Here is an excerpt from a recent blog post by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, the co-founders of Culture Works. To read the complete article and check out other resources, please click here.

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Too often in our work we meet with well-intentioned managers who seem to always have their noses down in the crisis of the moment, the numbers of the quarter. Many of them have hit a wall of productivity, or profitability, or creativity.

Few pause and consider if there is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed. Are their people buying in, or not?

Culture is often dismissed by uber-busy business types as too warm-and-fuzzy, the stuff handled by HR. With all due respect, that’s rubbish.

Culture isn’t touchy-feeling, indefinable. When you walk into a great culture, it smacks you in the face with its concreteness. We’ve all experienced this firsthand. There is a tangible feeling about spending time in an Apple store where employees are truly enabled to meet your needs, or phoning Zappos and sharing a laugh with an energized customer service agent, or ordering a double-double at an In N’ Out
counter. It is an atmosphere that engulfs you immediately and lingers with you after you leave.

Culture “has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down,” wrote Shawn Parr in Fast Company magazine. “Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty … (where) the money invested in research and development, product differentiation, marketing, and human resources is never maximized and often wasted.”

This month we visited with leaders of Trimble Navigation, one of the fastest growing providers of GPS, laser, optical and inertial technologies for industries such as construction, engineering, and transportation. It’s a business that runs on incredibly complex equipment that would make NASA envious.

But according to the CEO, their technology is “table stakes”—something Trimble has to have to be competitive. It’s important, don’t get us wrong, but what sets this fast-growing company apart is culture.

“It’s our culture that creates an environment where a customer can call at 4 p.m. and know that someone will answer the phone and work all night if that’s what it takes to fix a problem,” said Steve Berglund. “Our culture is rife with those kinds of stories. We hire people who want to change the world, who are crusaders for perfection. And it’s our values that drive those behaviors.”

According to the article in Fast Company, building a strong culture takes hard work. The writer suggested four ideas to consider, which dovetail well with our recent research for All In.

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To read the complete article and check out other resources at the CultureWorks website, please click here.

Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton are the co-authors of several books that include The Carrot Principle, 24-Carrot Manager, and The Orange Revolution. They and their work have been featured by print and electronic media such as The Financial Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, the New York Times, NBC’s Today Show, CNN, ABC’s Money Matters, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and the Society for Human Resource Management.