I find this thread kind of confusing, it basically seems to say the culture itself doesn't matter. What matters is that it is strongly held. Which means top down, ritualized and vigorously defended against any attempts at change.
And what are the alternatives? No consistency throughout the company would mean that there wouldn't be any company culture to speak of. And if your processes aren't (ultimately) top-down, then what's the company leadership actually for?
Other values may well vary between departments - People working on the car's software can do weekly releases at little or no cost with lightweight planning - but the injection-moulded door handle will need a $$$$$ mould and several months for every design change, so they'd certainly better have frozen the design several months before product launch.
There might not be much common ground on ideas like starting with an MVP and iterating, moving fast, dealing with changing requirements, two week sprints, and so on.
The obvious alternative is a bottom up organization of culture although most companies are not setup for that to work well. The actual reality is going to be a combination of both. I'm sure everyone's worked in environments where the corporate values are treated as a joke.
Change is not a problem but consistent application of expectations is important (in my opinion, this would include expectations around how you manage change).
If you have one set of expectations from one manager, and a different set of expectations from another manager, the complexity of your work just squared.
Of course, he doesn't explore whether or not the benefits of this are worth the disadvantages, and there's plenty of room for argument either way, especially with large organizations.
Both of those versions are gross oversimplifications.
That's very reductionist.
At that point it’s bad company culture right?
Yes, because you're taking a significant risk joining any company (in the sense that you have limited time and want to go where you can have the most impact for the firm and best outcomes for your goals).
You often dont know details about projects, people, etc -- but if you vibe with the culture, you can easily find your place there. If the culture is all over the place, it is hard to know from the outside. And if the culture is a mismatch for you, better to neither waste your time nor that of the firm. Without a strongly projected culture, that is hard to do.
But a great company culture is one (regardless of its core tenets) that’s followed strongly throughout the organization, top to bottom, starting with the CEO.
Having it split into tweets doesn’t help. I struggle to think of a worse format - perhaps a series of short videos would be worse?