Your Company Runs on an Operating System You Never Designed

A few years ago, I heard a story at a culture workshop that I still can't shake. It goes like this.

A Swiss insurance company runs a culture workshop for its leadership. The kind of initiative that, in certain corporate circles, gets treated as a box to tick. Something the board approved because someone in HR made a convincing case, and because 2020s corporate hygiene demanded it.

During the coffee break, the facilitator approaches a cluster of senior executives. Grey hair, grey skin, grey suits, grey expressions, the unmistakable aura of men who have already decided this is beneath them. She asks for a first impression. The most senior of the group turns to her, still chewing his Gipfeli, and says: "Very nice, thank you. But we don't really need this. We know what the culture is here. So do all our employees."

The confidence is absolute. The kind of confidence you develop when nobody around you has disagreed with you in fifteen years.

The workshop continues. Attention levels among the grey suits remain firmly in the nap zone. But in the back, among the staff, something else is happening. People are starting to take the thing seriously. Asking questions. Talking to each other. Especially the women.

The final act is an anonymous employee survey.

The results reveal a perception of the company's culture that, to put it diplomatically, is significantly different from what the men in grey had so confidently anticipated.

I don't know what happened to that organisation afterwards. Knowing Swiss corporate culture, I doubt it sparked a revolution. But the story closed a circle that had been open for decades in my head. It made two things visible that I had been sensing but couldn't articulate.

Culture, like brand, is a perceived entity. You don't own it. You don't control it. You can try to influence it, but ultimately, it lives in the heads of the people who experience it every day. The men in grey were describing what they wanted the culture to be. The survey described the culture as it actually was.

And when culture and brand pull in the same direction, they reinforce each other quietly, almost invisibly. When they don't, people notice. Maybe not right away. Maybe not consciously. But they notice.

Which brings us to the part nobody honestly talks about.

The operating system that runs everything

Every company has their special words. They are on the website. In the onboarding deck. Sometimes, on the wall of the meeting room, which is a particularly cruel form of decoration, because everyone stares at it during meetings, where the meaning of those words is being violated in real time.

Most companies call these things "values". They almost never are.

What most companies actually have is somewhere between decoration and wishful thinking. The real values, the ones that shape what really happens, are invisible. They are your company's operating system. The code that decides how things get done when nobody is watching. Who gets hired. Who gets promoted. What gets sacrificed when priorities collide. How fast people move, and where.

Most companies never designed this operating system. It just happened. It grew out of the founder's quirks, early hires, market pressure, accidents, and compromise. Some of it works. Some of it becomes a problem, hard to decipher and eradicate.

After twenty-five years of watching this play out, I have noticed that what companies call "values" tends to exist at one of three levels.

Level one: wallpaper. Chosen because they sound good. "Innovation. Excellence. Integrity. Teamwork." You could swap them between any company, in any sector, and nobody would notice. The organisational psychologist Rob Briner calls this kind of values work "magnetic nonsense," and he's right. Quick test: remove them from the website and observe whether anything changes in the organisation's behaviour. If nothing changes, they were never values.

Level two: good intentions. The founder believes in them. Sincerely. But nobody built systems to truly inspire the company's life. They live in one head. Middle management interprets them however suits the moment. The frontline saw them once in a slide deck and can't remember a single one. This is the most common level and the most dangerous, because it creates the illusion of alignment while providing none of the benefits.

If you've read my previous piece on what happens when strategy lives in one head, you'll recognise the pattern. Values, like strategy, don't survive the transfer from one brain to an organisation unless someone does the hard work of making them explicit, shared, and consequential.

Level three: operating system. Integrated into how the company actually runs. Hiring filters for them. Promotions reward them. Trade-offs get resolved using them as criteria. And here's the part that separates level three from everything else: they cost something. You turn down a client. You lose a supplier. You slow down growth. You fire a high performer who delivers numbers but poisons the well.

What you get is coherence. And coherence is the one thing nobody else can copy.

Yes, some people actually do this

David Croyé, founder of JustWatch in Berlin, bases every major decision on three values: Learn and Improve, Do What You Say, and Don't Be an Asshole. These are decision filters. JustWatch chose a high-margin business model because learning requires sustainable revenue. They refused acquisition offers because "Do What You Say" means keeping promises to users even when the money is very, very good.

Andy Yen at Proton in Geneva made privacy a human right baked into governance. In 2024, Proton transitioned to a non-profit foundation. Yen's reasoning: "We cannot be forced to sell ourselves, forced to deliver higher profits, or forced to seek sources of revenue that don't align with our mission."

