As technology and new media create increasingly accessible forms of organization, and empower more people to build communities, the challenge of systematically and intentionally building culture becomes relevant to more people. What defines a “healthy”, “strong”, or “good” culture? Is culture building possible, or is culture so inherently bottom up as to defy intention and system? What is the work of culture building? Does it have clear steps or stages? Are there principles of culture building that can be communicated and taught? Or is the work of culture building fundamentally idiosyncratic and restricted to those few with an inarticulable knack for it? We survey the definitions, perspectives, practices, and insights of 16 professional culture builders: practicing organizational consultants whose practices span large traditional organizations, small teams, multi-organization networks, mission-driven organizations, and decentralized organizations. Organizing and taxonomizing their perspectives and practices, we distill 5 common components of strong culture and 17 common practices for building it. After concluding that culture building work is clear, articulable, and accessible, we develop an argument that organizations and communities should approach culture building systematically and intentionally by empowering a community manager to organize, surface, and focus the needs of members toward a continuously adapting and iterating culture of culture building. With this work, we complement computational technologies for building organizational flows and processes with established social technologies for building shared trust, meaning, beliefs, goals, values, purpose, and identity, toward more meaningful organizations, and a population of leaders who are more effective at bringing people together
