Hey Founder: The Importance of Defining Your Corporate Culture Like Right Now!

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that “culture is too mushy to measure,” I wouldn’t have had to start a company. I’d be rich already.

Here’s the funny thing I’ve learned over the years: every self-proclaimed “bottom-line thinker” who waves off culture as emotional nonsense — the “it’s just business,” “fuck your feelings” crowd — is flat-out wrong. I say that with conviction because culture isn’t some mystical fog floating above the company. It’s the reflection of the founder’s core — the sum total of what you, as a leader, actually value.

Every one of us walks through the world with a unique lens. When you start a company, lead an organization, or even just manage a team, that lens becomes the culture you bring to the table. The problem? Most people never take the time to define it. Either they were taught it’s less important than the tangible stuff — the product, the profit, the plan — or they’re too uncomfortable to open up about what truly drives them. And some, if we’re honest, are just too damn broken to tell people where they stand.

But here’s the thing: your people need to know. Every morning when they show up, they need to understand what it means to belong — what it means to be part of the mission you’re building. Without that clarity, you get motion, not momentum.

Now, sure — without the operational side of the business, there is no business. You’ve got to make a product, serve a customer, hit your numbers. Without that, you don’t exist. But the how matters as much as the what. How your people treat each other. How they collaborate. How they support one another when things fall apart. The “what” might keep you afloat, but the “how” determines whether you actually move forward.

The Cultural Side of Business vs. the Operational Side of Business

Let me make this real with a story. Years ago, I worked for a guy who ran his business entirely from a spreadsheet. He loved the numbers. He’d slice and dice data a hundred ways from Sunday, find the tiniest patterns, and make decisions straight from the math.

One day, I tried to explain that relationships mattered — that loyalty and influence weren’t captured in a cell formula. He smirked and said, “Malcolm, the numbers don’t lie.”

“You’re right,” I told him. “The numbers don’t lie — but they don’t tell the whole story either.”

That exchange, in one neat little package, is the difference between the operational side of business and the cultural side.

Most people will tell you culture doesn’t move the bottom line like operational excellence does. I disagree. They’re yin and yang — the two forces that keep the business in balance. So let’s define them.

The operational side of business is where most leaders live. It’s the structured, measurable world of results. It’s the belief that every action should have an ROI, that resources must be traded and optimized like poker chips to achieve a strategic goal. It’s where tough decisions are made — the kind that force you to cut, reprioritize, and rationalize with a straight face because “it’s just business.” It’s cold. It’s logical. And yes, it’s essential. Without it, there’s no product, no customer, no profit. But it’s also the side of business that can turn leaders into calculators if they forget that numbers are just reflections of human behavior.

The cultural side of business is the fuzzier, more fragile front end — the part that lives and dies by how people show up. It’s built on the belief that companies don’t innovate, people do. That goodwill toward your customers isn’t charity, it’s strategy. It’s what happens when the goals of the individual align with the goals of the enterprise, creating exponential impact because people want to push together. It’s about cultivating the kind of environment where differences don’t divide but actually amplify what’s possible — where a team’s harmony isn’t sameness, it’s synergy.

Culture is not the “soft stuff.” It’s the human infrastructure that holds everything else up. You can ignore it for a while, sure. You can even outperform it for a quarter or two. But eventually, you’ll feel it — not in your balance sheet, but in the cracks between your people, your customers, and the soul of what you’re building.

Take the Time to Define Your Culture… Like Right Freaking Now

I’m going to lay down the gauntlet.

If you’re a founder and you haven’t taken the time to write a culture document — not just think about it, not talk about it, but write it — you’re already drifting away from your true north.

Why? Because as a founder, you are not a blank slate. You are a person who believes certain things. You have principles that guide how you operate, lessons that have shaped what you value, and opinions (probably strong ones) about how things should be done. You have personal goals and your own way of chasing them. You have habits — the way you create, lead, and learn — that are unique to you. You have ethics that define what’s right and wrong in your book. You have expectations about how people should behave when they show up to work beside you.

All of that — your internal wiring, your emotional fingerprint, your “human personal internal value core driven culture” — already exists. It’s there whether you say it out loud or not.

So here’s my question: why the hell wouldn’t you take the time to put it on paper so everyone else knows where you stand? What exactly do you have to lose?

Because here’s what’s really at stake — without it, you’re sailing further from your true north every day. And the people rowing the boat with you? They can’t pull in the same direction with strength or purpose if they don’t know what direction that is.

Too many founders I meet are so consumed with the holy trinity of startup life — building the product, finding the market, scaling the business — that they never stop to define how they expect people to behave while doing those things. They never write down the operational definitions for what “good” looks like when it comes to human behavior inside their company. And because of that, everyone’s left guessing what’s acceptable, what’s rewarded, and what’s sacred.

Let me be clear. When I started my company, I told my co-founder we needed to do this early. He asked why — said it was a good idea, sure, but we had “so many other things to do.” Fortunately, he knew I’m a bit of a culture warrior, and after a few conversations, he told me to go for it and let me own this very important thing (to me).

I wrote our culture document three or four months after we got off the ground.

And here’s the funny part — the cultural principles I wrote then are still the same ones we use three years later. Were they perfect? Not even close. I tweaked them, refined them, wrestled with them. In fact, I hated our fourth principle for years. Every time I listed them out, I’d forget it and say, “Oh yeah, that fourth one we need to rethink.” But over time, as we watched our culture play out in the real world, I realized the fourth one was actually right — the underlying definition just needed work.

