Culture Before Crisis: Building Company Culture for the AI Era

Victoria Mensch: Hello and welcome to Decisions at the Frontier, brought to you by Silicon Valley Executive Academy, where we help leaders tap into the Silicon Valley innovation playbook. I am your host, Victoria Mensch, CEO of SVEA, and today we're going to talk about an elusive topic: organizational culture. There is a version of culture work that happens when something is broken — when the company is failing, the values have eroded, the trust is gone. But there is also a harder version. How do you evolve a culture that's working right now, and how do you do it before you are under pressure that forces you to? My guest today has spent 20 years leading that harder version. He's an organizational psychologist who has built and led culture, learning and leadership transformation at Apple, Gap, Roku, and now Autodesk, where he joined nearly three years ago to lead a proactive cultural evolution inside a 40-year-old enterprise navigating disruption and AI at the same time. Maxim Williams, welcome to Decisions at the Frontier.

Maxim Williams: Thank you, Victoria. Really excited for the conversation.

Victoria Mensch: Great. Maxim, tell me a little bit about your journey. You've spent 20 years, as we mentioned, building cultures in different industries across different organizations. Can you take us back to the beginning? Where did you start, and how did you come to do what you're doing now?

Maxim Williams: Great question. Twenty years sounds like a long time. It's probably longer than 20 years, but nobody wants to go that far back on a résumé — and I shave all my gray, so at least I don't look as old as I sound. My first love is psychology. I still love psychology, and how people show up in organizational spaces is very fascinating to me. Initially I wanted to be a psychiatrist and a counselor, and found early on, especially after my bachelor's degree doing some work in psychiatric facilities, that I'm a little too empathetic for that work. So I discovered organizational psychology as I was deciding what I wanted to do for grad school, and I pursued a master's and a doctorate in organizational psychology because I was really curious. We spend all of our time at work, right? Eight, ten, twelve hours — often more time than we spend with our families. I find that work is a very formative and important experience in people's lives and identity. Your sense of purpose sometimes comes from your work. As a person who loves psychology, I wanted to understand what's going on for people psychologically and socially in the workplace, and how we can make workplaces as impactful and meaningful as possible while still running a good, solid, effective business. That's where I started over 20 years ago.

Maxim Williams: Then I realized: how do I get paid to do this work? I've had the opportunity — and in some cases the naivety — to apply for things early on and pursue experiences that gave me a practical understanding beyond the academic one: org design, org development, learning and development, leadership development. Shortly after grad school I found myself in healthcare, of all places, applying these concepts to patient populations and community building — how does a hospital transform the way it operates so the outcomes are better, not just for the hospital but for patients? I wasn't a healthcare guy, but I could apply what I was learning in school to support healthcare. From healthcare I came to Silicon Valley. After a number of years I got an opportunity to work at Apple — very different from healthcare, a lot faster paced and more product focused. I left Apple for Gap Inc., in a role helping the corporate entity tether talent management practices across its five brands at the time: Old Navy, Banana Republic, Athleta, Intermix and Gap itself.

Maxim Williams: From Gap Inc. I went to Roku, partly because I love tech and product, but I'm also a TV and film guy. On the other side of this screen are all my Halloween costumes and my love of media and Star Trek. Fun fact: the founder of Roku invented DVR technology to watch more Star Trek, and I'm a Trekkie, so that was an easy sell. At Roku I helped build talent systems from scratch and helped the company through its post-IPO period, working with the CEO, the CPO and the HR leaders to build systems that meet the business where it is and don't make everything feel like an HR exercise. Then a little over three years ago I was pursued by Autodesk and, to your point in the intro, its desire to evolve its beloved culture. It's a very beloved place; people love working here. I took the opportunity because it's also super intimidating to evolve something people love. I approach it the way I have other roles, from a psychologist's or social psychologist's perspective: how can we create experiences where people love working here even on the tough days, where folks can do their best work, whatever that work is, and connect back to the mission of the organization.

Victoria Mensch: Thank you for this, Maxim. There is an understanding — and that's my experience as well — that most culture initiatives don't really change behavior. In your opinion, and from your practice, what separates the initiatives that actually do work?

Maxim Williams: I think it's an acknowledgement, to your point, that it's more than just words — and in some ways more than just behavior. Behavior is almost the lagging indicator for culture. There's a humility for anybody doing culture and transformation work in realizing it's not an overnight fix. It's not that just because we changed our values, suddenly we have evolved. That's barely the first step. You identify why you want to change, what's driving the change, what you want to be responsive to, what's working and why, and where the business is going. All of those have to be triangulated. If you have a customer base, what's your customer feedback? All of that has to be inputs. But you also have to acknowledge that you're up against whatever the implicit or explicit culture has been up until that moment. Almost every company I've worked at except Roku has been around a long time — Gap Inc. over 50 years, Apple approaching 50, Autodesk 44 or 45-plus years. Whether or not things were written down, there's a culture in those environments.

