# How to Build Company Culture: Turning Values into Rituals

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/how-to-build-company-culture/
- Published: 2026-11-02
- Updated: 2026-11-02
- Category: Leadership and working life
- Publisher: Girişimci Kafası

On 28 November 1660, twelve men met at Gresham College in London. Among them were Christopher Wren, then a professor of astronomy, the chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician William Brouncker. What they agreed to found had a long name: a college for promoting physico-mathematical, experimental learning. It soon became the Royal Society.

The founders also chose a motto: "Nullius in verba", take nobody's word for it. The phrase was cut from a line in Horace's Epistles, "Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri", bound to swear by the words of no master. When the king granted the society its arms in 1663, those three words came with them.

But a motto is only words. The gentlemen who met once a week wanted every claim shown by experiment, and someone had to prepare those experiments week after week. In 1662, on Robert Moray's proposal and Boyle's recommendation, a young experimenter who had worked as Boyle's assistant was given the job: Robert Hooke, the society's first Curator of Experiments. His task was to bring the experiments that would be put on the table at each meeting.

The society had no reliable income. Money for Hooke's post came in 1664, when John Cutler settled an annual £50 gift on the society; on 11 January 1665 Hooke was made curator for life at £80 a year. In 1935 the society's librarian, Henry Robinson, wrote that without Hooke's weekly experiments the society could scarcely have survived, or would at least have become something quite different. The founders wrote the motto. One of the first people they hired turned it into something that happened every week.

## Culture is not the sentence on the wall

Molly Graham, in a talk written up by First Round Review, describes seeing something similar at Facebook. When she joined in 2008, 400 employees were serving 80 million users, and nobody had yet described who the company was. Graham split the longest-serving employees into groups and asked which words they used to describe the place. "Hacker" was written on walls all over the office, yet not one person used it to describe the company.

Her advice to startups is to define culture early and on purpose. She lays it out in three steps; the Royal Society's story adds a fourth.

### Start by looking at the founder

Graham says companies grow in the image of their founders. A competitive founder builds an aggressive company; a founder who thinks in data builds one that decides by numbers. So the first job is an honest inventory. What sets you apart from the people around you? What do your friends have in common? How do you make your best decisions? What drives you mad about other people? Even at five or ten people, write the answers down, and put them in a drawer if you must.

### Turn your adjectives into a story

"Smart, fast learners, team players" describes every company, which means it describes none. Graham suggests steering clear of words like "innovative" and "impact", and writing down only a story you are willing to stick your neck out for. It can be four sentences or three values, as long as it says plainly what you are and what you are not. As Graham tells it, Zuckerberg wrote a five-point list in 2006 of what it meant to be "one of us", took ten minutes over it and put it in a drawer; it came back out in 2009 when the values were rewritten. The same logic works for job adverts: write each one not for everyone, but for the one person who absolutely belongs in that role.

### Tie every value to a ritual

"Take nobody's word for it" could have stayed a slogan. What kept it alive was an experiment arriving on the table every week. Ask the same question of each value you write down: in which recurring event does this value show up? If you say you care about customers, it might be a weekly hour in which the team listens to a customer call together. If you care about speed, it might be a short Friday demo of something that went live that week. A value without a ritual quietly disappears in the next busy week.

### Tell the story, then let it change

For Graham this is work a founder cannot delegate. A founder's words are like a stone thrown into a pond; the next day everyone is repeating them. But culture does not stand still either. In the early days "move fast and break things" meant taping a server together to keep growing. By July 2010, when the user count passed 500 million, that was no longer acceptable; the motto stayed, but its meaning shifted towards moving fast over years.

## Culture is something you cultivate

The word culture comes, via French, from the Latin cultura. According to Nişanyan's Turkish etymological dictionary, the root verb is colere, to till, to work the land. Its first meaning was farming; education and the shared habits of a community came later. A field is not sown once and left; it is worked again every season.

The organisational psychologist Edgar Schein, in Organizational Culture and Leadership, first published in 1985, describes culture in three layers. On top are the things you can see: the office, the dress, the rituals, the in-jokes. In the middle are the values a company declares. At the bottom lie the assumptions nobody writes down and everybody takes for granted. The Royal Society's motto sat in the middle layer; Hooke's weekly experiments sat on top. Living side by side for years, the two produced the bottom layer: here, nothing is accepted unless it is shown by experiment.

You cannot reach the layer of assumptions with a document. Only repeated behaviour gets there.

## A final word

In the first volume of Democracy in America, published in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville uses the word mœurs for both "the habits of the heart" and the shared ideas of a people, and in one sentence places laws behind them:

> "On attribue trop d'importance aux lois, trop peu aux mœurs."

Too much importance is given to laws, too little to habits.

The Royal Society's motto still sits on its coat of arms today, but what kept it alive in the 1660s was the experiment put on the table every week. What is the weekly experiment in your company? Which of the values you have written down lives through a ritual, and which only hangs on the wall?

*If you are choosing the first people who will carry your culture, [Hiring Your First Employees: How Do You Choose the Right Person?](https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/how-to-hire-your-first-employees/) is worth a read.*