That’s the point. You write them early. You live them. You test them. And then you refine them until they become undeniable. Ours did. Even with the rough edges, those early statements captured our core values perfectly — who we were, what mattered to us, and how we expected people to show up. They became our compass.

So yes — write your culture down. Right fucking now. Then revisit it as you grow. Because those words will become the bedrock of how you hire, lead, and survive the chaos that’s coming.

Now, let’s dig into how to actually write your cultural principles — how to test them, apply them, and, most importantly, live them. But first, I think I will share our company's cultural document so that as we walk through the steps, I can tell stories and refer to these principles as examples

GraphIQ's Cultural Document (both the long form and short form)

Every company needs a set of cultural tenets that serve as both compass and code. They’re not just slogans to hang on the wall or some fluffy HR exercise you do between funding rounds. They’re the behavioral operating system that defines how your people move, think, collaborate, and recover when things inevitably go sideways.

Below are the cultural principles we built at GraphIQ — our version of that operating system. They didn’t appear out of thin air. They’re the product of 30 years of working across every kind of company you can imagine — from massive corporate machines to scrappy, shoestring startups. I’ve been lucky (and sometimes unlucky) enough to watch leaders at every level either build a thriving culture or destroy one in slow motion.

Over time, you start to see the patterns. You start to recognize that great cultures don’t come from grand mission statements — they come from shared behavior. From the small, daily choices people make when no one’s watching.

So when I finally sat down to write GraphIQ’s culture document, I wanted it to be more than a list of nice-sounding values. I wanted to synthesize what I’d learned from decades of leaders, mentors, peers, founders, and even a few complete assholes who taught me what not to do. I wanted to boil all of that down into practical rules of thumb — principles that could guide us when things got messy, not just when things were good.

These tenets are not meant to be universal law. They’re my opinion — shaped by hard lessons, good teachers, and the relentless belief that culture isn’t a poster, it’s a practice. You’ll see three versions below: the four cultural tenets, the "one-slide pitch deck version," and the full written form (the foundation we actually use) — our shorthand for when we need to communicate who we are quickly and clearly.

GraphIQ’s Cultural Tenets

Everyone grabs a shovel, but isn’t too proud to ask for help

Know your customers and channel their needs

When the best ideas win, everyone wins

Smart thinking enables seamless execution

Pitch Deck Slide Version

Everyone grabs a shovel, but isn’t too proud to ask for help

We all pitch in, no matter the task. And when someone has a bigger shovel, we’re smart enough to ask for help so the work gets done faster and better.

Know your customers and channel their needs

We don’t just know our customers’ business—we know their people, their processes, and their culture. That personal insight fuels solutions that serve them best and drive growth for us.

When the best ideas win, everyone wins

Egos don’t build companies—great ideas do. By aligning behind the best idea every time, we beat the competition, delight customers, and share in the success together.

Smart thinking enables seamless execution

Being intelligent is about theory; being smart is about action. We think our way out of jobs, automate waste, and execute so cleanly that the marketplace rewards us."

Long From Version

1. Everyone grabs a shovel but isn’t too proud to ask for help

   
   

   At GraphIQ, we believe no one is above rolling up their sleeves. Big job or small, strategic or tactical, we all “grab a shovel” when the work needs doing. Ownership matters here—if something is important to the business, someone steps in to move it forward.But there’s another side to this. Grabbing a shovel doesn’t mean you have to dig the whole trench alone. Sometimes the shovel you’ve picked up isn’t quite the right size—or maybe you’re not the fastest digger for that particular job. That’s where humility comes in. We value people who know when to reach out, ask for guidance, or invite someone with a “bigger shovel” to help dig smarter and faster.

   
   

2. Know your customers and channel their needs

   
   

   We aim to be relentlessly customer-driven. It’s easy for companies to lose their way as they grow—focusing inward on internal politics or personal wins rather than what matters most: the customer and, ultimately, GraphIQ’s success.Knowing your customers goes deeper than their business model. It’s understanding their processes, their culture, and the people themselves. The companies that truly succeed are the ones that see customers as whole people, not just accounts. But insight alone isn’t enough. We also have to channel what we learn—turning their expressed needs into solutions that align with our strategy. That means not just chasing every request the market throws at us, but focusing on what drives the greatest impact for our growth.

   
   

3. When the best ideas win, everyone wins

   Innovation is our lifeblood, but it only thrives when egos take a backseat. At GraphIQ, we commit to recognizing, supporting, and executing on the best idea—no matter whose idea it is.Why does this matter? Because when the best idea rises to the top, everyone benefits. Customers get better solutions. We outperform the competition. The business grows stronger. And the people who contributed to the effort get to share in the win. If we can consistently make space for the best ideas to lead, we create a cycle of success that carries us all forward.

   
   

4. Smart thinking enables seamless execution

   Intelligence is nice. Smart thinking is essential. For us, smart means knowing how to apply knowledge—book smarts plus street smarts—to make things happen with as little friction as possible. That could mean automating the repetitive tasks that slow us down, or working yourself out of a job because you’ve found a more efficient way to do it. Seamless execution isn’t about grinding harder; it’s about thinking sharper. When we take the time to pause, plan, and choose the smartest path, we waste less, stress less, and deliver more. And in the long run, that’s how we win—again and again—in the marketplace.

