Culture as a Signal
Culture is a signal. Without leaders to amplify it, the signal fades. That’s cultural entropy.
A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) argued that it takes ten years for the culture of a great company to unravel once the CEO seat passes from a product or engineering founder to an operator. He pointed to Boeing, Intel, and Apple as examples. Distinctive, product-driven cultures were replaced by generic decision-making and hollow efficiency.
What DHH is describing is what I call cultural entropy, the natural dissipation of a company’s distinctiveness when leaders stop embodying and reinforcing the culture. Strong cultures run on momentum, but without leadership energy the signal weakens, behaviors blur, and the edge is lost.
Boeing, Intel, and Apple show cultural entropy at work in established winners. But the same force operates from day one. When I joined Groupon in 2012, it had founder-driven energy and a product mindset under Andrew Mason. That culture shaped decisions and experimentation. As leadership focus shifted and external pressures mounted, the signal blurred.
In startups, culture acts as a signal that guides decisions, behaviors, and risk appetite. As a company grows and a founder is pulled into urgent challenges and crises, the signal weakens. The result is drift toward generic choices, misaligned behaviors, and risk aversion.
The insidious part is how slowly it happens. With attention drawn to loud short-term issues, it is hard to notice culture eroding. Investing in culture can feel like wasted time until one day it is already gone.
Extraordinary leaders treat culture as a strategic asset. They act as cultural custodians. They resist pressure to abandon the soft stuff. They use storytelling, rituals, and visible decisions to inject energy into their culture. They see cultural entropy as a real and present threat. We need more leaders who refuse to let their culture fade into mediocrity.
