Positive Culture
One of the Eight Universal Laws of Sustainable Business Scale
You can tell a lot about a regiment in the first twenty-four hours.
Not from the briefings. Not from the welcome. Not from what anyone says to you when you arrive. You can tell from the way people move. The way they talk to each other when nobody senior is watching. The way a junior soldier responds when something goes wrong. The way the room changes when a senior rank walks in.
As a Combat Medic attached to different regiments throughout my service, I had an unusual vantage point. I wasn’t a permanent member of any of them. I moved in, deployed alongside them, and moved out again — back to the Medical Corps, ready for the next attachment. Which meant I experienced something most soldiers never do: multiple cultures, from the outside, in rapid succession.
And the difference between them was not subtle. It was immediate, visceral, and (as I came to understand over time) entirely predictable in its consequences.
Two Regiments. Two Cultures. One Lesson.
The first was an infantry regiment with a long history and a proud tradition. On paper, it had everything. Heritage. Reputation. A set of values that had been handed down through generations.
In practice, it was run on fear.
The leadership was authoritarian in the oldest and least effective sense of the word, not the disciplined, standards-driven authority that produces excellence, but the bullying, status-protecting, compliance-through-intimidation variety that produces silence. Junior soldiers learned quickly that the safest response to any situation was to say nothing, do nothing beyond the minimum required, and avoid drawing attention. The initiative was not rewarded. It was punished because initiative implies judgment, and judgment implies that the person exercising it believes they have something to contribute.
As a medic, I saw the consequences of that culture with a clarity that perhaps others didn’t. Because fear doesn’t stay in the barracks. It deploys with you. It shows up in the decisions people make under pressure, in the information that gets withheld because nobody wants to be the one who raised a problem, in the physical and psychological toll of operating in an environment where your worth is measured by your compliance rather than your capability.
The culture killed people. Perhaps not directly. But the environment that culture created, the suppression of judgment, the erosion of trust, the isolation of individuals who should have been functioning as a unit, made everything harder, slower, and more dangerous than it needed to be.
Then I had the privilege of serving alongside the Gurkha Rifles.
If the first regiment showed me what broken culture looks like, the Gurkhas showed me what culture at its most extraordinary looks like. And the contrast was not marginal. It was total.
The pride was the first thing you noticed. Not the performative pride of a unit that talks about its history — the lived, daily, entirely unselfconscious pride of soldiers who genuinely believed that belonging to this regiment was one of the great privileges of their lives. It wasn’t imposed from above. It wasn’t mandated by the officer class. It was carried, individually and collectively, by every person in the unit (from the most senior to the most junior) as something personal, something earned, something worth protecting.
And that pride translated directly into behaviour. Not because anyone was watching. Because that was simply who they were.
When things got hard (and they got very hard), the response was never individual. It was collective. The challenges that would have fractured other units, that would have produced the blame, the withdrawal, the self-protection I’d seen elsewhere, produced the opposite in the Gurkhas. All for one. One for all. Not as a slogan. As an operating principle that holds under every conceivable pressure.
I have never forgotten the difference. And I have seen both of those cultures, in civilian dress, in every business I have worked with since.
What Culture Actually Is
Most business owners understand culture as something they have, rather than something they do.
They have values on the website. They have a mission statement in the boardroom. They have a vision for where the business is going and a set of principles that describe how it intends to get there. And they believe, genuinely and not unreasonably, that these things constitute the culture of the business.
They don’t. They describe it, at best. They aspire to it. But they are not it.
Simon Sinek’s foundational argument, that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, gets closer to the truth. Culture is not the what. It is not even the why, though the why is where it starts. Culture is the how. It is the daily, lived, behavioural expression of what the business actually believes, as distinct from what it says it believes.
And the gap between those two things, between the stated culture and the lived culture, is where most businesses are quietly losing the war.
The values on the wall of the bullying regiment I served with were probably admirable. Heritage. Courage. Honour. The officers who enforced compliance through fear almost certainly believed they were upholding those values. They weren’t. They were demonstrating, through every interaction, every decision, every moment of how they showed up, that the real values of that unit were hierarchy, self-protection, and control.
Culture is not what you say. It is what you tolerate. It is what you reward. It is what happens in the room when you’re not in it, and whether what happens then is recognisably the same as what happens when you are. It is the invisible code that every person in the business reads and responds to, not from the handbook, but from the accumulated evidence of how this place actually works.
The Three Ways Culture Kills a Business
Culture that is misaligned, where the stated values and the lived behaviours are in conflict, doesn’t announce itself. It works quietly, and its effects compound over time in ways that are easy to attribute to other causes.
It drives out the best people first.
The individuals most likely to leave a culture that doesn’t match its stated values are precisely the ones the business can least afford to lose, the people with enough self-awareness to recognise the gap, enough options to act on it, and enough integrity to find the dissonance intolerable. What remains, over time, is a team selected not for capability but for tolerance of the way things actually are here. Which is a polite way of describing a team that has either stopped noticing, stopped caring, or stopped believing that it could be different.