Maxim Williams: The ones that do it really well acknowledge that this is a change exercise. They're realistic about where they are and why, they understand the delta between today and where they want to go, and they chart it out not over quarters but in years. Honestly, the longer you've been around, the longer the curve, and the more consistent, disciplined and repetitive you have to be. Companies that do this well put in place mechanisms and systems, routines and rituals — they keep the ones that are working, replace the ones that aren't serving where you want to go, create new rituals quickly and consistently, and hold true to that with a year-over-year lens. You might be on a three-, four- or five-year journey before you see indicators of behavior change. People will always revert to the legacy, to what was comfortable. Some companies do it well because they have to — they've had a major moment where they've let the customer down. I think Apple is a good example of shifting what matters without shifting the DNA and essence of Apple. I was there just after Steve passed away, and his vision of what Apple culture was was very prominent. What they did was operationalize it. It wasn't a bunch of values on the wall. There were things written down, but it was really about rituals and stories. Part of my job was to work with what they called Apple University, where we did leadership training. It was a lot of storytelling and scenarios. It wasn't giving you the answer. It was: here are key decisions Apple and its leaders have had to make over the last 40 years; let's unpack them. Why do you think Steve and other leaders made that decision? What worked, what didn't? You start to understand the culture through that storytelling — who we are and who we want to be — versus a slide deck with the values, the definitions and the great behaviors. That's not really how change works.

Victoria Mensch: Do you think there's a question of ownership that comes up? I think it comes up a lot in those efforts — ownership and accountability. What does genuine accountability look like?

Maxim Williams: If this is “culture by Maxim,” it's going to fail. If it's “you've hired me, I'm going to come in and fix it, and my name is on everything,” it's not going to work. This has to be owned all the way at the top. At Autodesk it was really the CEO's decision to do this. He didn't have to change — people loved working here, and you can go along with what you have. But he felt a sense of ownership for culture, and I don't think I would have taken the job without it, because it has to be top-down; it can't just be bottom-up. Once there's that commitment and a consistent demonstration of accountability — he talks about it, our CPO talks about it, the rest of the C-suite talks about our culture. When I meet with them, almost unprompted, they'll say, “Max, we want our team to be living the values by default, and I'm going to make sure my leadership team is showing up that way.” That's music to my ears. All I have to say then is, “How can I help you?” Without that leadership accountability, a lot of culture initiatives fall by the wayside. It becomes just a marketing exercise, or a thing we thought was fun before moving on to something else.

Maxim Williams: We've built that accountability in. We can sit down with a leader and look at their engagement survey results. We have a dashboard we call our culture health index, where we look at the demonstration of the values across the org as perceived by our people, and at indicators of a healthy culture. That's shared with the executive team and senior leaders, and every team also reviews its own engagement results. We work with our HR business partners, so there are multiple layers of accountability. Then there are our performance systems — how we set goals. We look at the how and the what, and a big portion of the how is our values and how you demonstrate them. Leaders and managers talk with their teams about what a value looks like for you and how you've demonstrated it in the last quarter or the last year. That sense of accountability and ownership has to be built in, and I believe it starts at the executive layer. They have to believe this is worth the effort and that they will be role models. That's what good looks like in my experience.

Victoria Mensch: To that point, it takes a long time to change behavior — not a couple of weeks, not a couple of months, probably not even a couple of years. It's consistent effort over a period of time, which also means you need to start early, before you actually have to. So how does that work? In your experience, what pushes people, especially at the top, to even consider this effort? And second, how do you know that what you're building is actually going to work if the results are a few years down the road?

Maxim Williams: Good questions. I love a lot of things about Autodesk, but one is that we have a research and strategic foresight team. I spent a lot of time with that team early on, because they're looking five to ten years out at what's going on in the industry and feeding that back to the executive team — and as you can imagine, they were thinking about AI longer than the average person. You have to understand the landscape you're operating in and also what's coming. If you're paying attention to what's coming, you then do an assessment: am I ready for it? It's going to rain in a week, or tomorrow — am I prepared for the rain? Not to speak for our CEO, but given his vantage point he was likely realizing what was coming, and this was over three years ago; they probably started long before I was interviewed. AI was on the way. We were in the AI space long before it became trendy — given Autodesk and AutoCAD, the “auto” is right there — so for 40 years we've been at this. We were seeing these signals, and then you look internally: people love working here. It's a very people-centered, innovative organization; everybody's nice and collaborative. Meanwhile a market was emerging that was becoming very volatile, very relentless, very unpredictable, and AI is very disruptive. What does that mean for us behaviorally as an organization, and for every individual? What do we need to start doing differently, rather than resting on our 40-year-old laurels?

Maxim Williams: You want to have that conversation before you have to, and I believe we were. There were signals that pushed certain moments — we pushed on the concept of trust years ago because we felt we could do better for our customers — but the cultural evolution started because we wanted to start before we had to. Now that we're in this moment with AI and all the volatility, it creates a frame for us to navigate: our five values and one way of working. Optimistic, relentless, brave, ingenious, trusted, and One Autodesk. Those become our compass. How might we navigate this optimistically? How might we be more relentless? How might we be brave — the world requires bravery. We need to be ingenious, innovative and resourceful. And everything starts with trust and ends with trust; it's hard to do any of those things without a foundation of trust. It's easier to do all of it if we're held together by collaboration, connection and belonging — aka One Autodesk. That becomes our north star as a company and as a community of people trying to behave and align in this environment. It was very timely to have started that journey before we had to, given what's going on right now.

