Culture is still the work. AI just raised the stakes.
I spent over 20 years building leadership and organizational systems inside Adobe, Twitter, WeWork, and Udemy. The lesson that keeps proving true: strategy fails without the culture to execute it.
Strategy doesn’t fail in the quarterly review. It fails in the daily flow of work: in the handoffs, the unclear decisions, the meetings that go nowhere. Not because people don’t care, but because the system wasn’t built for execution.
AI just made that work more important than ever because now those systems need to include how we work with new technology, not just each other.
Culture is still the work. AI just raised the stakes.
I spent over 20 years building leadership and organizational systems inside Adobe, Twitter, WeWork, and Udemy. The lesson that keeps proving true: strategy fails without the culture to execute it.
Strategy doesn’t fail in the quarterly review. It fails in the daily flow of work: in the handoffs, the unclear decisions, the meetings that go nowhere. Not because people don’t care, but because the system wasn’t built for execution.
AI just made that work more important than ever because now those systems need to include how we work with new technology, not just each other.
Meet Melissa
The organizations that will thrive aren’t the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones that build cultures where people, and their tools — can actually execute.
After two decades as a leader and operator inside iconic, growing companies, I learned that most strategies don’t fail because of the strategy, the technology, or the product. They fail because of how people work together. Culture isn’t something we have, it’s something we do.
Those values, behaviors and practices show up every day in our decisions, our meetings, and our interactions, whether we’ve designed them intentionally or not. We might as well design them.
AI just made that work more important than ever because now those systems need to include how we work with new technology, not just each other.
At Adobe, I helped build the people systems that powered its shift to the cloud.
At Twitter, I built the organizational development function from the ground up.
At WeWork, I saw the cost of disconnecting culture from strategy.
And at Udemy, I helped the company evolve into an enterprise education business, strengthening the leadership and culture practices that supported that shift.
How We Can Help
Not sure which service you need?
Start with a Strategy-Execution Gap Diagnostic.
We conduct 30-minute interviews with your leadership team to assess seven critical factors: strategic clarity, cultural alignment, decision velocity, process integration, communication effectiveness, learning capacity, and change agility. You receive an overview of themes, gaps, and recommended actions.
Writing & Speaking
I write about leadership, culture, and what it takes to execute in the age of AI.
Substack (ReCulturing)
ReCulturing (verb):
Leverage the power of systems thinking to clarify your purpose, build your strategy, and design your culture.
ReCulturing is the playbook for building a business in which employees are clear on the why, what, and how they are working.
ReCulturing is not a one-time change effort because culture is not something we ultimately have, but rather something we do.
I wrote ReCulturing because it was the book I wish I'd had earlier in my career.
I read everything I could find. Articles, research papers, books. I took every class. But nothing helped me codify culture in a way that could be measured, repeated, and scaled. I knew culture was more than the happy hours and ping pong tables. It was the underlying system of how things actually worked inside a company. Most leaders know culture matters. They just don’t know how to codify it.
They leave the values vague. They talk about leadership in abstractions. They send employees to management classes. And none of it creates what everyone actually wants: a clear, consistent system where people understand what’s expected of them, how they’re supposed to work, and what it takes to succeed.
I’d spent years inside companies that got culture right, and then I went to WeWork and saw what happens when it all goes wrong. That experience didn’t discourage me. It clarified everything.
ReCulturing is the playbook that came out of it. I share my own experiences, what I learned, where I failed, what I’d do differently, alongside stories of leaders at companies like Netflix, Pixar, and Autodesk who built cultures that actually worked. It’s a framework for connecting culture to strategy and codifying how to build effective leaders, teams, and organizations at scale.
That’s why ReCulturing is even more relevant today. Bolting AI onto an already unclear strategy and culture only amplifies what’s already broken. Start with getting clear on your strategy and culture first.