Image credit: Workday

Dave Duffield is a very savvy guy. The serial entrepreneur with multiple successes under his belt is doing it again; Workday, his latest company is on a best places to work list.

You may remember Dave’s last company PeopleSoft (acquired by Oracle in a hostile takeover), which regularly made similar lists.

So what does Dave do that keeps his companies top rated? You can find the answers here,

“The Workday Experience is the combination of everything that’s unique about Workday: our culture, our core values, our company meetings, our Development “Show and Tell” happy hours, our soccer team, our recognition programs, but most importantly it’s our people. It’s everything that makes us different from your average employer, and everything that makes Workday a great place to spend a workday.”

I especially liked the list of cultural values to which they DON’T subscribe:

• Bureaucracy
• Top-down decision making
• Corporate politics
• Unnecessary organizational structure and hierarchy
• “Kissing up” and “slapping down”
• Boredom
• Cutthroat, shark-like business dealings

Take a few minutes to read the Core Values and Culture info and see how many you already embrace at your company and how many you can add.

Image credit: duchesssa

There are as many definitions and explanations of corporate culture as there are academics, consultants, coaches and every person who works now, has worked in the past or plans to work in the future.

But what about the ‘corporate’ in corporate culture?

What is it other than a piece of paper showing that the government recognizes its existence and it owes taxes?

Is it the office buildings that house it? The manuals that explain it? The stock that represents its value?

Actually, a corporation isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

That means that the ‘culture’ in corporate culture is about those people and their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

What’s your definition of corporate and culture?

Image credit: MeHere

What a difference a dozen years make.

When RampUp Solutions started in San Francisco convincing entrepreneurs, let alone VCs, that culture was of critical importance, that corporate culture needed to be architected as carefully and consciously as any product and that hires needed to fit the culture and not just the needed skill set it felt like we were swimming against a tsunami.

We were, but that was then and this is now.

Now people such as Silicon Valley venture capitalist David W. Pidwell give public talks at major universities on “The Attributes of Building a Corporate Culture,” focusing on how entrepreneurs are often so overwhelmed with starting the business that they overlook creating the corporate culture. Pidwell believes that corporate culture provides the core values, policies and practices that define employee behavior and internal operations.

Culture underlies equally the success or the failure of companies of all sizes. In larger companies incoming CEOs ignore the corporate culture at their own risk and are often dumped for either botching it or not changing it.

How important is culture to you?