These are the three forms of this you need.

• Bullet Points

• A one-slide deck version with a short, pithy one liner of what they mean

• A long-form version of each tenet to really explain yourself so it's crystal clear

All say the same thing, but they expand on your thinking from form to form.

How do you even write a culture document?

Let’s be honest — there’s no “right” way to start.

Frankly, there’s not even a wrong way. The only real mistake is not starting at all. Having something — anything — written down is always better than having nothing. But over time, I’ve found there are a few rules of thumb that make the process a whole lot more meaningful when you’re trying to define the culture of your company.

Here’s how I think about writing a culture document, step by step.

Step One: Think About Who You Are as a Person

Seems dumb and obvious, right? But this is where every founder has to begin — with themselves.

A culture document starts with you. You are the culture; you’re just trying to express it in a way that others can understand and follow. Before you can define the behaviors you want from your team, you need to understand what truly drives you — what you value, what you tolerate, what you absolutely don’t.

So take stock. Sit down and think — really think — about what matters to you and how you want people to operate inside your company.

You can test it in a few different ways:

• Ask people who know you well. Friends, family, former colleagues — they often see patterns you can’t.

  
  

• Free write. This is my favorite. Don’t plan. Don’t edit. Just write.

  
  

One of the best creative techniques I ever learned came from a fiction writing seminar I took in college. My professor would walk in and say, “Start writing. Don’t think. Don’t reread. Don’t stop.” Ten minutes. Pen to paper. No filter.

It’s magic. That process lets you clear out all the gobbledygook clogging your brain and tap into what’s actually there. Try it. Ask yourself: What’s important to me? How do I want people to behave in my company? What do I expect from myself and others when the pressure hits?

Do this a few times. Don’t worry about structure or polish — this is about honesty, not grammar. The more you pour out, the more the patterns will start to show.

Because here’s the truth: you can’t define a culture for others until you’re crystal clear on your own. Your people can’t follow what you haven’t articulated.

This is the first and most important step — getting you on paper. Once you’ve done that, the rest of the process gets a whole lot easier.

Step Two: Make Your Co-Founders Do It Too

If you have co-founders, they need to do this exercise right alongside you. No exceptions.

Culture isn’t a solo act — it’s a shared operating system. You can’t write it alone and expect everyone else to magically fall in line. Every founder brings their own values, instincts, and baggage to the table, so this step is about getting all of that out in the open early.

Think of your cultural tenets as the single most important operational definition your company will ever have. You’re defining how people behave, decide, lead, and respond under pressure. And like any operational definition, it only works when everyone who leads the business agrees on what those definitions actually mean.

So make your co-founders sit down and do the same exercise you just did. Have them pour themselves out on paper — who they are, what matters to them, how they want the company to operate. Then compare notes. You’ll see overlaps, contradictions, and probably a few things that make you raise an eyebrow. That’s the point.

And if they resist? Tell them you don’t give a damn. This isn’t optional homework — it’s the foundation of the business. Everyone who’s steering the ship needs to be clear on what direction they’re rowing.

Step Three: Align on What’s Most Important

Once you’ve got a pile of thoughts on paper, it’s time to start removing the waste.

Go through what you’ve written and begin circling the things that really matter — the patterns, the repeated ideas, the beliefs that hit you in the gut. These are the building blocks of your culture.

You can’t have fifteen cultural principles. No one will remember them, and you won’t live by them. You probably need four to six, max. So start trimming.

Boil it down from a mess of words into a handful of core ideas — the ones that truly define who you are and how you expect people to operate. Everything else is just noise.

Step Four: Synthesize What You Have

Now comes the part where you turn all that raw material into something clear, memorable, and uniquely yours. This is where your personal philosophy starts taking shape as actual cultural tenets.

For us, our very first one became:

Everyone grabs a shovel but isn’t too proud to ask for help.

Let me tell you how that one evolved.

Both my co-founder and I have always believed that leadership means being willing to do the work yourself. No one — and I mean no one — is above getting their hands dirty. He’s the CEO, I’m the CBO, but we prefer to just call ourselves co-founders. Sometimes he jokes that he’s the product guy and I’m the sales and service guy. Titles don’t mean much to us — they just describe the work we happen to be doing that day.

We see ourselves as part of the same team, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, bringing our individual talents to the table. And like everyone, we’ve got strengths and blind spots. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the most detail-oriented person, but I’ll always jump in and try.

As we talked about the kind of company we wanted to build, one thing became very clear: we don’t have time for people who love to ideate and then dump the execution on someone else. Nothing kills momentum faster than that. We both felt strongly that no task is beneath anyone, and no one gets to hide behind their title. If something needs doing, someone needs to do it — even if it’s messy, even if it’s not perfect. Because if nobody grabs the shovel, nothing moves forward.

There were plenty of times my co-founder was swamped, and I’d just say, “Let me do it.” I’d even warn him: “This is going to be worse than if you did it yourself, but at least it’ll be started.” That’s the point — forward motion beats theoretical perfection every time. Even an imperfect effort gets you further than doing nothing.

That’s where the first half of the tenet came from — the belief that progress belongs to the people willing to grab the shovel.

But the second half came from an equally important realization: some people are great at grabbing the shovel, but terrible at knowing when to say, “I can’t take this any further.”

