What the hell!? 37 signals are SO full of themselves. They are a small business, yet they keep posting articles like they have discovered the secret to changing the world. The restaurant round the corner to my house make more income than them, but I do not see the owner standing outside telling others how to run a restaurant instead of inside cooking.

37 Signals is one of the more annoying Web 2.0 companies. Yes, I know you're trying to drum up interest so people invite you to hold talks, but why do all articles always seem to be about how wonderful you are, how great your company is, and you reinvented something or the other.

Get over it, you guys are not in possesion of the fountain of wisdom.

It's just part of their business model, that's how they stand out from the crowd. Otherwise how do you think yet another to-do list would be a viable business app. Same thing holds for Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek. Yet another bug tracker. It wouldn't go anywhere without Joel's writings on how to do software.

I think a better question would be

"How do I improve the culture?" or "How do I maintain this culture, now that we have it?"

An artificial culture is obviously phony and worse than no culture at all.

I once worked at a company that "claimed" a culture with emphasis in employee training (which was obviously false).

The employees referred to the corporate culture as:

Big Ultimate Large Lame Special High Intensity Training

You don't create it, but I think it can be artfully guided. By being cognizant of the incentives and disincentives you create every day, you can exert a good deal of control over it.

So obvious, and yet so difficult for bigger companies to get right.

Mostly because for monolithic companies process and procedure are more important than culture for keeping the wheels greased.

In the same vein, you'd have to be pretty naive to think that culture at places like Google, Apple and Microsoft (to an extent) can remain how they are without some steering and work by higher-ups to foster said culture. Maybe it wasn't forced to begin with, but there is certainly an upkeep cost as employee numbers rise.