The HubSpot Culture Code [slides]

When choices come down to make a difference or make a profit companies choose profit. If they truly wanted to make a difference, they would be nonprofits.

I am from New York and spend most of my time in Colombia. My English speaking New York personality and Spanish speaking Colombian personality have diverged quite significantly.

I am a lot more indirect in Spanish. I'll rarely say "no" in Spanish for example. I'll always try to rephrase it as "yes, but we could also..." or "maybe we could...".

The "we seek the truth and face facts" mentality works well for some cultures and not as great for others.

I question the idea that a company should have a single culture. Might be better to aim to be a place where folks from a variety of cultures can collaborate.

> FBI documents accessed by journalists via a freedom of information request revealed that HubSpot attempted "multiple failed attempts to manipulate and extort people” with the intention of stopping the book's publication.

> HubSpot executives considered the book "a financial threat to HubSpot, its share price, and the company’s future potential."

I'm including this because this book was published in 2016. While I'm sure that HubSpot, its employees, and management may have learned some things about integrity and transparency since then, it's probably not enough to be writing this soap-boxy slide deck that announces that software built around their culture is going to solve their problems.

On the other hand, I do believe software can shape and guide a culture but only if the culture is also at the pilot seat behind that software. That's to say, as long as the implementors of said software are not interested in developing a certain culture. Your employees will inevitably decide what software gets used and what software gets circumvented, the byproduct of which becomes what people colloquially refer to as culture.

Culture comes from everywhere. When you recruit gay people, some of the values of gay people trickle into your company. When you recruit Black people, values of Black folks trickle in. When you recruit from universities those values trickle in. Each of those will shape your culture and those people are not monoliths either, they're mixes of many vibrant and dark experiences. The last part is key, recruiting is one aspect, but your company culture will continue to evolve and I see projects like this as software trying to drive culture (what the C-suite wants) instead of culture driving software that it maintains itself.

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