> My take away from this is that you can't change the culture

I've seen the culture changing in some special circumstances a couple times in previous companies, and honestly all of them were ugly: 1) Demographic replacement (having more people saying yes and out-vote the legacy employees)

2) Hired guns from the top to the bottom to shake the system (we called in a company those managers "007" because they used to have licence to fire).

3) Non-compliance stable as a discipline method for the "legacy employees" (very adopted in Central Europe)

4) "Train-your-replacement" as a coercion method for collaboration

5) Some modified version of the "madogiwa-zoku" but instead of looking to the window, they push people to go for the "metawork," like organizing events, being a developer advocate in conferences, assuming roles as "community managers," or being used as a "donkey token" to be used in conferences or panels of "_______________ in tech."

The last one made me chuckle. Worked in Japan, didn't see many madogiwa zoku (probably because I only worked at startups) although it was talked about a lot. But I guess community manager-esque position did exist, and now it makes sense why so many big company blokes that went to tech meetup came off as very incompetent

What you say and what they think are not the same, usually your meaning and intention is drowned out by their pre-existing assumptions and incentives/motivations. You have to resonate with their assumptions and incentives for them to "hear" your meaning and intention.

> Non-compliance stable as a discipline method

Can you expand? I don't understand what this means.