Scaling Org Culture: Design for Business

In 2023, I co-taught Scaling Organizational Culture at Stanford d.school, a hands-on course exploring how leaders and employees can intentionally design and scale organizational culture. The post-pandemic shift to remote and distributed work has made workplace culture more fluid and, in many cases, more transactional. This course gave students the tools to build ethical, resilient, and people-first cultures by combining human-centered design with behavioral science.

This year’s focus was on startups, where founders need to think about culture from day one. A high-growth company moves fast, and without intentional culture design, it’s easy for values, norms, and behaviors to become reactive rather than strategic. Throughout the quarter, students worked with startup leaders and organizational experts to identify culture challenges, design interventions, and prototype new ways of working.

The course followed a prototyping-driven approach, giving students the opportunity to experiment with real-world solutions. By collaborating with partner organizations like BenchSci, Snappy, and SkillLab, students saw firsthand how culture is not just shaped by leadership but also by the everyday experiences of employees.

We brought in guest speakers who have spent their careers shaping workplace culture, including experts from McKinsey, GitLab, Harvard Business School, and Google X. These conversations helped students understand how culture design works in different organizational contexts, from remote startups to large multinational companies.

Students left the class with a deep understanding of how to design culture intentionally, how to measure the impact of culture experiments, and how to scale culture in a way that aligns with a company’s mission and values. This course reinforced my belief that culture is one of the most powerful levers for organizational success, and it was rewarding to help students develop the skills to shape it effectively.

See more about the class at its site here.