“When the Culture Writes Back”

At first, every company culture is nothing more than the founder’s shadow. Your quirks become policies. Your fears become bottlenecks. Your strengths become the unspoken law. But if you succeed, if you build something that grows, a shift happens:

The room you built starts writing back.

The jokes in the Slack channel aren’t yours anymore. The way people greet each other in the mornings carries an energy you didn’t design. Decisions are being made in meetings where you’re not present - not because you abandoned them, but because the system is breathing on its own.

This is culture in its rawest sense: a set of invisible hands steering the company, formed not just by what you said, but by what you tolerated, reinforced and neglected. Culture doesn’t ask for permission. It replicates like DNA, mutating slightly each generation, until one day you realized the company no longer runs on your energy - it runs on its own.

There is two ⛔️ Dangers when culture writes back. You face two traps 🪤 

1 - Loss of control. If you neglect the pruning, culture can calcify into bureaucracy, gossip, entitlement or mediocrity. It will drift.

2 - Tyranny. If you clamp down too hard, you strangle the very life you wanted - people follow rules but kill initiative. The company becomes obedient but dead.☠️

The founder’s job becomes paradoxical: to shape without suffocating, to prune without poisoning, to let life grow without letting weeds overrun the garden.

Most people think culture is “soft.” But finance shows you its skeleton.

• Look at your P&L. High overtime? That’s culture. It means urgency and firefighting, not planning.

• High client churn? That’s culture. It reveals promises made faster than they can be kept.

• Excessive spending on perks? Culture again - maybe generosity, maybe undisciplined buying of loyalty.

Numbers don’t just show financial health. They reveal cultural DNA. Finance is culture made measurable.

One friend at work. Once, told me this story.

He was working for a mid-sized accounting firm. Founded by two partners: one strict, one easy-going. At first, their 20 person team mirrored this duality. But once they scaled past 60 employees, something strange happened:

The juniors weren’t copying the partners anymore. They were copying the managers. And those managers, without knowing it, built a culture of avoidance. They never wanted to bother the partners, so they hoarded problems, built layers of reporting and create endless “review cycles” before any decision reached the top.

Financially, it showed up in the most unexpected place: accounts receivable. Clients weren’t being billed on time because invoices bounced between too many hands before going out. The delay wasn’t a financial process issue. It was cultural: nobody wanted to be blamed, so nobody took ownership.

The partners were frustrated until they realized: “the culture had written back.”

The solution wasn’t just a new billing system. It was cultural pruning: rewarding directness, praising those who made fast (even imperfect) calls, and deliberately over-communicating that “speed matters more than avoiding blame.” After some months, receivables dropped, morale rose, and the room they had built spoke with a clearer voice.

What is the lesson?

Culture is the DNA that outlives you. You can’t stop it from writing back but you can choose whether the words are coherent, sharp and aligned - or chaotic, bloated and toxic.

Your job is not to script every line. Your job is to build the grammar, the rules of composition, the editing discipline. The sentences will change. The voice will evolve but the story will stay true.

The culture will speak. Make sure it says what you meant.