It makes every other law harder to apply.
You cannot build systematised operations in a culture where people protect their knowledge because knowledge is power, and power is the only security available. You cannot develop leaders in a culture where showing capability is a threat to those above you. You cannot multiply a team in a culture where trust is rationed and autonomy is withheld. Culture is not one law among eight. It is the environment in which all the other laws either take root or fail to. Get it wrong, and the systems, the pricing, the leadership model, and the team you build will all underperform — not because they are wrong in themselves, but because the culture they’re operating in is working against them.
It becomes invisible to the people inside it.
This is the most insidious consequence, and the one I witnessed most clearly in the broken regiment. The people who had been there longest, who had been shaped by that culture from the beginning of their careers, could not see it. They had normalised the fear, the compliance, the suppression of initiative, to the point where it simply felt like how things were. How they had always been. How they were supposed to be.
The same thing happens in businesses. The culture that is slowly eroding performance, driving away talent, and preventing growth becomes invisible to the owner who built it, not because they are blind, but because they are inside it. The accidental business owner who micromanages because the culture of control was established on day one, and has calcified quietly over the years that followed, does not experience themselves as a micromanager. They experience themselves as thorough. As caring about quality. As the person who holds the standard.
They are correct. And the culture they have built is, regardless of their intentions, killing the business’s ability to grow.
What Positive Culture Actually Looks Like
The Gurkha Rifles did not have a culture document. What they had was something far more powerful and far more durable: a shared identity so deeply embedded that it shaped behaviour automatically, without instruction, under conditions that stripped every other variable away.
This is what positive culture looks like at its most fundamental. Not a set of aspirations. A set of behaviours so consistently demonstrated, so thoroughly reinforced, and so genuinely believed in by the people inside them that they persist regardless of circumstance.
In a business context, this translates to something specific and achievable, but it requires the owner to make a shift that many find genuinely difficult.
The shift is this: from defining the culture to embodying it.
The businesses with the strongest cultures are not the ones with the best-written values. They are the ones where the owner and the leadership team around them demonstrate those values in every interaction, every decision, every moment of difficulty, without exception and without inconsistency.
Because culture is transmitted not through documents but through observation. Every person in the business is watching, constantly and often unconsciously, for the signal that tells them what this place actually values. They watch what gets rewarded and what gets overlooked. They watch what happens when someone makes a mistake, and whether the response is curiosity or blame. They watch whether the standards that apply to the team also apply to the leadership, or whether the values are for display and the leadership is exempt.
What they see is the culture. Not what’s on the wall.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
In the military, the phrase we used was simple: improvise, adapt, overcome. It wasn’t a slogan. It was a cultural baseline, the minimum expectation of how a soldier would respond to any situation that didn’t go to plan.
It didn’t matter which regiment I was attached to, which terrain, which conditions, which set of circumstances had conspired to make the mission harder than it was supposed to be. The expectation was the same. You improve what you can, you adapt to what you can’t change, and you overcome whatever is in front of you. Not because it was written in a handbook. Because that was the culture, and the culture was what you were.
The businesses that scale, the ones that retain their best people, that develop leaders, that build something genuinely transferable and genuinely valuable — have a version of this embedded in how they operate. Not improve, adapt, and overcome necessarily. But a cultural baseline that is lived rather than stated, demonstrated rather than described, and resilient enough to hold under the pressure that growth, change, and difficulty inevitably bring.
That baseline starts with the owner. It is transmitted through every decision they make, every behaviour they model, every moment of difficulty in which they either demonstrate the culture they say they want or reveal the one they’ve actually built.
You cannot outsource it. You cannot document your way to it. You cannot hire a consultant to install it while you focus on something else.
But you can build it. Deliberately, consistently, and with the understanding that the gap between the culture you have and the culture you need is not a communication problem. It is a behaviour problem. And behaviour, unlike strategy, is entirely within your control.
Where Do You Start?
The most honest diagnostic for culture is not a survey or a workshop. It is a single question, asked without defensiveness: if I were attached to this business as an outsider for thirty days, what culture would I observe?
Not the values. Not the mission statement. The actual, daily, behavioural evidence of what this place believes and how it operates.
The Business Freedom Assessment won’t answer that question for you. But it will surface the structural conditions, the dependencies, the bottlenecks, the leadership gaps — that are either enabling your culture or working against it. Because culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the systems, the team, the leadership model, and the pricing decisions that either reinforce what you believe or contradict it.
It’s free. It’s thorough. And it’s the most honest conversation most business owners have had about what they’ve actually built, versus what they intended to.
Ready to find out what culture you’ve actually created — and what it’s capable of becoming?
Take the FREE Business Freedom Assessment at www.mytruenorth.club/bfa and let’s build the cultural foundation that makes everything else possible.