That humility — that moment when you recognize you’re digging with a teaspoon while someone else is sitting in a bulldozer — that’s leadership, too. Asking for help doesn’t make you weak; it makes you efficient. Sometimes the fastest way forward is knowing when your shovel isn’t the right size.

That juxtaposition — hard work on one side, humility on the other — became the essence of the tenet. Everyone should be willing to do the work, and everyone should know when to ask for help. Both matter equally.

After a few conversations (and maybe a few beers), we landed on the phrasing:“Everyone grabs a shovel, but isn’t too proud to ask for help.”

That line captured exactly who we were and how we wanted our company to operate. It was simple, clear, and real. It came out of honest reflection, a few shared stories, and a mutual understanding of how we wanted people to behave when things got tough.

And just like that — through a mix of writing, talking, and testing — we had our first cultural tenet.

Voila.

Step Five: Keep at It — and Limit Yourself to Four to Six

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: keep your cultural tenets to no more than six and no less than four.

Too many, and you’ll drown in your own philosophy. People won’t remember them, and they’ll end up as words on a wall nobody reads. Too few, and you’ll leave out something critical — a blind spot that’ll come back to bite you later.

You need just enough to cover the full landscape of what makes your company tick — ethics, customers, execution, expected behaviors, the bottom line, all of it.

Think of your culture like a house. Four to six tenets give it the right number of walls and beams to stand solid without collapsing under its own complexity. Anything more is just decorative clutter.

Keep it tight. Keep it focused. And keep refining until every tenet truly earns its place.

Step Six: Expand on Them

Once you have your one-line cultural tenets, the real work begins — expanding them.

A good tenet should start as a simple, powerful line (like the one above), but you can’t stop there. You need to spell out what it actually means in practice — the behavior it celebrates and the behavior it rejects. Think of the one-liner as the headline, and the expanded version as the story underneath. That’s how you make sure everyone is crystal clear on what “Everyone grabs a shovel but isn’t too proud to ask for help” really means.

Below is the expanded definition:

At GraphIQ, we believe no one is above rolling up their sleeves. Big job or small, strategic or tactical, we all “grab a shovel” when the work needs doing. Ownership matters here — if something is important to the business, someone steps in to move it forward. But there’s another side to this. Grabbing a shovel doesn’t mean you have to dig the whole trench alone. Sometimes the shovel you’ve picked up isn’t quite the right size — or maybe you’re not the fastest digger for that particular job. That’s where humility comes in. We value people who know when to reach out, ask for guidance, or invite someone with a “bigger shovel” to help dig smarter and faster.

If you read that, it should be very clear what we mean. Let’s break it down piece by piece.

“We believe no one is above rolling up their sleeves.”

Simple. You’re not better than anyone else — not by title, not by role, not by pay grade.

At our company, if there’s a stack of papers that needs stapling and the person who usually does it is slammed with something more critical, then you pick up the stapler. It’s that straightforward. You could be the CEO, but if you’ve got five spare minutes, grab the damn stapler.

This actually happened to me years ago. I was an executive at a large company and had 30 minutes between meetings. One of the most junior people on my team was clearly stressed out — head down, eyes darting, papers everywhere. I asked what was wrong, and she said she had a big meeting in 15 minutes and still had to staple a massive deck.

Now, a shitty boss would have said, “Plan better next time,” and mentally docked her ten points. Instead, I said, “Give me half the pile.” We finished together. She made her meeting, and she never forgot that someone four levels up was willing to pitch in for the team. That moment said more about culture than any all-hands speech ever could.

“Ownership matters here — if something is important to the business, someone steps in to move it forward.”

This one is about accountability. We all own the business, so we all share responsibility for moving it forward.

If you see something important and assume someone else will handle it, you’re part of the problem. Don’t think your job is more important than the company. You’re not. None of us are. If something’s on fire, pick up the hose. Don’t wait for permission.

At GraphIQ, we don’t do “that’s not my job.” If it matters, it’s your job until it’s handled.

“We value people who know when to reach out, ask for guidance, or invite someone with a ‘bigger shovel’ to help dig smarter and faster.”

This is the other half of the tenet — the humility side.

Working hard is great. Working smart is better. When your shovel is too small or the job’s too heavy, find someone with a bigger shovel. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help — be grateful that you’re surrounded by people who can make the work better.

A small shovel and a big shovel working together will still get the trench dug faster than either one alone. That’s the point. Collaboration beats heroics.

And yes, sometimes the right move is just saying, “Hey, this is too heavy for one person.” Because it’s not weakness to ask — it’s wisdom. You can’t move mountains alone, no matter how good your shovel is.

That’s how you expand a tenet: you take a line that sounds simple and unpack the full philosophy behind it — what it looks like, how it shows up, and what it says about who you are as a company.

When people read it, they shouldn’t just understand the words — they should feel what kind of team they’re joining.

This is how a cultural principle goes from a nice-sounding idea to an actual way of working.

Step Seven: Freeze Them for a While and Constantly Revisit Until You’re Sure

Now that you’ve got your first draft, hit pause.

Seriously — step away from it for a bit. Let it breathe. You’ve done the hard part by getting your culture out of your head and onto paper. That’s the real win. The goal right now isn’t perfection — it’s articulation. You’re giving language to the DNA of your company, and that takes time to settle.

