Key Highlights
- Stop treating people as resources – Empower employees to do their best work, not control them like cogs in a machine.
- Money isn’t enough – Employees want meaning, purpose, and growth opportunities beyond their paycheck.
- Culture = decisions – Culture is “the cause and effect of every decision you make.”
- Define your purpose first – Explain why you’re in business beyond making money before employees ask.
- Try the obituary exercise – Write your company’s obituary 20-40 years in the future to discover your true purpose.
- Invest continuously – Culture needs ongoing attention like finance or IT, not just quarterly initiatives.
- The flywheel effect – Hard work upfront pays off infinitely once momentum builds.
When Josh Levine talks about company culture, he’s not speaking in abstractions or corporate buzzwords. He’s sharing hard-won insights from over 15 years of helping organizations—from hypergrowth tech companies to nonprofits—build cultures that actually work.
His journey to becoming a culture design expert started, ironically, during the 2008 financial crisis. After spending a decade as a brand strategist, Josh found himself without a job just as the global economy collapsed. But that moment of forced reflection led to a crucial realization: he had been helping organizations create brand promises they couldn’t deliver on.
“I really started to think about how do I help these organizations understand that there is an additional audience for their story and their brand?” Josh explains. That audience was the people on the inside. “I didn’t know it was called culture at that point, but eventually I kind of found my way in.”
What he discovered was both simple and profound: company culture is not some soft, feel-good concept. It’s an incredibly powerful, rigorous business tool that can improve bottom lines and people’s lives simultaneously.
The Fundamental Shift: From Resources to Humans
If there’s one mindset shift Josh wants leaders to make, it’s this: stop thinking of your people as resources.
“We are stuck in a machine era mindset where our businesses are organized in a way that if we don’t think about it critically, they will naturally kind of align in an assembly line,” he says. “We think about the people as cogs in a machine.”
But in today’s hyper-growth, fragile business environment, that approach is not just outdated—it’s a liability. “We will only survive if we empower those people to be able to do what they do best, to give them the guidance and then allow them to do their best work.”
This isn’t new-age philosophy. It’s practical reality. The second crucial shift? Understanding that people don’t show up just for money anymore.
“This has been true for 20 years,” Josh emphasizes. He shares a personal story about his grandfather forcing his father to become an accountant instead of pursuing his passion for music, all in the name of having a “depression-proof career.” His father was unhappy because of it.
But we’ve evolved past that. “We’re at a place where in the evolution of our economy, that we can choose to do things that matter, and we can obtain from our work value beyond dollars.”
Today’s employees are moving up their own hierarchy of needs. They’re looking for meaning, purpose, and growth. Surveys consistently show that career progression and learning opportunities are among the top reasons people leave jobs. “Make it very clear to me how I’m going to improve, how am I gonna get better?” That’s what employees are asking.
Defining Culture: Every Decision Matters
So what exactly is culture? Josh has a definition he uses with every executive team he works with: “Culture is the cause and effect of every decision that you make.”
Let that sink in for a moment. Every decision. Big and small.
“Business is human choices,” he continues. “I don’t care how many algorithms you’re running, business is human choices. That is why culture is important. You are setting people up to make better decisions without someone over them saying, do this, do that. They’re not tools, they’re humans, and they can make good decisions when given the right context.”
This definition reframes everything. Culture isn’t about ping pong tables or casual Fridays. It’s about creating the context and guardrails that allow people to make good decisions aligned with where the company is going.
Starting with Purpose: The North Star
In Josh’s framework, which he outlines in his book “Great Mondays,” there are six components of culture. The first three are about designing your culture—essentially creating your map and deciding where you want to go.
Step number one? Defining your purpose—why you’re in business beyond making money.
“That is critical,” Josh says, “because you need to answer that question before employees start asking that question: what the hell am I doing here? Why am I here? This is so hard.”
And business isn’t easy. It’s not the business’s job to make people happy, but it is the business’s responsibility to provide that cognitive framework and context. “Here’s why we are doing what we’re doing. I’m not talking about quarterly revenue. I’m not talking about bumping the stock price. I’m talking about what’s the big thing that we’re working on together.”
But here’s the challenge: finding that purpose is hard for most leaders. They’re consumed with what’s right in front of them, focusing on the next 12 to 24 months at most.
The Company Obituary: A Powerful Exercise
To help leaders break through that short-term thinking, Josh uses an exercise he learned early in his career as a brand consultant. He has them write their company’s obituary—imagining a future 20, 30, or 40 years ahead.
“This forced perspective gives them the permission to forget all of the things,” he explains. “Just for this day, just for right now, for the next four hours, we’re gonna be thinking about how the world will miss your business and what they’ll remember. They’re not gonna remember Q3 returns in 2025. They’re gonna remember how you change the world.”
The exercise works because it forces leaders to believe it’s possible to think beyond the next 24 months. Josh encourages them to go too far with their thinking. “It’s easy to reel back in, but real hard to go further.”
It’s a bit like time travel—treating the future as if it were the past. What happened? What did we accomplish? How did we matter?
Culture as Continuous Investment
As the conversation draws to a close, Josh shares what might be his most important message: “Culture is not this quarter’s mandate.”
It’s a skill and capacity that needs to be fed, cared for, built, and represented just like finance, IT, or operations. “This is something that needs to be constantly fed,” he stresses. “Otherwise entropy’s gonna take over.”
The hard truth? Building culture requires a lot of energy, and the results are difficult to see at first. But here’s the good news: “Once you get that flywheel moving, the benefits are infinite.”
When you have great culture, everything becomes easier. You attract the best talent. You keep talent longer. You have more efficient teams. You create new ideas more easily. People are less fearful of making mistakes.
“That is ultimately what we want. In fact, it’s not just what we want, it’s what we need,” Josh says. “Because we do not have the time, energy, or capacity to run companies the way that we used to in that machine era top down way. This is less about ‘let me tell you what to do’ and more ‘let’s look and be inspired and provide the guardrails so that people can make better decisions together.'”
Learning from the Best
When asked about his own best boss, Josh points to Marty Neumeier, an important figure in the design and brand strategy world. “He is absolutely the man that I model my leadership style after. He was fearless and almost obsessive with innovation and coming up with new ideas.”
What made Marty exceptional was his communication ability—verbal, visual, and written—and his talent for bringing a room of executives together in an inspiring way. “That’s what I try to do: bring groups together, bring them along.”
Josh Levine’s work reminds us that building great culture isn’t mystical or elusive. It requires intentional design, continuous care, and a fundamental belief that people aren’t resources to be managed—they’re humans capable of making great decisions when given the right context and purpose.
For leaders aspiring to create workplaces where people thrive, Josh’s message is clear: start with purpose, invest consistently, and trust your people to make good decisions. The upfront work is significant, but once that cultural flywheel starts spinning, the momentum becomes unstoppable.
Connect with Josh Levine:
- Visit greatmondays.com for free tools and resources
- Read his book “Great Mondays“