Roger Dudler at Frontify in St. Gallen calls the alignment of values, culture, and brand "the ultimate growth unlock."

Three European founders. Different sectors. Same conclusion. Values that guide real decisions create an advantage that generic competitors cannot touch.

The mechanism

So how does an organisation of 60 or 80 people move from level two to level three?

I have been inside companies where frameworks covered entire walls. The only benefit was absorbing the echo. I have sat through workshops that produced five beautiful words by Friday and zero behavioural change by Monday. The off-site version is better because at least it includes wine.

The sequence matters, and it's messier than any consultant will tell you.

It starts with decision architecture. How decisions get made determines which values are real. If your stated value is "customer first", but every budget dispute gets resolved by whoever yells loudest about revenue targets, then "customer first" is a fairytale. When two priorities collide, what is the tiebreaker? If the answer doesn't align with your values, then something else is running the show. And whatever that something is, that's your real operating system.

I once sat in a Q4 preparation meeting, where the head of product and the head of sales were fighting over the same budget line. Product wanted to fix a defect that customers had been complaining about for months. Sales wanted to fund a booth at a trade show to close three big accounts before the end of the year. The CEO listened to both, looked at the ceiling for about ten seconds, and gave the money to sales. Fun fact: the company's website said "quality is our obsession," but still, that meeting lasted twenty minutes. The signal lasted considerably longer. I am, after all, still talking about it.

Then it moves into people decisions. Hiring, firing, promoting. These are the moments when everyone sees what really matters.

At another company, I watched them hire a sales director who was known to be a bully. Brilliant numbers. Shirt collars too large to be true. Almost illiterate. Three people at his previous company had resigned specifically because of him, and this was not a secret. Everyone in the industry knew. The CEO knew. He hired him anyway, because the pipeline was drying up and the board was asking questions he didn't want to answer. Within six months, two of the best sales agents had left. Not dramatically. Quietly. The kind of departure where the exit interview says "new opportunity" and the real reason is "I saw what you actually reward around here." That single hire told the entire organisation more about its real values than any town hall ever could.

Then it becomes visible in what you measure.

Your KPIs are your real values.

I'll say that again. Your KPIs are your real values. The words on the poster are irrelevant. What matters is what gets you a bonus. If bonuses are 100% revenue, then "customer first" is just a bedtime story. If you say "collaboration" but every OKR is individual, you've built a system that actively punishes the behaviour you claim to want.

And finally, the hardest part: what you're willing to bleed for. A market you don't enter. A client you refuse. A partnership you walk away from. If your values have never cost you anything, they aren't values. They are preferences. And preferences never built functioning operating systems.

Early in my career, I worked for a family-owned manufacturer. Three generations. Seventy years of history. Employees who had held the owner as a baby, watched his grandfather die, worked for his father, then worked for him. The company didn't need to write "family" on the wall. It was the air everyone breathed. Then 2008 hit, and one of the first names on the layoff list was a man who had been there since 1977. Thirty-one years. The operating system that had felt like family revealed itself overnight: the real value was survival, and "family" meant "expendable, starting with whoever we think won't fight back." That was the day I understood that values you haven't stress tested are just weather. They change when the pressure does.

The product is the final exam

You can align values with culture. You can align culture with brand. You can tell a beautiful, coherent story. But if the product breaks the pattern, all that coherence works against you.

A sustainably branded product that breaks after three uses. A "premium quality" item that feels cheap in your hands. A "customer-obsessed" service that takes forty-eight hours to reply. The gap between promise and experience is where trust goes to die.

Brand and culture are both the sum of the micro decisions your company makes every day. Operationalised values are the code behind those decisions. Without that code, your brand is just a slide deck, and your culture is just a workshop. And consumers, even if they can't name it, feel the gap. Incoherence leaks. Through the product. Through the service experience. Through the tone of the email your support team sends at 5 pm on a Friday when they're (at least mentally) already at the third Negroni.

If this is the operating system, then what follows is about the frictions that break it. How do you ensure someone acting on your behalf makes the decisions you would make, without monitoring every move? How do operationalised values compress the decision space and make companies faster, not slower? And what would happen if you could read the real values of a competitor, not the ones on their website?

In the pieces that follow, I'll take this operating system apart, friction by friction. But you don't need to wait for those to know where you stand.

The test

Tomorrow, your best performer will violate a company value. Maybe in how they treat a colleague. Maybe in how they handle a client. Maybe in how they cut a corner to hit a number.

When that happens, what you do next will say more about your real operating system than anything on your website, in your onboarding deck, or on the meeting room wall.

The entire organisation will be watching.

And so, eventually, will your customers.