Live with your tenets for a while. Talk about them. Test them in real situations. See if they actually hold up when things get messy. You’ll start to notice which ones feel natural and which ones sound forced. That’s when you know what to tweak.

Don’t overthink it too early. This isn’t about carving something in stone — it’s more like planting seeds. You need to get them in the ground first, then water, prune, and adjust as they grow. The goal right now is to get them alive, not perfect.

So freeze them, revisit them, and keep refining as you grow.

The point is simple: you can’t evolve what doesn’t exist. Write them now. Perfect them later.

Next, let’s talk about the rules of thumb that separate good cultural tenets from the fluffy, forgettable ones — what they are, and what they’re definitely not.

What Are Some Cultural Tenet Rules of Thumb?

Like everything in business, there’s what you do and there’s how you think about doing it. Writing a culture document is no different. You can’t just slap some catchy slogans on a slide and call it done — you need a few grounding principles to guide the process.

I mentioned some of these earlier, but it’s worth going deeper into the rules of thumb that make cultural tenets actually mean something.

Cultural Tenet Consideration 1: Your Value Core Comes Through Clearly

Let’s start with the most obvious point — your cultural tenets can’t be aspirational fluff. They have to come straight from your value core.

A cultural tenet isn’t something you hope to be someday. It’s something that already lives inside you. If there’s daylight between who you are and what your tenets say, they’re not cultural — they’re corporate. And when that happens, people can tell.

Put another way: if you’re not visibly bothered when someone violates one of your supposed “cultural tenets,” then those tenets are bullshit. They’re just nice words dressed up as meaning.

The real point of writing this stuff down is to memorialize what you stand for so it survives you — so the company behaves the same way when you’re not in the room. The ultimate sign you’ve nailed it is when the organization outlives you and people still quote your beliefs, still feel connected to your way of operating, and still find meaning in your value core.

Is that a little grand? Sure. But if you genuinely believe the cultural side of business drives long-term success — not just for you as the founder, but for everyone in your orbit — then it’s worth taking seriously.

Here’s an example of how this can go wrong.

I’ll use my own value core to make the point. I’ve worked at plenty of companies that proudly listed a cultural tenet around a “family atmosphere.”

You’ve probably seen one of these:

Our company values creating a sense of family where everyone feels at home at work.

On the surface, it sounds great. We all spend so much time at work that it’s nice to imagine your team as an extended family. The intent is good — build warmth, connection, and a sense of belonging.

But for me, this doesn’t fit. Why? Because while I believe in empathy, compassion, and treating people with respect, I also know that not everyone can live up to the “family” metaphor — and pretending they can just makes it phony.

Do I treat my team like family? In spirit, yes. I care deeply about their well-being, and I’ll always put people first. But to make “we’re a family” a formal tenet — something I hold everyone accountable to — feels disingenuous. In my experience, that kind of language can turn toxic fast. It gives people permission to weaponize “family” in unhealthy ways — guilt, favoritism, emotional manipulation. I’ve seen it too many times.

So for me, that kind of tenet doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit my value core. Not because I don’t want warmth or connection — but because I believe you shouldn’t have to declare “we’re a family” to act like decent humans. You should just do it.

And that’s the point: your cultural tenets have to come from what you actually believe and will hold others accountable to. If it doesn’t hit you in the gut — if it doesn’t make you react viscerally when someone violates it — then it’s not a tenet. It’s wallpaper.

Your value core should shine through every line of your culture document. Because when it does, people don’t just read it — they feel it.

Cultural Tenet 2: They Should Be Scalable Enough to Drive a Truck Through

This might be the most important one.

For years, whenever I’ve built a strategy or a concept, I’ve always said I want to be able to drive a truck through it.

What I mean by that is simple — a great idea, principle, or cultural tenet should be so well-constructed, so universally true, that it stands up under pressure. No matter how you test it, stretch it, or question it, it still holds. It’s broad enough to apply in a variety of situations, but not so vague that it loses meaning.

Now, that’s a stretch goal. It’s not easy. Sometimes it’s impossible. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get as close as you can. Because the broader your cultural tenets, the more scalable they are — and scalable tenets give people room to interpret them in ways that fit their own roles, challenges, and decisions.

Think of it this way: your tenets should work for the sales rep and the engineer, for the executive and the intern, for the future version of your company you haven’t even met yet.

Let me give you an example.

Our second tenet is:

Know your customers and channel their needs.

At first glance, it sounds simple. But in reality, this one is intentionally broad and deeply layered. It captures a lot — and that’s exactly what makes it scalable.

Point 1: We need to be customer-focused.

This seems like the obvious one, right? Every company says it. But for us, this isn’t a tagline — it’s a truth. We’re both product people at heart, and we believe our success begins and ends with the customer.

We’ve both seen what happens when companies lose sight of that. They start building for themselves — chasing vanity metrics, playing political games, focusing inward instead of outward. “Know your customers” keeps us grounded. It reminds everyone, no matter their title, that we exist because someone chose us to solve their problem. If we forget that, we’re done.

Point 2: “Customers” means more than just buyers.

This is where the scalability really shows up. When we say know your customers, we mean all the people we serve — not just the ones who pay us.

Sure, there are customers who buy our products. But there are also the partners who rely on us, the suppliers who collaborate with us, and the communities that host us. Each one of those groups has needs and expectations.

