In some ways, companies face a similar challenge. Senior leaders like to imagine that they are in charge of all the levers of change. When their CEO announces a big new strategy to the market, they work with their teams to put an execution plan in place. But after a few months it often becomes apparent that the promised transformation is not going according to plan. Delays, re-scheduled meetings, excuses—but secretly, no one at the organisation is really surprised.

The German military strategist, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, said it best. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Or, as Mike Tyson liked to put it—everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. But who is the enemy? 

When it comes to change, your true opponents are those often unwritten rules, subroutines and algorithms that collectively add up to a company’s culture. Culture is not a warm and fuzzy idea fabricated by HR. It’s real, it's powerful. And, for better or worse, it’s your operating system.

Just like re-writing an operating system, changing culture is not as simple as serving free beer on Fridays, running paintball team-building sessions, or giving everyone their own iPad (although those are all very nice ideas). To change the way things work at your company, you first have to identify the parts of your cultural code that are broken.

Companies with poor culture are incredibly inefficient. It’s like bad programming with excess lines of code.

Bad cultural coding requires leaders to micromanage employees to ensure they comply with company procedures. Even worse is when your internal heuristics are badly defined. Whenever a new and challenging situation arises, your employees lack the value-based mental shortcuts that mean they can reach the right solution or decision without high level intervention.

In a company with great culture, values are not just what motivate employees to do exceptional work. They also serve as an inner voice for your people on how to make the right calls for the business. That’s why Zappos invests so much in both their hiring and management practices. When everyone knows making the customer happy is the touchstone of the company’s values, people feel empowered to make bold decisions to serve that principle. 

Another interesting example is StarHub, the Singaporean telecommunications company. Starhub is a company that prides itself on innovation. But, when I spoke with their CEO Tan Tong Hai, he explained to me that’s not the most important part of their culture. The company’s core value, actually, is happiness.

According to Mr Tan, this value isn’t a superficial concept of feeling joy, but rather the deeper satisfaction that comes from empowerment and belonging. For him, happiness at a cultural level means the company believes in its employees and provides them with the tools and authority to do what it takes to make the customer happy. It also means belonging in a place where people respect your capabilities.

I could list a dozen other interesting corporate culture examples, but they won’t help you. You can’t copy another company's culture—you have to design your own from scratch.

Here is one way to start:

Run A Culture Hackathon

Understand what your best employees are passionate about. Schedule an offsite for your team, your department or even your entire company. But instead of sharing formal presentations and agendas, use an intuitive facilitator to help your people discuss and discover the elements of your company culture that work and the parts that don’t. At the end of the day, summarize what people feel strongly about and what they are prepared to take responsibility for. Use this as the basis for your culture code.

Creating great culture is easy when you are a start-up, but scaling ‘greatness’ when you get big is hard. Not impossible, but certainly worth of a rethink of how you do things. But just remember when you do so, who is really in control.