Against the culture deck

Every company has a culture deck now. Beautiful typography, six abstract nouns, and not one sentence anyone could disagree with. Excellence. Ownership. Passion. You cannot fail to live up to a value that means nothing.

The test we use is simple: can a reasonable person disagree with this? "We trust each other" fails. "There is no such thing as below your pay grade: everybody takes the trash out" passes, because plenty of good companies would say the opposite.

So we published the totems as pages, not slides. Each one has a number, an edit date, and enough specificity to be wrong. Some are marked draft, because they are. One of them says we're bad at control without controlling, which no deck has ever admitted about anything.