Think about it — when we have someone representing the company in a nonprofit or community setting, aren’t they still “channeling customer needs”? Of course they are.

They’re carrying our company’s values into another environment, listening to what matters to others, and bringing that understanding back.

That’s why this tenet works. It’s broad enough that you could apply it whether you’re managing a big retail client or sitting on a local board. “Know your customers” doesn’t just scale — it travels.

Point 3: Know your customers as people.

This one’s personal for me. I’ve spent a lot of years working in partnerships and innovation, and I can tell you with absolute certainty: the people who succeed the most are the ones who actually know the people they work with.

Business gets a lot easier when you stop treating customers like transactions and start treating them like humans. Learn what drives them. Understand their constraints, their ambitions, their quirks. Relationships aren’t just good manners — they’re good business.

For me, “know your customer” also means know them beyond the job title. The companies that win are the ones that build real human trust. I believe in the phrase “the network provides.” It’s not a great tenet on its own, but it lives underneath this one. When you genuinely know people, the network takes care of you — and that’s where opportunity, loyalty, and partnership come from.

Point 4: Channel their needs — don’t just collect them.

This is the second half of the tenet, and it’s just as important. It’s not enough to understand your customers — you have to act on that understanding.

Too many companies build things because they think it’s a good idea. They make what’s interesting to them, not what’s important to the people they serve. That’s a recipe for wasted effort and missed opportunity.

For us, “channel their needs” means we listen, we interpret, and then we make decisions that directly tie to what customers actually value. We don’t chase every request or trend. We look for patterns. We look for pain points. And when we hear the same thing enough times — and ideally, from someone willing to pay for it — we take action.

That’s how you stay customer-driven without becoming customer-chained.

When you read our long-form version of this tenet, you’ll see all of this built in:

We aim to be relentlessly customer-driven. It’s easy for companies to lose their way as they grow—focusing inward on internal politics or personal wins rather than what matters most: the customer and, ultimately, GraphIQ’s success. Knowing your customers goes deeper than their business model. It’s understanding their processes, their culture, and the people themselves. The companies that truly succeed are the ones that see customers as whole people, not just accounts. But insight alone isn’t enough. We also have to channel what we learn—turning their expressed needs into solutions that align with our strategy. That means not just chasing every request the market throws at us, but focusing on what drives the greatest impact for our growth.

That’s what I mean when I say your cultural tenets should be scalable — you should be able to “drive a truck through them.”

A great tenet holds true no matter where or how you test it. It gives people the space to think, adapt, and act — without losing the through line of what you stand for. It’s both wide and deep. It lives at the top of the company and at the edges of it.

If your tenets can travel across time, context, and circumstance — and still feel right — then you’ve written something worth standing behind.

Cultural Tenet Consideration 3: Beware the Tactical and Narrow (The “Folding In” Principle)

This one’s just as important — and really, it’s the equal and opposite of the last one.

If Cultural Tenet 2 is about making sure your ideas are broad enough to drive a truck through, then this one is about making sure you’re high enough off the ground to see if you’ve actually built something that scalable. It’s your “check yourself” moment — the test to make sure your tenets aren’t too tactical, too narrow, or too one-dimensional.

It’s surprisingly easy to fall into this trap. You start brainstorming what matters to you and suddenly you’ve got fifteen “cultural tenets.” When that happens, that’s your first red flag. If you’ve got more than six, it usually means your ideas are too granular — you can probably drive a sports car through them, not a truck.

That’s where what I call the folding in principle comes in.

The folding in principle means asking: Can this smaller, tactical idea live inside a bigger one? Can it be a facet of something broader and more enduring? Because most of the time, it can — and when you start folding those tactical thoughts into larger tenets, you make your culture more cohesive, more durable, and a hell of a lot easier to live by.

Let me give you an example from our own experience.

As I’ve mentioned before, we wrote our four cultural tenets pretty early on. And for a long time, the fourth one was the one I always referred to as “that fourth one I gotta rewrite.”

But funny enough, over time, I started to realize it was right all along.

Here it is:

Smart thinking enables seamless execution.

Now, I’ve always been a big believer in the difference between intelligence and being smart. I’ve met plenty of incredibly intelligent people who can’t actually get things done. Intelligence is knowing how to solve the problem; smart is figuring out how to do it faster, simpler, and with fewer people losing their minds along the way.

And as someone who’s spent a lot of time around “intelligent idiots” (we’ve all met them), I’ve learned to value smart people over intelligent ones every time. So for me, this tenet was about creating a culture that values pragmatic problem-solving — people who use their brains not to look clever, but to make things easier for everyone else.

That’s the “truckable” part. But the real story here — the folding in part — came later.

A couple years after we wrote our tenets, my co-founder and I were talking through them again, and he threw out a phrase I’d heard him use before:

“Everyone should strive to work themselves out of a job.”

Now, if you know him, this makes total sense. He’s obsessed with improvement — finding ways to automate, simplify, and create so much efficiency that the need for that role eventually disappears. It’s about constant evolution, not complacency.

I’ll be honest — at first, I thought it was too tactical to be its own tenet. But then it hit me: this idea fit perfectly under our fourth one. It wasn’t something new — it was already inside it.

Working yourself out of a job is what smart thinking looks like. It’s about creating efficiency and frictionless execution. So instead of rewriting or adding another tenet, we folded his idea in — and the tenet suddenly became more complete. It wasn’t just about being smart; it was about applying that intelligence to create systems so effective, they make the old way obsolete.

