The closing summary of Carroll's teaching note on managerial levers. It argues that the levers rest on well-understood social and psychological processes of influence, motivation and commitment, yet companies rarely deliver on culture's promise because managerial actions and structures are inconsistent and efforts are episodic. It also notes that goodwill gestures, such as Netflix's approach to vacation, should be promoted only when consistent with the culture.

The diagnosis is not lack of knowledge but lack of consistency over time. A culture program that runs for one quarter and then yields to other priorities teaches people that the old expectation still governs.

Uber's fourteen values from 2015, including 'always be hustlin'' (get more done with less, working longer and harder), 'meritocracy and toe-stepping', 'principled confrontation', 'super pumped', 'be yourself' and 'let builders build'. The page asks what you think of them.

Each value is specific and was strongly held, which is what made the culture strong. Read them as a set: together they reward aggression and individual heroics and say nothing about how conflict, power or complaints are handled, so status could override everything else.

A summary of the issues engineer Susan Fowler described in her February 2017 blog post: a manager's propositions, HR telling her he was a 'high performer' who would not be punished, other women with similar stories, claims that HR misrepresented repeat offenses, political games among managers, an altered performance review, denied transfer requests, retaliation and a falling share of women in engineering.

Every item is a management lever acting against the stated value 'be yourself': HR process, performance review, transfer decisions and treatment of high performers. The values on the wall lost to what the system rewarded and tolerated.

The eight norms introduced by new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in November 2017, replacing the fourteen values: we build globally, we live locally; we are customer obsessed; we celebrate differences; we do the right thing, period; we act like owners; we persevere; we value ideas over hierarchy; we make big bold bets.

Compare with the 2015 list: the content shifted from aggression and hustle toward integrity and inclusion, but rewritten words alone cannot change the norm. The test is whether hiring, promotion, investigations and exceptions for star performers changed with them.

Three points: culture is the secret sauce and commitment mechanism for some firms; managers will not abandon it for a laudable public goal; the ideal is homogeneity on cultural characteristics with maximal diversity on all other traits. It asks how to achieve that given social processes of influence.

The ideal works only if 'cultural characteristics' are defined as job-relevant behaviors. Social influence pushes groups to hire people who look and sound like them and call it fit, which is how strong cultures drift into exclusion.