Culture is what you put up with
I didn’t come up with the idea in the title of this post - someone else told me about hearing it. But it’s a good enough idea that it’s worth exploring a bit.
There are lots of definitions and guidelines to culture. Make a list! Be clear on principles! Stuff like that. But the reality is, it’s much easier to state a cultural goal, than it is to actually implement it in practice. Real culture, like real strategy, involves choices and discipline.
The question is really: what are you willing to pay a high price to have? For large companies, it’s usually fairly obvious: Google will pay very high prices in terms of hiring, programmer freedom, and efficiency so that they have a high degree of code quality. Amazon will pay a very high price in terms of attrition and flexibility to have a high degree of operational excellence. Etc.
But if you say something like “we have a culture of quality”, it may or may not be true. Are you willing to pay a high price in terms of growth, or revenue, or user releases for that quality? Do you invest more than average in tools and staff to manage it? Is bug closure rate (or some similar measure of quality) one of the top metrics in the company, that other metrics are allowed to suffer for?
To the degree that your company actually puts up with lower levels of quality in the face of these pressures, that’s the actual culture of quality that you have. Which is fine - no company can value all things at all times. But it’s easier to understand culture if you look at “what’s the worst behavior we will tolerate”, rather than “what’s the cultural goal”. Both are interesting, but the first is reality - merging them together is how culture is really built.