Workplaces can function in very different ways depending on how employees are expected to work and make decisions. Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has shared his views on organisational culture, comparing workplaces where employees wait for instructions from the top with those where workers are encouraged to take initiative and act independently.
He said organisations face a fundamental trade-off between providing comfortable certainty and encouraging initiative.
However, he warned that these organisations can struggle if their leadership fails to set the right direction consistently. He wrote, “Seize the initiative culture often feels chaotic, with lots of internal disagreements. In a chaotic initiative-driven culture, the external environment (market) may have to provide the occasional discipline. He wrote, “People who are full of energy and initiative often vehemently disagree with other. Vembu described this as a fundamental trade-off between organisational cultures. He wrote that organisations can provide comfortable certainty but lose the initiative, or seize the initiative while continuing to feel somewhat uncomfortable.
In a post on X, Vembu said highly metric-driven organisations often develop a “wait for instructions from the top” culture. He said such workplaces can offer greater predictability and certainty. Vembu said an initiative-driven culture, on the other hand, can feel chaotic, with frequent internal disagreements and a persistent sense that things are “not good enough”. There is always the gnawing feeling of “not good enough”. Vembu said people who are full of energy and initiative often vehemently disagree with each other. I joke about this: every smart programmer looks at another programmer’s code and thinks “it sucks, I can do better”! Vembu said that in his experience, trying to combine both approaches by creating a highly disciplined culture of seizing the initiative produces the worst of both worlds.
