The internal culture of a company determines a great deal about what they produce, who works there, and ultimately how successful they can be in a competitive market. I have a good deal of experience with two very different cultures, each with vastly different results.

It's important for people to know which sort of culture they will succeed in; working against the grain of a company is almost never a good idea. But it's also important to spot these cultures because they're not equally effective.

And by "culture" in this context, I mean a population's most fundamental shared values. There's rarely a poster on the wall with these values; you have to impute them from what sort of ideas are accepted, rewarded, or discouraged.

Effort Culture

This culture puts a high value on personal effort. Everyone tries to contribute their particular skills to the problems at hand. To use examples from IT, everyone is expected to pitch in if a server goes down. The cardinal sin is to withhold effort or to criticize another's effort. Accommodating everyone's ability to contribute is the big focus of projects.

Even if you think someone's contribution doesn't help achieve the goal, you are expected to laud their effort. These sorts of places have parties at project completion, even if it's three years late and four times the budget. Everyone worked hard!

Methodology is valuable because it structures who puts in what effort. Consultation is a theme in these organizations, to give everyone a chance to contribute to a project. "On time and on budget" is often the measure of success, as these are measures of contributions, not market reception.

Cultures like this tend to deliver products that get by. They accomplish the stated goals, have well-deliberated trade-offs, and will pass regulatory burdens. Mostly because there were three hundred people all contributing a tiny element to the design. But in general, they will be soulless, lowest-common-denominator products. Financial services products, cell phone plans, and many government services all carry the flavour of being made in an effort culture.

Product Culture

This culture puts a high value on the end product. People are only involved to the extent that they can positively affect design or delivery. The cardinal sin here is to bring in arbitrary constraints that negatively affect the end product itself. Delivery of a customer experience is the big focus.

These cultures tend to be coarser, less polite, and be filled with thick-skinned people. You are judged by the ideas you accept and argue for. People will judge an idea on its relationship to their product goal, whether or not you took all night to write it up.

Delivery of poor products is not lauded along with good products. Teams that produce good products are conspicuously rewarded with more money or freedom, perks, but also expectations. "On time and on budget" is less important than having a successful product in terms of sales.

Methodology is only useful if it solves a problem associated with getting out a better product. Each step is filtered through a rigorous pruning, where its cost is evaluated against the benefit it could bring to the product.

Cultures like this tend to deliver market-leading products. Many startups begin this way, with a clear product vision. Since there is so little time and money, every action has to be scrupulously evaluated against that goal. They out-design and out-produce large, slow, effort-culture corporations. Even though it is large, Apple looks like a product culture company.

All Cultures Are Not Equal

In an effort culture you are generally rewarded for trying, rather than objectively succeeding. Effort cultures celebrate finishing a project no matter how successful. Product cultures tend to expect to post good sales numbers before celebrating.

In effort culture companies, I have actually delivered whole products with no measurement to ascertain if the end users used or liked the product. In one such case, I got curious and looked at some logs several months after launch. Less than 1% of the expected users actually used the new product we built. Through a product culture's lens, that's a failure. Not so for effort culture — it was delivered on time and on budget.

The effort culture can only produce great products by accident. There is not necessarily a single mind in charge of a product, so they end up with a committee feel. Large financial institutions, with their multitude of regulatory, tax, partner, and (finally) product considerations, produce these sorts of products. Who likes their investment or bank account products? When you need an advisor to walk you through innumerable confusing product options, then its likely they're not made with the consumer in mind as much as the company itself. It's likely that these products are made like that: the consumer experience is just one tiny factor in their creation, not the goal.

Pick Your Poison

Some people are looking to be a small cog in a gigantic machine. They want a 9-5, put in a day's effort, and get recognized for it, without having to argue about goals and the "right" thing to do. They populate large corporations, which institutionalize that culture.

If you want to make great products, then you will chafe in such an organization. Arguments to overturn established routine and structures will fall on deaf ears. Since real innovation is disruptive, it makes many people's efforts redundant — intolerable in an effort culture.

It's not true that all large organizations have effort cultures and that small startups have product cultures. Apple is a counter-example on the one side, and many little Mom and Pop shops are an example on the other. It still takes an assessment of what sorts of activities are rewarded or discouraged. But if you want to be happy in your organization, it's vital to correctly diagnose what sort of culture you want, and find an appropriate place with like-minded people.