The Culture Code: A Tribute to a Book That Shaped My Work
A few books explain culture. The Culture Code helped me build a method for it. Published in 2018 by Daniel Coyle, it is the result of four years spent inside some of the world’s best groups, a special-operations unit, a championship basketball team, a film studio, even a gang of jewel thieves, asking one question: why do some groups add up to far more than the sum of their parts? This is a tribute, and a debt. Several of the ideas at the center of Culture by Commitment took their shape, in part, from this book.
A New York Times bestseller, and one of the most recommended culture books of the last decade. What sets it apart is not the famous stories but the claim underneath them: that great culture is not a personality some lucky groups are born with, it is a set of behaviors any group can learn. Coyle put it in a single line that I have never been able to improve on: culture is not something you are, it is something you do.
That line is close to the foundation of everything I do. I help leaders build culture, and I have come to believe it is built exactly the way Coyle describes, not declared in values on a wall, but accumulated through small behaviors repeated until they become who a group is. What I call Culture by Commitment is a method for doing that on purpose. And while the method is my own, several of its load-bearing ideas were sharpened by this book. What follows is where it left its mark.
Why It Resonated: Culture Is Something You Do
Long before I had a name for any of this, I believed that language shapes thinking, thinking shapes behavior, and behavior repeated over time becomes culture. What The Culture Code gave me was confirmation of where that chain lands, and the cleanest words for naming it. The doing is the culture; there is no separate thing behind it.
That reframing matters more than it sounds. If culture is something you are, you are stuck with it, you got the good kind or you did not. If culture is something you do, it is buildable, and it is buildable by ordinary teams, not just the gifted ones. Coyle spent four years proving the second view with research and field work. I had arrived at the same conviction from the practitioner’s side, building cultures from the front. Finding it stated so plainly, and backed so thoroughly, did something useful: it gave me confidence that the premise underneath my whole approach was sound.
The Three Pillars, and What Each One Taught Me
The spine of the book is three skills that Coyle found in every strong culture he studied. He describes them as working from the bottom up, first building connection, then channeling it into action. Reading them was less a discovery than a recognition: they named, cleanly, the conditions a culture has to produce. Here is each one, and what it gave me.
Build Safety. Coyle shows that belonging is built from the outside in, through what he calls belonging cues, small signals repeated until people feel safe. That is shared language by another name, and it confirmed something central to my method: the small, repeated signal is the unit culture is actually made of, not the grand gesture.
Share Vulnerability. His vulnerability loop, one person goes first with a weakness, another answers in kind, taught me that trust is not a precondition you wait for, it is produced by a behavior you commit to. That is exactly how a commitment works: you do the act, and the condition follows.
Establish Purpose. Coyle’s finding that strong cultures overcommunicate their narrative, repeating it until it sticks, lines up precisely with the cumulative-effect idea at the heart of my work. Purpose is not announced once. It is said so many times, in so many ways, that it becomes the air the group breathes.
Notice the through-line in all three. None is a value to post on a wall. Each is a behavior a group performs, repeatedly, until it hardens into culture. That is the observation that gave me the most. It told me culture work should happen at the level of what people actually do and say in the moment, again and again, which is the level my whole method operates on.
The Idea I Took Most: Interactions Over Individuals
The Idea That Stuck
A group’s performance is decided by how its people interact, not by how talented they each are.
The book opens with a now-famous experiment: teams build the tallest tower they can from spaghetti, string, tape, and a marshmallow. Business school students, careful and credentialed, lose to kindergartners, who do not strategize so much as huddle, try, fail, and adjust together. The students manage status. The children manage the marshmallow. The lesson is that group performance turns on the quality of the interactions, not the brilliance of the individuals.
That idea did more to shape Culture by Commitment than any other in the book. It is the reason I do not try to build culture by hiring stars or writing aspirational values. I build it at the level of the interaction, the meeting, the piece of feedback, the decision, the handoff, because that is where culture is actually made or lost. Get the shared commitments right inside those moments, and the culture takes care of itself. Coyle gave me the clearest evidence I have ever seen that this is where the leverage lives.
Where the Book Left Me Wanting, and What I Built
Every honest tribute includes the place a book stops, and for me that place is what sent me to work. The Culture Code is a breathtaking catalog of what great cultures do. It takes you inside the best groups on earth and shows you their signals, their loops, their stories. What it does not quite give you, and does not really set out to give you, is a method for an ordinary team to manufacture those behaviors on purpose, on a Tuesday, with the people they already have.