Here’s how the expanded version reads today:

Intelligence is nice. Smart thinking is essential. For us, smart means knowing how to apply knowledge—book smarts plus street smarts—to make things happen with as little friction as possible. That could mean automating the repetitive tasks that slow us down, or working yourself out of a job because you’ve found a more efficient way to do it. Seamless execution isn’t about grinding harder; it’s about thinking sharper. When we take the time to pause, plan, and choose the smartest path, we waste less, stress less, and deliver more. And in the long run, that’s how we win—again and again—in the marketplace.

That’s the folding in principle in action.

Too many tenets make your culture tactical, not foundational. The moment you find yourself listing smaller, action-level ideas, take a step back and ask: Can I fold this into something bigger?

If the answer’s yes — and it usually is — do it. That’s how you stay elevated, keep your culture cohesive, and make sure the truck still has a clear, open path to drive through.

Cultural Tenet Consideration 4: Juxtaposition Creates Healthy Tenet Tension

Cultural tenets are deceptively simple statements. They’re meant to stretch people — to make them behave in ways you believe will drive the business forward. As I’ve said before, they represent the cultural side of business in action. And make no mistake: when done right, the cultural side of business absolutely drives real revenue.

But here’s something interesting I learned early in my career — most cultural tenets are juxtaposed. They live in tension with one another. And that’s not a flaw; it’s the point. That tension creates healthy friction — the kind that forces people to think harder about their choices and how they show up.

When I first started my career, my boss walked me through our company’s cultural principles and stopped midway through two of them. He told me about the idea of juxtaposition.

At Clorox, the two principles were:

• Do the right thing.

• Stretch for results.

At first glance, they sound perfectly compatible — who wouldn’t want to do both? But as he explained, those two ideas can actually be at odds.

If you’re stretching for results, it’s easy to get tempted by shortcuts. You might justify cutting corners or stepping on someone else if it helps you hit your number. But on the flip side, if you’re only doing the right thing — playing it safe, staying cautious — you might never hit your goals.

Those two tenets create a natural tension. They demand balance. They force you to ask yourself: How do I push hard while still holding myself accountable to the right standards? That’s what great cultural design does — it makes people think deeper about how they achieve results, not just that they achieve them.

That same principle applies to our own tenets.

Let’s talk about one I haven’t covered yet — our third one:

When the best ideas win, everyone wins.

I love this one. It’s my co-founder’s value core in action — something I learned from watching him lead. It was a part of me, but not to the degree he lived it, but I absorbed it over time because I saw how powerful it was when lived out loud.

Back at our previous company, I remember being in a team meeting — ten of us sitting around a table — and I saw him live this idea in real time. No matter who spoke up, no matter where the idea came from, he always gravitated toward the best one. Titles didn’t matter. Seniority didn’t matter. The idea that made the most sense won, period.

And what happened was magic — the team lost its ego. People started contributing freely. Collaboration got faster. Decision-making got cleaner. Everyone was focused on the outcome, not the credit. Watching that changed how I thought about leadership. It pushed me toward true egoless collaboration — and that’s the beauty of juxtaposition in action.

“When the best ideas win, everyone wins” carries its own internal tension. It says: push hard to have the best idea, but also have the humility to recognize when someone else’s idea is better. It demands that you compete and collaborate at the same time — stretch for the business, but also step back when it’s not your turn to lead.

Here’s how we captured it in full:

Innovation is our lifeblood, but it only thrives when egos take a backseat. At GraphIQ, we commit to recognizing, supporting, and executing on the best idea—no matter whose idea it is. Why does this matter? Because when the best idea rises to the top, everyone benefits. Customers get better solutions. We outperform the competition. The business grows stronger. And the people who contributed to the effort get to share in the win. If we can consistently make space for the best ideas to lead, we create a cycle of success that carries us all forward.

That’s what good cultural tenets do — they stretch you. They make you a little uncomfortable. They challenge you to balance ambition with humility, speed with care, outcomes with ethics.

Because the best cultures don’t just tell people what to do — they make them think deeply about how to do it.

Cultural Tenet Consideration 5: Be Bold and Cover a Lot of Ground

Bringing it all together, remember this: your cultural tenets need to cover a lot of ground.

They aren’t just nice phrases for the company wall — they’re the blueprint for how you want your people to operate every single day. They should define how your team behaves, how they treat customers, how they treat each other, and how they think about growth.

Culture isn’t just about people being nice to one another. It’s about the entire system of how your business works — how decisions are made, how customers are served, and how results are achieved.

I don’t need to belabor the point, because if you look at ours, you’ll see what I mean:

Everyone grabs a shovel, but isn’t too proud to ask for help

Know your customers and channel their needs

When the best ideas win, everyone wins

Smart thinking enables seamless execution

In those four tenets, we cover a lot of terrain: how we work, how we treat our customers, how those customers shape our success, how we expect people to check their egos and operate as a team, and how we drive execution through thoughtful efficiency.

Each tenet holds a piece of the business — people, performance, ethics, execution — but together, they form a complete operating system.

That’s the real point. Your cultural tenets shouldn’t describe just one part of your company; they should define the whole thing.

Be bold enough to make them broad. Make sure they capture every essential corner of your business — because when your tenets reflect your value core and your business reality, you’ve built something that can actually last.

