Week in Review: Culture > Everything
This week's theme was "Culture > Everything"—and I stuck to it more consistently than I expected. From newsroom mistakes to national education policy, every piece ultimately came back to the same truth: culture shapes everything else.
The Headlines
I published eight pieces this week, ranging from personal leadership stories to op-ed work in The Philadelphia Inquirer. What emerged was a coherent argument about why culture isn't just important—it's foundational to every other organizational priority.
The Personal: Started Monday with "A Leadership Mistake I Made (And What It Taught Me About Culture)"—the story of how I "killed" the wrong person on a newspaper's front page and what my editor's response taught me about psychological safety.
The Diagnostic: Midweek brought "Culture Check: What's One Thing Your Organization Really Believes?" and "Culture Isn't What You Say. It's What You Tolerate"—frameworks for auditing what your organization actually values versus what it claims to value.
The Practical: "Don't Just Say It — Signal It: 4 Ways Leaders Model Culture" broke down specific behaviors that either build or erode trust, accountability, and shared commitment.
The Systemic: Two pieces connected culture to broader institutional challenges. My Inquirer op-ed highlighted how congressional cuts to both STEM education and public media funding create a "perfect storm" for American scientific leadership. And "Pennsylvania's Literacy Crisis Has a Blind Spot" showed how policy advocates are overlooking their most effective literacy partner—public television—just as it faces elimination.
The Warning: "You Can't Pivot Your Way Out of a Toxic Culture" addressed leaders who think new technology, mission statements, or strategic plans can fix cultural problems without addressing leadership behavior.
The Industry Shift: "When Search Becomes Premium" examined how Taboola's new AI search tool for publishers signals a troubling cultural shift toward paywalling basic discovery functions, turning information access from a public good into a premium service.
The Thread That Connected Everything
What struck me while reviewing the week was how naturally each piece connected to organizational culture, even when that wasn't the starting point. The education pieces? They're really about institutional culture—how Congress prioritizes funding, how states approach literacy, how advocacy organizations frame problems.
The leadership pieces revealed a pattern: every functional organization I've worked with had leaders who understood that culture isn't a program you implement—it's the sum of daily decisions about what you reward, tolerate, and model.
Even the search monetization piece connects to this theme: when platforms start paywalling basic discovery functions, they're making a cultural choice about whether information access is a public good or a premium service.
What Resonated Most
The biggest response came from "A Leadership Mistake I Made"—the story about putting the wrong obituary photo on the front page. LinkedIn lit up with media professionals sharing their own "fail fast, fail forward" moments and the leaders who helped them learn rather than just punished them.
Michael Fomil shared a particularly vivid example about "hard starts" in live TV breaking news, where screwing up could blow the start of 100 local stations simultaneously. His lesson: "Admit when you make a mistake. It won't fix the mistake but it will give you credibility."
The tolerance piece also struck a nerve, with readers sharing stories about organizations that talked about innovation while punishing risk-taking, or promoted collaboration while protecting empire-builders. The newspaper industry example about problem employees getting "promoted" to Opinion/Editorial apparently exists across multiple sectors—the tolerance trap is more common than most leaders want to admit.
The Bigger Picture
Writing about culture for a full week reinforced something I've suspected: most organizational problems aren't actually operational problems. They're cultural problems that manifest operationally.
You can't strategy your way out of a trust deficit. You can't innovate around dysfunction. You can't pivot past toxicity. At some point, leaders have to decide what they'll actually stand for—and prove it through consistent action, not aspirational messaging.
Next Week: Audience Isn't a Department
Next week's theme shifts to "Audience Isn't a Department"—exploring how successful organizations build audience understanding throughout their structure rather than treating it as someone else's job.
Looking forward to that shift from internal culture to external relationships, though I suspect the two themes will prove more connected than they initially appear.
What was your biggest takeaway from this week's culture deep-dive? Comment and let me know—I read every response and often feature the most insightful observations in future posts.
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