The gap is between admiring and building. You can finish the book moved by the Navy SEALs and the Spurs and still not know what to do at your own next meeting. The signals are described; the mechanism to install them in your team is left largely to you.
That gap is where my work lives. Culture by Commitment is, in a sense, my answer to the question the book left open: how does a normal team actually produce safety, candor, and shared purpose, deliberately and repeatably? The answer I landed on is commitments, a handful of shared behaviors, chosen on purpose and lived across the activities that matter, one at a time, until they become culture.
So I do not hold this against the book. I am grateful for it. A book that shows you the destination so vividly is a gift, even when it leaves you to draw the map. Much of my method is the map I drew after reading it.
It is also worth saying, in fairness, that the book’s science leans on a particular body of social-signal research, so it is best held the way I hold all good frameworks, as a powerful lens rather than a settled law. That does not dim the debt. It clarifies it.
From a Great Book to a Method You Can Use
So if The Culture Code convinced you that culture is something you do, built from what a team repeats until it sticks, then you already believe the premise of Culture by Commitment. The remaining question is the practical one the book points toward without fully answering: how does your team produce those behaviors on purpose?
The answer I work from is commitments. Start with the core commitments a team shares, then the activity commitments that make them real inside meetings, feedback, decisions, and the rest, one activity at a time, until the cumulative effect is a culture you chose on purpose. Coyle showed me, as clearly as anyone ever has, that this is where culture is built. The method is how you go build it.
Work with Joe
Want to turn ideas like these into a culture your team lives?
Books like The Culture Code prove the mechanism: culture is something you do, built from small behaviors repeated over time. The work is turning that into the specific commitments your team actually runs on, across the activities that matter most, meetings, feedback, decisions, ownership, and rolling them out so they stick.
If you want to build a culture through commitments that hold, let’s build it.
Joe Newsum: McKinsey alum, former CEO, COO, CFO, and CMO, and creator of Culture by Commitment, working directly with Fortune 500 CEOs and executive committees to build cultures that hold.
Part of the Culture Guide
This is one piece of a complete, free guide to building a high performance culture. Start at the Culture Guide hub for the full system, or jump to the ideas most worth your time:
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Culture Strategy ›
The strategy: deriving the culture your business needs from your True North, your advantage, and the behaviors that win.
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Culture by Commitment ›
The method behind this page: how shared commitments, not values, actually build culture.
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What Is Organizational Culture ›
The big idea: it was never values, it was always language. Why most culture work fails.
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How Language Creates Culture ›
The mechanism: language shapes thinking, thinking shapes behavior, behavior becomes culture.
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The Four Types of Culture Commitments ›
The framework: the four kinds of commitments that build culture, and where meetings fit in.
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How to Make Culture Change Stick ›
The proof: concentrate, model, and reinforce until the new way holds on its own.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Culture Code about?
Daniel Coyle spent four years inside some of the world’s most successful groups to find out why some teams outperform the sum of their parts. His answer is that great culture is built deliberately through three skills: build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose. His core claim is that culture is not something you are, it is something you do.
What are the three skills in The Culture Code?
Build safety, which creates belonging through small repeated signals; share vulnerability, where people go first in admitting weakness to build trust; and establish purpose, where leaders overcommunicate the shared narrative. Coyle says they work from the bottom up, first building connection and then channeling it into action.
What is a belonging cue?
A small signal that tells people they are safe and connected, things like eye contact, turn-taking, attention, and energy. Coyle’s point is that belonging is built from the outside in through many small cues repeated over and over, which is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build.
What is the vulnerability loop?
A simple exchange that builds trust: one person signals a weakness or need, another detects it and responds with their own. Coyle argues that vulnerability does not come after trust, it comes before it. Going first with honesty is what makes the trust appear.
How did The Culture Code influence Culture by Commitment?
It gave the cleanest articulation of the premise the whole method rests on, that culture is something you do, built from repeated behavior rather than declared in values. Its focus on interactions over individual talent, and its three pillars, helped frame where culture lives and what a team must actually produce.
What is the difference between The Culture Code and Culture by Commitment?
The Culture Code documents what great cultures already do, beautifully, but stops at the catalog. Culture by Commitment is the method an ordinary team uses to build those behaviors on purpose, by choosing a handful of shared commitments and living them across the activities that matter, one at a time, until they become culture.