Company Culture: Maintaining As You Grow

Okay, you state the company's mission, develop the core values of the organization and then build the culture that expresses the company's "personality," and life is good.

Thing is, time doesn't stand still and keeps moving forward. You add people, change products, popular culture changes around you, and people just get bored with anything over time.

Simply stated, different things work at different stages of a company's evolution. These are my version of various growth stages:
-Embryonic........you-10 employees
-Start-up............10-30 employees
-Small................30-100 employees
-Medium...........100-600 employees
--merge or be acquired--multi-sites--venture capital--IPO--
Board of Directors--founder(s) leave--
-Large...............600 to infinity

We'll be looking at the stages up to Medium, you know, the ones where it's still fun.

So the art to employ here is to adapt your culture to changes by morphing elements of it to keep it viable.

Repeat after me: CHANGE IS GOOD.

Stay creative, my friends.

Lance