The Daily Vote for the Future Firm

An office's culture is mostly the sum of small choices that nobody else notices at the time. Each one is a vote for what the place will be in a few years.

Take an ordinary Tuesday in a property office. A cash buyer is in a hurry and has no proof of address with him. The agent can ask him to come back, or can take the deposit and promise to sort out the FICA documents later. Across the room, a tenant's deposit arrives, and someone can either receipt it into the interest bearing deposit account that day or leave the slip in a drawer until Friday. Neither choice will be noticed this week.

Both get noticed eventually, though, mostly by the people sitting nearby. When a senior person takes the shortcut, a junior learns that the rule is optional. When the senior does it properly, even when it is inconvenient and nobody would ever know, the junior learns that it is not. Culture is built far more from moments like these than from anything said at a meeting or printed in a policy.

There is no way to abstain, either. Doing nothing about the missing proof of address is still a decision, and it gets recorded in the habits of everyone who watched it happen.