This incongruous assortment of engineers, reminiscent of the diverse characters of a Passion play, had one thing that bound them together: a deep, almost spiritual conviction that a good idea and some hard work can make a difference.

This personality is captured in the corporate culture-the values and beliefs that the people in the company are expected to live and work by. It creates goodwill, establishes trust, and forms relationships with customers, employees, government agencies, and other institutions.

A company develops attitudes, even emotions, that are expressed through the actions of its people.

COMPANIES ARE NOT conscious in the human sense, but each one nonetheless has its own personality.Mitchell and I had stumbled upon a plain truth: personal computers are deskbound, like typewriters, and are unsuitable for people who spend their time away from a desk or work face to face with others.Almost like clockwork, every ten years since the beginning of the computer revolution, a new class of computers had unexpectedly emerged.When IBM announced that it would be bringing out its own version of the personal computer, to be called the IBM PC, Mitchell directed his programmers to tailor their program to this machine. But Mitchell intuitively understood something that only the Japanese taught in school: in a fast-growing market, what matters is your share of new machines, not existing ones, because new machines quickly come to dominate the market. Most industry people thought Lotus was crazy to try to unseat Visicalc, which dominated the market at that time. Lotus was in a race with several more established competitors, and he knew it.

Startup by Jerry Kaplan