Don't Create Company Culture: Lessons on Meaning of Work

Two decades into creating media companies with a laser focus on non-scaled quality of work as my operating principle, one of the most frequent questions I get from almost everyone I have ever interacted with in some depth is how did we at Skift create the meaningful culture we seem to exude from everything we do, internally and externally? By that they usually mean the creation of an authentic company culture, whatever that means in their own minds.

Thousands of books and millions of articles have been written since, oh well, whenever creating culture became an intentional corporate thing. 

The most basic lesson I have learned, a secret I will give away: don’t create company culture. 

Culture happens organically whether you want it or not, and the only way to craft it is to not to focus on it, but to focus on what you created the company for: great, meaningful work.

For my sec