Culture matters

The article argues that culture is a major tool for changing behavior alongside incentives and process, and that it can drive outcomes such as manufacturing defect rates, programming velocity and debugging skill. It cites country differences in factory defect rates that persist across companies using the same processes and incentives. It also describes Centaur, a company where a culture of owning problems and rigorous debugging yielded, per the author, a serious production bug rate of well under one per year across about 100 engineers, with very light process and incentives.