[jdmichal]

> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but it seems a bit simplistic. CEO's are also in the position to be thought leaders, public advocates, build hype, and internally, guide the company to specific results.

At least the first three of those are different ways of setting culture. The last one is so loosely defined that it could mean anything.

The sum of all actions of all actors within a company is its culture. If people act in an obsessive way about UX, then you have a culture of obsessive UX.

The CEO has the power to shift these cultures. There are many tools, as you point out, but the biggest one is setting appropriate goals, with the proper aligning (dis)incentive structure. These are set on his subordinates, who then filter it down and specify it for their subordinates, and so on down the entire chain.

> Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.

If you supposedly have a culture that values writing unit tests, then that should be reflected in action. The idea of tossing unit tests should be met with disdain, the same way we value not murdering people and murder is meet with disdain. It's not about tradeoffs, it's about stated cultural values (talk) versus the actual culture (walk). If there's nothing holding you to the stated cultural values, that's a management failure.

[speedplane]

Normally, I would consider culture to be work ethic and how employees treat each other beyond the purely transactional business sense. You're defining it to be something much broader, that's fine, but I think that broader undertanding is better captured by the word "leadership".

And as far as my last factor ("internally, guide the company to specific results"), I mean that CEOs make a lot of day-to-day tactical decisions. E.g., how many engineer/sales/marketing people do we add to that team, do we need a bigger office, do we sue someone or not, do we take VC money on the offered terms or hold out for something better.

These tactical decisions are less visible, but probably make up a good deal of a CEOs day.

[jdmichal]

Culture is both a tool and side-effect of leadership. I talk about culture being the sum of all the actions of all the participants, but the funny thing is that culture also informs all those actions. Basically, there's a self-reinforcing feedback loop here, and that's one of the reasons why changing negative cultural aspects is both hard and important. It's hard because you'll be working against the currently ingrained culture. And it's important because you must break that self-reinforcing loop in order to affect real change.

And yes, CEOs can make tactical decisions, or at the very least give final approval on them. I think in smaller companies they tend to be more involved in such decisions, and as the company grows it becomes impossible to keep up and it gets delegated out. But in my opinion, those tactical decisions like the ones you list don't exhibit leadership as much as they need a leader to make them. It's a reversal of the reasoning: People aren't leaders because they make those decisions; they make those decisions because they're leaders.