Our Manifesto

Dear Fellow Leader,

For decades, business leaders have been sold the same story: “Just hire A-Players.” It’s an attractive idea, clean, simple, and wrong.

This “A-Player Fallacy” rests on a common psychological trap, the Fundamental Attribution Error. We convince ourselves that performance is mostly about the individual. In reality, most organizations already have a deep reservoir of capable people. What they lack is the system that allows those people to consistently play better together.

At the same time, too many companies fall into another trap: engagement theater. They run surveys, workshops, and listening sessions, hoping employees will tell them what the culture should be. But good teams don’t crowdsource their playbook. They don’t wait for the coach to ask each player what “good” looks like. They set a standard, make it clear, and then hold each other accountable to it,  in supportive, constructive ways.

That’s what Culture by Design does.

It begins by defining the specific behaviors that drive success in your company, not vague values or slogans, but clear, observable actions. Then, through simple rituals, you dedicate just enough time for people to practice those behaviors, get clarity, and coach each other. With this common language in place, accountability becomes peer-to-peer, not just top-down. Teams raise the bar for each other.

And when that happens, something powerful unfolds:

• People feel competent, because they know what “good” looks like and have support to achieve it.
• People feel connected, because they share a language that builds trust and strengthens bonds.

This is the missing ingredient that stalls the majority of continuous improvement initiatives and large-scale transformations. Without clarity on behaviors and reinforcement, everything else grinds to a halt.

Nobody wins a race by staring at the speedometer. Whether it’s profit margins or engagement scores, the numbers only move when you focus on the behaviors that drive them. You don’t get results by obsessing over results. You get results by focusing on the Fundamentals.

This isn’t theory. We’ve guided more than a thousand organizations through this process, and their results speak for themselves:

“In over 40 years of running my company, we have never done anything as profound as implementing our Fundamentals, and we have CultureWise to thank for it.”

“We consistently win Best Places to Work awards, and we attribute all of that to our Fundamentals, which CultureWise helped us do. We are able to attract great people and retain them.”

“We reduced employee turnover by 50% and increased productivity by 30% by implementing our Fundamentals with guidance from CultureWise.”

Of course, some companies already get this. Some leaders figure it out from first principles. Others benefit from a guide. However you get there, get there. The best players in the world still have coaches, often many of them, because coaches help them improve more quickly.

If you get this and can run with it on your own, we’d love to be in your orbit and are ecstatic that you’re already part of the movement. If you need help making this happen, we’ve got you.

This is a movement and you’re either in or you’re out. If you’re ready to abandon the myths and build the kind of organization where culture becomes your ultimate competitive advantage, then you belong here.

We call it Culture by Design.

And it’s time to build the kind of companies that people, and your future, deserve.

With resolve,

David Friedman, Founder and Chief Culture Architect

Dustin Campbell, Persistence Management Co-Founder

Erik Waters, Persistence Management Co-Founder

Alex Hill, President