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If the "real culture" is toxic, what do you suggest? Just saying "oh well"? Firing people until moral improves? This is the kind of reason why companies intentionally try to foster certain traits in their professional culture.

Maybe you are a great person and don't need any culture but does that mean that doing nothing is enough?

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I haven't tried it, but http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2013/11/02/quick-tr... seems plausible.

You can also shape culture using rules. For example, at Google SRE, there was a rule that after any outage a post-mortem was to be written. It described why the problem happened, why that happened, etc. and how to prevent each level from re-occurring. Things like "it was person X's fault" or "we will be more careful" were forbidden. Fault and fixes had to be in technology or procedure, not people. It helped shape a culture of coming forward with problems and of looking for solutions. It didn't work perfectly, but it helped.

This is incidentally also how air crash investigations work, at least in Europe. Placing blame is never the intention. Focus is always on finding ways to improve the process. This seems like a superior approach in most situations.

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