I had an absolutely marvelous conversation with Kim Nordstrom yesterday about team culture, re: a book he’s been writing for a while. I’m SUPER jazzed about it, and I’m really glad someone’s doing what he’s doing.

In the course of the conversation yesterday, he mentioned that in the interviews he’s done, he’s found that for team culture, it’s often better to have values that are “brutal”. And I thought “that’s a strange word to use,” but as the conversation went on, it was clear that part of the meaning was that the stated values were specific, black and white, and controversial.

And I think he’s totally right. But if you know me, that’s obvious, right? Because I often state things hyperbolically, and sometimes it bites me in the ass, but I’ve found in general, that more extreme way of framing things pays more than it costs.

Not in everything – but in what a team should be, and the kind of culture that you need. You want to exclude people who don’t believe what you believe. You want people to question whether they believe it or not. You want people to stop and say, “Wait, what?”

And I think one of the reasons is that in the “middle”, once you come away from some extremes, there’s a huge grey area that can be read in so many different ways that it can be anything to anyone. If your team cares about “honesty” and “quality” and other generic pablum, then people can interpret that in a dozen different ways. And if you have a dozen different interpretations, then you have… nothing.

If, on the other hand, you say, “No crunch, ever,” then you need to really think about what that means. What happens when you’re butting up against a deadline? What happens when your team has more work than they can handle? All your experience says, “work more, work harder.” But if your team’s culture says, “No crunch, ever,” what do you do?

Plenty of people *say* that they believe in sustainability. But you only *actually* believe in sustainability when you push the date, or start hiring early enough and with enough advance prep that the new folks will make a positive difference. Or you build an infrastructure that can push at any time. Or you commit to never promising release dates, no matter what a publisher wants.

All those things *cost* something. Culture, to me, is how you spend money and time. Until you pay the price, your beliefs are just words.

But it makes me feel better on reflection a bit – sometimes I worry that my way of phrasing things is a negative, and my perceptions of its benefits are illusory. I fluctuate between seeing it as a superpower and a fatal flaw. And you know what? It’s both. Which, if you know me, you’ve seen both sides of that equation echoing through the last 20 years again and again.

It’s great, it sucks, and you know what? I’ve come to peace with it.