The Culture Code has a provocative premise, watered down by undue hero worship and a commitment to mediocre neoliberalism.

The basic idea is that real work, real innovative, value-added work, is done by dedicated people who are emotionally invested, who are together in this effort, who are vulnerable and unconcerned with social status games. This emotional bond is something that can be tracked in how team-members interact with one another, even in total ignorance of the content of their communication. It's something delicate, which is fostered by great leaders, and spoiled by a single bad apple. Potentially, it's even something that can be trained, though Coyle is fuzzy on those details.

The twin problems are that so many teams are far from Coyle's ideal. First, most business propositions are fundamentally irrelevant and almost pointless. It's one thing to be beholden to an ideal of perfect service, another thing entirely to go for a 3% improvement on NPS at Applebee's. Given a choice between being excellent and maximizing short-term returns, most companies will go for the short-term returns. Second, and this is the hard part: humans love social status games. We're good at playing them, we're invested in them, and I'm not sure 'good teamwork' is enough to tell the boss his ideas are bad.

And on a methodological note, Coyle uses a lot of examples of flashy, design-centric companies, but building anything even moderately complex involves a host of technical challenges and choices. It's one thing to say that empowered swarms can do it all, but I think most work is far less romantic than that ideal.