Why culture beats strategy

I got this wrong for years. When Fredrik and I were building Mediapilot in Stockholm, we did what every young founding team does. We spent a full afternoon in a conference room drinking bad filter coffee and writing our company values on a whiteboard. We debated words like transparent, collaborative, and integrity. We eventually had them printed out and framed for the office wall. We felt incredibly professional, convinced we had laid the groundwork for a brilliant company culture. Then we walked out onto the sales floor and completely ignored them.

The cost of keeping a toxic earner

I'll be honest with you. We had a guy on the team who was pulling in massive numbers. Let me explain how he operated. He hoarded leads, talked over the junior staff in meetings, and made the office atmosphere miserable. Everyone knew it. You could feel the tension drop the moment he walked out to get lunch. But every month, we looked at the revenue he generated and found a reason to look the other way. We told ourselves that sales is a tough environment. We convinced ourselves that you need sharp elbows to survive in a commission-driven business. What I did not realise then was that we were actively writing our real company values every time we let him get away with it. Your culture is rarely the framed words on the wall. It is the worst behaviour you are willing to tolerate.

The person you refuse to fire defines your company much more than the offsite where you define your mission statement.

The moment you make an exception for a high performer who treats people poorly, you send a clear message to the rest of the organisation. You tell them that the rules are fake. You communicate that respect and collaboration are only required for the people who cannot hit their revenue targets. It took us far too long to understand this at Mediapilot. By the time we finally found the nerve to let that salesperson go, the damage ran deep. Good people had already checked out, and recovering the trust of the team took months of hard work. We eventually grew the business to create more than a hundred jobs over roughly seven years, but those early mistakes cost us dearly. We lost great talent simply because I was too cowardly to fire a toxic earner.

Software cannot fix cowardice

Years later, working on the commercial side with Happeo, I saw this exact dynamic from a completely different angle. Happeo builds intranet software to improve employee experience. I spent a massive amount of time talking to companies about how to connect their teams and build better internal environments. The software is genuinely excellent at giving a company a digital heartbeat, connecting remote workers and breaking down silos. But I learned quickly that no tool can fix a management team that lacks courage. You can buy the best internal communications platform in the world, set up all the right channels, and post weekly updates about mental health and team spirit. If the leadership team consistently promotes the office bully, or ignores the manager who routinely steals credit from their juniors, the tool simply becomes a faster way for people to complain to each other in private channels. The companies that thrived were the ones where the leadership acted swiftly to protect the team from bad actors. The ones that struggled were the ones hoping a new piece of software would do the heavy lifting of management for them.

The strategy illusion

We love strategy because it feels like a maths problem. You sit in a room, map out the market, decide on pricing models, and project your revenue for the next four quarters. It feels clean. It feels safe. Dealing with human behaviour is completely messy. It means pulling a senior person aside and telling them they are ruining the dynamic. It means making the terrifying decision to fire your top earner and trusting that the rest of the team will step up to fill the gap once the dark cloud is gone. I update a written life plan every single year. I have kept this habit since around 2010. I rate my family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time out of ten. Looking back over those plans, the years where my work score dips to a five or a six are almost always the years where I avoided a difficult personnel conversation for too long. The stress of tolerating a toxic situation bleeds into everything else.

I moved my family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018. We meant to stay for two years, and we are still here. I spend a lot of my time playing tennis badly, and I try to keep my work life as clean and honest as possible. Now, building Anchor for alienated fathers and Substrat for AI builders, I try to keep my past mistakes front of mind. I haven't got this figured out entirely. Even today, when I make a small number of angel investments, I spend more time trying to figure out what the founders will actually tolerate rather than reading their three-year strategy decks. If you want to know what a company's culture is, ignore their careers page. Look at who gets promoted, and look at who gets away with murder. I still catch myself hesitating when a tough decision needs to be made. But I have learned the hard way that the temporary pain of a difficult firing is nothing compared to the slow death of a team that realises you do not actually mean a single word you say.