In every corporation, there's an incompetent a**-kisser sitting somewhere close to you. Their main mission is to hang on until retirement…
Yes, that's exactly how we got the emotions flowing early in the evening among the nearly hundred guests who joined us to celebrate our 10th birthday at the Orea Hotel Angelo in Smíchov. Michal Rožek, an idea maker and advertising copywriter who took on the role of host, gave guests an unconventional welcome with a short reading from the book Nepříjemní (“Unpleasant People”), written specifically for Kogi together with fellow industry writer Ondra Holomek. It's not something you can normally get your hands on, but feel free to write to us about it/$ (the subtext being: “The fish always rots from the head — except now, you're the head!”).
The book's title doesn't reflect the mood of the evening, though. Quite the opposite!
It was great to get up on the makeshift stage and reminisce about our early days together with Jarda Jíra, who helped found Kogi CON and is now a former co-owner. The second founder, Filip Černý, mentioned that from the very beginning, Kogi CON wanted to create value. As it turned out, though, anti-divorce counseling, a network of dental clinics, and desert water-production containers weren't the obvious choice. For Jarda, it ultimately turned out to be construction, while Filip, together with Pavel Kuhn and, today, an entire multi-person team, set out to raise awareness around building and strengthening corporate cultures. And it turns out to make sense — with measurable results, too!
Our panel discussion guests confirmed as much: Martina Ježková, HR Director at České Radiokomunikace, Gorjan Lazarov, CEO of Orea Hotels, and Petr Doberský, CEO of Czech Airlines Technics. Together, they offered a genuinely wide range of perspectives on just how essential a role corporate culture plays in their organizations, and how it shouldn't be underestimated. “People are like software — without it, we couldn't restart,” offered Gorjan Lazarov, sharing his experience with the transformation at Orea Hotels, where identifying shared core values like care, innovation, and trust played a key role in building a cohesive team united around common goals. “Corporate culture is what connects people around shared values,” he added.
$Listen to the podcast with Gorjan Lazarov: After I took over, I scrapped every policy and gave people trust/$
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Petr Doberský, meanwhile, emphasized the key value of open communication and described how long it took for people at the company to understand that working on corporate culture actually pays off: “It didn't work with a heavy hand — we had to explain things consistently and take it step by step to earn the mechanics' trust.”
$Listen to the podcast with Petr Doberský: A corporate crisis is a lot like a marriage crisis. Open communication brought our company back into profit/$
Martina Ježková added that a strong corporate culture has a self-cleaning function — it naturally filters out people who don't share the same values. From her own experience, she also admitted that the hardest part of transforming a corporate culture is convincing managers and directors not to make compromises. Gustavo Razzetti: people don't leave jobs, they leave corporate cultures
To close out the evening, we blew out the metaphorical candle on our birthday cake with a conversation with world-renowned speaker and corporate culture expert Gustavo Razzetti. “Corporate culture is what brings people together — or drives them apart. It's invisible, but it has an effect. When it works, people don't even notice it. They only discover it once problems start to appear,” he said. According to him, nearly 90% of senior executives consider culture one of their top three priorities, yet many don't know how to actually change it. “People don't leave jobs — they leave corporate cultures,” he added, also pointing to the importance of feedback toward management and getting leaders actively involved in shaping culture. “A lot of companies mistakenly treat feedback as a tool for criticism. Instead, we should be building a culture where leaders actively seek out feedback so they can improve and keep learning,” he said. Razzetti closed by noting that culture transformation is a long-term undertaking. “Companies often confuse the culture they want to have with the culture they actually have. You need to understand that changing culture is an evolutionary process that requires continuous effort and an understanding of where you are on that journey,” he concluded. His ideas gave everyone in the room something to think about, and underscored just how essential it is to pay attention to corporate culture as a key factor for success in today's fast-moving work environment.
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