Winning for Customers is the Ultimate Culture Hack: Lessons from Work Inspired
As leaders in the global AI space, we are constantly bombarded with the idea that "culture eats strategy for breakfast." In my leadership roles I’ve seen my organizations attempt to build culture as a standalone project; implementing perks, values workshops, and engagement surveys in a vacuum. But after reading Aron Ain’s Work Inspired, I’ve come to a different conclusion. While I agree with Ain that a high-performance culture is essential, I believe many leaders get the causality backward. Culture isn't the primary driver of success; it is a dependent variable. The right culture, the one Ain spent years building at Kronos, forms organically only when an organization remains laser-focused on delivering for its customers.
The Technology "Un-Leader"
We live and die by the efficacy of our products and the value they provide to the end user. People feel inspired and engaged not because the company is 'nice,' but because they are winning for the customer. Ain’s book provides a brilliant roadmap for the management infrastructure needed to sustain this momentum, but we must view his ideas through the lens of customer-centricity.
Ain defines the 'Un-Leader' as a leader who intentionally sheds the traditional trappings of status and ego to put the company and employees first.
For those of us in engineering, this humility is the prerequisite for developing true customer empathy; it ensures our technical egos never stand in the way of solving a user's actual problem. When we 'Un-Lead,' we become humble enough to pivot a product roadmap the moment the data shows our current path isn't serving the customer, regardless of how much code we’ve already written. This transparency in strategy is what creates the organic cultural shift: when employees see leadership making the hard, right calls for the customer, it validates their work and builds a culture of integrity. This kicks off a powerful flywheel: the more we win for our customers, the more engaged and capable our people become, and that collective energy, in turn, drives further success. In this framework, culture isn’t the independent variable we tinkered with to get results; it is the emergent property of a team that is laser-focused on delivering value."
Inspire by Knowing What Your Customers Want
Ain’s most famous management tool, the Manager Effectiveness Index (MEI), is a perfect example of how to hold an organization accountable to this mission.
At Kronos, managers were rated by their teams on specific behaviors like transparency and communication.
For a technical lead, however, I believe these scores are actually a proxy for how well a manager connects the team to the customer. When a manager deeply understands the customer's pain points and effectively communicates them, the MEI scores naturally take care of themselves. This isn't just about being a 'good guy'; it’s about radical transparency regarding the customer strategy. If your engineers don’t understand the customer's specific struggles, they are just writing lines of code in the dark. By adopting Ain’s focus on over-communication, specifically through the lens of user empathy, we ensure every person on the team knows exactly how their technical output impacts the end-user experience. This clarity is what breeds the 'Work Inspired' engagement Ain describes; it is the profound sense of purpose that comes from knowing your work actually solves a human problem, which is the ultimate driver of team performance."
Build Trust by Building Better Products
Innovation, another core theme of the book, is also a byproduct of this customer-first mindset. Ain tells the story of how he funded a $5 million 'disruptor' team to build a product that would essentially put Kronos out of business.
Ain advocates for a high-trust environment where micromanagement is eliminated, giving engineers the autonomy to experiment.
I agree with him. However, I believe the causality is reversed. The trust is built by a high-stakes mission of solving a customer's problem. When that mission is succeeding, micromanagement disappears naturally and teams hold each other accountable without needing to be told what to do. In this light, the trust and innovation Ain describes are not the starting points of a company; they are the dependent variables that lock into place once the team is unified by a singular focus on the user.
Lead With Customer Centricity, Get Culture
Ultimately, Work Inspired teaches us that engagement is the result of a team that is successfully serving its market. When we lead with character, competence, and an obsession with the customer, the culture Ain outlines - one of trust, innovation, and pride, falls into place on its own. If you focus on customer outcomes, and make these outcomes visible to your team, you’ll find that the people will reinforce your momentum and eventually become the reason you continue to win.
Upon reflecting for several days after reading the book, here are my actionable takeaways. I will ask my leaders at the end of every sprint review or product demo to stop the technical "how" conversation and ask their team two specific questions:
- The Impact Question: If we shipped this today, which specific customer problem is eliminated, and how does that make their life better?
- The MEI/Support Question: What is one thing we are currently doing that is getting in the way of us delivering this value faster?"
By shifting the focus from "what we built" to "how we served," we create the accountability and purpose that defines a world-class culture.