How do companies design great organizational cultures? How can we at Strategyzer design a great organizational culture?

These are questions I frequently ask myself because I want to attract and retain outstanding team members.

Business history is littered with doomed approaches to organizational culture. There are the famous retellings from Ballmer era Microsoft where a competitive ranking system made employees paranoid, secretive and cynical towards each other. We’ve all experienced unfair situations where the louder, politically savvy workers advance while the real talent who might be adverse to playing games gets left behind.

Organizational culture is not just a set of principles you can tack up on a bulletin board and expect employees to follow. It’s just not going to happen, even if I hire the right people. Corporate culture has to be designed with the right tools--from the processes to the incentives, that lead to good organizational behaviors and great outcomes.

At Strategyzer, creating an outstanding place to work is important to us. And as the company grows, the founding team is tasked with figuring out how to develop a culture that creates value for our team members and our business. I’ll admit that we aren’t there yet, but we’re working on it. For example, we’re collaborating and experimenting with smart people like Dave Gray to help design tools like the Culture Map that can achieve this task.

Later this month I’m going to be speaking about organizational culture at  The Business Innovation Factory and Business of Software summits.

That's where I need your help.

I want to illustrate what people feel through real-life stories of terrible corporate culture.