Bringing It All Together: They’re on Paper — Now What?

So you’ve done it. You’ve written your cultural tenets, wrestled your values onto paper, and declared who you are as a founder.

Now what?

Here’s where most people blow it. They stop. They write a “culture doc,” pat themselves on the back, and never actually use it. It sits in a folder somewhere, collecting digital dust.

But the real work — and honestly, the real fun — begins once you start living it.

If you’ve taken the time to define your value core, you’ve given yourself a gift: a clear, shared definition of who you are and what you expect. The next step is embedding that into the daily rhythm of how you operate — how you hire, lead, build, and grow.

Here’s how we do it.

We hire with them.

This is the first place your culture should show up. When we interview people, we’re not just looking at skills — we’re watching for behaviors that mirror our principles.

Our first tenet — Everyone grabs a shovel, but isn’t too proud to ask for help — shows up constantly. And the people who’ve thrived here are the ones who live that principle without even realizing it.

I can give you a real example. Early on, when we were still scrappy and figuring out how to keep the lights on, a few people joined us knowing we couldn’t pay them right away. We were honest about it — cash was tight. But they trusted us. They believed in what we were building. They grabbed the shovel anyway and started digging beside us.

And they didn’t just survive; they thrived. Those same people are now full-time team members driving huge parts of our business forward. Why? Because they understood what we were about before we even had a payroll system. They didn’t need to be told what the culture was — they embodied it.

That’s what culture alignment looks like.

We figure out who doesn’t fit.

The reverse is equally important. Sometimes people show up with all the right credentials, but you quickly realize their shovel’s still sitting in the garage.

We’ve had folks who loved to ideate — who could talk for hours about strategy and vision — but never actually picked up a tool. They’d wait for someone else to execute, hovering above the work as if they were allergic to sweat.

At first, it’s tempting to make excuses for them. Maybe they’re “big-picture people.” Maybe they’ll grow into it. But over time, you realize that misalignment with your cultural tenets isn’t something you can coach away.

When that happened, we looked at our culture doc and it was right there in black and white: Everyone grabs a shovel. That’s who we are. And when someone doesn’t, it’s not a mystery why they fail. The tenet gives you the language — and the courage — to act on it.

We make big ideas live and solve problems together.

One of my favorite things about our culture is how the tenets layer on top of each other.

When the best ideas win, everyone wins meets Smart thinking enables seamless execution almost every single day. Together, they push us to bring ideas forward, listen deeply, and move fast without ego.

Because here’s the thing — when you truly believe the best idea should win, you stop caring who gets the credit. And when you combine that with a culture that values smart execution, things actually happen. We don’t sit around analyzing for months. We take the smartest path forward, execute cleanly, and iterate.

And there’s another layer here: we don’t let people just complain. You can’t sit in a meeting pointing out everything that’s wrong unless you’re also bringing an idea for how to fix it — or, at the very least, connecting it to what the customer actually needs. That’s where Know your customers and channel their needs comes in.

That intersection of tenets keeps us moving. It’s like a cultural feedback loop: listen, think, act, refine. Repeat.

We use them to hold ourselves and each other accountable.

Every company says they believe in accountability. Ours actually makes it possible.

When things get tense — and they always do — the tenets become our common language. Instead of finger-pointing or blaming, we can look at what’s happening through the lens of our culture.

Maybe someone’s been working hard but is stuck because they’re doing it all alone — that’s a shovel problem. They need to remember the second half: don’t be too proud to ask for help.

Maybe someone’s pushing their idea too hard without listening to others — that’s a best idea wins problem.

Maybe a team’s overcomplicating something that should be simple — that’s a smart thinking, seamless execution problem.

Once you have those anchors, it’s no longer personal. You’re not criticizing them — you’re realigning behavior to the shared framework everyone already agreed on. And that’s what makes accountability safe, honest, and productive.

We use them to grow.

This one’s personal for me.

Every founder hits moments where they hesitate — when fear or fatigue kicks in, or when the chaos of the startup grind makes you forget what you stand for. When that happens, I go back to our tenets.

They remind me who I said I was going to be when I started this thing.

Am I grabbing the shovel? Am I staying close to the customer? Am I making space for the best ideas, even if they’re not mine? Am I thinking smart, not just fast?

Those questions keep me honest. They keep me evolving. Your tenets aren’t just guardrails for your team — they’re mirrors for you as a leader.

And here’s the thing — when you truly live your tenets, you start to see how they drive the operational side of the business too. They’re not just cultural fluff; they’re performance infrastructure.

Each principle feeds the others. They shape hiring, execution, relationships, decision-making. They become the quiet rhythm behind how the company moves.

But if you never define them? You’re flying blind. People will make up their own version of “how we do things here,” and before long, your company’s like a boat with a dozen rowers — all rowing hard, all in different directions. You might have the best team in the world, but without alignment, you’ll just spin in circles.

Culture is what keeps the oars in sync. It’s what turns individual effort into collective motion.

So yes, write your tenets. But more importantly, live them.

Because if the cultural side of your business drifts, the operational side won’t save you.

You’ll end up in that same boat — full of smart, capable people, all rowing furiously but going nowhere — until you look around one day and realize you’re still out at sea, tired, hungry, and wondering how you got so far off course.

Culture is the compass. It always has been. And as a founder, it’s your job to make damn sure everyone’s steering by it.