Other companies can be successful with stack ranking (or removing lower performers) like Goldman Sachs or big law firms. I feel like the culture issue is somewhat orthogonal: you can have a failing company with great culture (what was the culture like at Sun or Netscape? I don’t know but wouldn’t be surprised if it was good). You can also have a successful company with a bad/lacking/incohesive culture, or a culture you don’t like)