Get the company handbooks of the world’s most sophisticated businesses

Last updated: October 2019

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” —Peter Drucker. “Culture books eat strategy books for brunch.” —Conversion Rate Experts.

The world’s most successful technology companies follow new, forward-thinking rules.

They encourage their staff to move quickly, act autonomously, and constantly experiment. Many of their working practices would seem alien to a traditional project manager or HR consultant.

Fortunately, such companies also tend to publish how they work.

The list below contains company manuals and culture books from many of the world’s most successful businesses. If you want to grow fast and build an incredible team, they are an amazing source of inspiration.

We hope you find them useful:

• The Netflix Culture (which has superseded the famous Netflix Culture Deck). Patty McCord, co-creator of the culture deck, recently wrote a book called Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility.
• Google’s values and Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead.
• The Basecamp Employee Handbook.
• The Valve Handbook.
• The Hubspot Culture Code.
• Bridgewater’s Principles and Culture.
• Delivering Happiness, a book about Zappos’ culture, and The Zappos Culture Book.
• Jeff Bezos interviewed by Charlie Rose about Amazon’s philosophy and Amazon’s leadership principles.
• Glitch’s (formerly Fog Creek) remote work policy.
• Book In A Box’s culture doc—a public, working draft in Google Docs, to which any visitor can add comments and suggestions.
• The Fool Rules: The onboarding and employee handbook for The Motley Fool.
• TechDept’s culture book.
• Crisp’s “DNA”
• Talks by GitHub’s founder, Zach Holman. (GitHub is interesting in that it has recently changed how it works, reverting from a self-help structure to a management-driven structure.)
• Many more companies’ culture decks on SlideShare.

If you are interested in how we work, you can see The Conversion Rate Experts culture book and our values, which have been key to our success.

We also like the following articles about culture:

• What makes work meaningful—or meaningless
• 80% of your culture is your founder
• The first two chapters of the book The Lean Mindset by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

Please let us know if you discover any other culture books—or great resources for managing companies.

What you should do now

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