcast from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the prominent venture capital firm, to my team last week. I'm a huge fan of Ben Horowitz and his perspective and insights on culture and leadership. It's worth listening to the entire podcast, but what stood out to me was the notion of making your company values real and actionable. As an example, a16z has a value where they require their partners to treat founders with great respect. It's one thing to say that, but many venture capital firms do the opposite because they're the ones with the money, and the founder is asking for the money, so the firm acts like they're the one in control (I've seen this many, many times over the years). To make this value real and actionable, the firm has a policy where for every minute that you're late to a meeting with a founder, you are fined $10. I can imagine some of their partners thinking, "whoa, this is weird, it wasn't my fault that I was late, why do I have to pay this money, my last company didn't make me do this."

And that's exactly the point.

That means that this company has a culture that is actually true to its values. It's distinct from other cultures. The $10 fine is a way to make the team feel this distinctiveness. To feel the values.

All of this reminded me of working at Zocdoc many years ago. Our #1 value was "Patients First." That meant we would always prioritize the patient when making a difficult decision. This was real. I recall a time when an enormous healthcare provider wanted us to build a feature for them that would result in a suboptimal experience for the patient. This organization was willing to pay us a lot of money for the feature and it would’ve made hitting our quarterly sales target a lot easier. It was a tough call. We weren't sure what to do. So we deferred to our values. Patients first. We told them no.

As Ben says in the podcast, culture isn't what you want it to be or what you say it is, it's what you actually do. If the team can't see and feel a company's values on a practical, day-to-day level, that means that values and behaviors aren't in alignment. Which means your values aren't real. They're simply words on a wall.