Victoria Mensch: Let's go back three years. You've just joined Autodesk with a mandate to really impact the culture. What was the first decision you had to make? How do you start?

Maxim Williams: The first decision was a validation decision: I wanted to validate the buy-in, accountability and ownership of the executive team before I really got started. So: let's get into a room. Are you all on the same page about the why — the reason this is important? What do you like and not like about the current culture? I wanted to make sure they'd had a shared conversation before I went and talked to a lot of employees. A fast follow was getting immersed in the culture and understanding the current state. I chose a multi-pronged approach, so I could work quickly and virtually, because we're globally distributed: focus groups, interviews, advisory councils, and a survey based on — ironically — a framework I learned in grad school, the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument. It works because it's a simple framework to help you understand your current culture and the desired future state based on your organizational maturity. Startups have a very different culture — a different vibe, very quick, very innovative, in some cases more customer focused. A company of 40-plus years gets more scale and predictability, but more bureaucracy, maybe less innovation and less speed. Yet people tend to have the same complaints as a company grows: too many silos, too slow, not enough innovation or experimentation, I'm afraid to fail, decisions are paralyzing. I needed to capture that quantitatively, so I created a random survey and a targeted survey.

Maxim Williams: Then I needed stories from people. I opened myself up to meet with everybody around the globe as best I could, to hear from individual contributors up through executives, and then fed that back to the executives: here's what I've heard, here's where you all are, here's where the board is, here's where the individual contributors are. Here are the gaps, and here's where we need to build a bridge between where people are and where you're saying we should go. And by the way, here's where the customers are — I pulled all the customer data and feedback and met with the customer success, marketing and brand teams. So the first decision was: I need data. This shouldn't just be a wordsmithing exercise. It shouldn't be Maxim going off into a cave and coming back with new values, or the CEO writing a document — he could, but you need to validate it. I remember telling him even during my interview: I can't decide for you how many values there should be or what they are, Andrew, without data. And I can't proceed without ownership. You all have to make sure this is something you really want to do, because once we make the shift, this is day one of a probably multi-year journey.

Maxim Williams: Some of that journey will be very visible — campaigns, events and activations — and some of it will be systems and things that are invisible. There'll be tweaks we have to make. But ORBIT — that's the acronym — should persist long after I'm gone if we're successful. We start looking at the indicators while I'm here, but if we're doing this well, 40 years from now people won't even remember the guy who came in and changed whatever. That's not really the story. The story is: have we shifted this 40-year culture in a new direction? Getting ownership from the executives, and getting data, stories and feedback inside and outside of Autodesk, were the key decisions early on.

Victoria Mensch: That's interesting, because in Silicon Valley the importance of data is a given, but outside of Silicon Valley it's a pretty novel concept that you want as much data as possible for organizational development initiatives. You mentioned the difference between the cultures of organizations at different stages of growth — a startup versus a more established company. There's definitely a tendency: the larger the company, the more it slows down, the more layers it has, the slower its decision-making. From an evolution perspective, cultures tend to gravitate toward stability, retention and engagement. But what we're talking about, especially from a Silicon Valley perspective, is innovation, and that requires something different: speed, more risk-taking, tolerance for failure. So what does a culture built specifically for innovation require, and what do most organizations get wrong when they try to build one?

Maxim Williams: There's tons of research and points of view on this, so I'll share what I've experienced and what we've been trying to do. Innovation at Autodesk is a legacy value for us. The company was founded as an innovative solution for people doing things by hand — blueprints, architectural designs. None of us can even imagine that world anymore. You have to have an environment that fosters experimentation and testing and makes it safe. What I love about Autodesk is that we have a research arm — a team with less pressure to deliver on things like sales targets, whose goal is to help us understand what's happening in the market over the next few years and feed that back. So you have to have time to research and focus. You have to pull in diverse perspectives — and I don't just mean diversity in the traditional sense. Our customers are diverse, our regions are diverse, there are generational differences. Innovation and inspiration can come from anywhere, and you need that openness and an organization that creates those spaces.

Maxim Williams: In large companies, and sometimes even in startups, you can get very narrow very quickly and not have those spaces. It gets very constrained because we're on a timeline, we have to scale, and people aren't safe to fail; there's no space for testing and learning. Some startups get away with it because they're so focused on execution and going so fast that they don't have time to research or test — they execute, implement and test all at once — and their size or customer base lets them. Companies that do this well — and at Autodesk we continuously try — look at how to create spaces for experimentation and give folks more enablement on how to fail effectively. That was a whole conversation at a conference a few months ago, where we brought our engineering and product organization together to talk about trends. The theme was “dare to disrupt,” and underneath it was: we need to fail, and we need to fail faster — and the implied understanding is that we learn from that failure. We need to learn faster.