To prevent values from becoming empty platitudes, integrate them into your company's core operating system. At Applied Intuition, managers are assessed, compensated, and promoted based on their adherence to values. For example, "decisiveness" is a key metric evaluated under the value of "speed."

Create a public document detailing your company's operating principles—from Slack usage to coding standards. This "operating system" makes cultural norms explicit, prevents recurring debates, and allows potential hires to self-select based on alignment, saving time and reducing friction as you scale.

When introducing a new skill like user interviews, initially focus on quantity over quality. Creating a competition for the "most interviews" helps people put in the reps needed to build muscle memory. This vanity metric should be temporary and replaced with quality-focused measures once the habit is formed.

To combat early discouragement in sales, create leaderboards and rewards for leading indicators like 'most doors knocked' or 'most calls made.' You can even award a prize for the 'biggest cuss out' to gamify rejection, creating early wins and de-stressing the process.

Use company-wide meetings to reinforce your operating system. Instead of only celebrating wins, have successful teams present the specific processes and methods they used. This turns every success story into a practical, scalable lesson for the entire organization.

To drive cultural change and ensure adoption of a new process, give it a memorable, idiosyncratic name. Rippling calls its Product Quality List the 'Pickle' (PQL). This creates a 'vessel for meaning' that becomes part of the daily lexicon, making the process stick in a way a generic name wouldn't.

Changing an entrenched culture is daunting. The best approach is to start small. Identify a group of ambassadors, run a focused pilot project aligned with the desired new culture, learn quickly, and use its success to spread change organically rather than forcing a large-scale overhaul.

Instead of vague values, define culture as a concrete set of "if-then" statements that govern reinforcement (e.g., "IF you are on time, THEN you are respected"). This turns an abstract concept into an operational system that can be explicitly taught, managed, and improved across the organization.

One-off team-building events often feel like "forced fun" and fail to change culture. The key is to integrate small moments of play into daily work—a concept called "plork." This can be as simple as renaming meeting invites to be more whimsical or starting meetings with a curiosity question.