| If you hang out on Facebook, you’ll see a lot of ads like this one. It’s for a metal portable campfire. Lovely. Perfect for you and your hipster friends’ summer nights in the mountains. Everyone in the ad is young and good-looking, everything is pleasant and mellow. There is no angst. There is no disease, suffering, and death. There is no killing. There’s no lust or envy or avarice of pride. There are no eviction notices or IRS audits. In other words, it isn’t real life. It’s a lot like when the business gurus talk about “corporate culture”. They like to emphasize the positive side of human interaction- teamwork, collaboration, empathy, and so on. A lot of happy “around the campfire” stuff, just like this ad. But that isn’t real life. In real life, there is tension, competition, unhappy customers, mishaps. Not everything is necessarily friendly, not everything is nice, regulators need to be satisfied; it's definitely not easy. To thrive, first one must survive, and that is about balancing all kinds of things that are in conflict. Hard decisions must be made, sometimes a few eggs need to be broken. A key point of culture is to create norms that provide implicit and explicit guidance. It creates the mental models that help make the hard decisions and keeps all stakeholders aligned, especially when things are tough. This is what strong cultures can do, keep everyone together, provide the motivation to show up and do the hard work. It's not pretty, but it is reality and it is vital to the sustained success of any organization. | 
