"The stronger the culture, the less process a company needs."
This sentence finally made it click for me. Culture is not about making people happy. It is the set of principles on which you convince people to base their decisions and actions that affect the company. If those principles can be made uniform without hierarchy and approval processes, that makes a company unequivocally more efficient.
Culture is, to a degree, about harmony, and therefore to an extent also about making people happy, in providing a sense of belonging to and identification with a group and a purpose greater than oneself.
I believe there's a fundamental difference, however, between culture as an emergent property, subject to its members' needs and changeable by its desires, and 'culture' as a set of metaphysical properties determined by a company's founders, to which one must either conform or find themselves terminated. A culture which you have no influence over isn't really a culture to which you can belong.
This sentence finally made it click for me. Culture is not about making people happy. It is the set of principles on which you convince people to base their decisions and actions that affect the company. If those principles can be made uniform without hierarchy and approval processes, that makes a company unequivocally more efficient.