“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – this famous quote by Peter Drucker is being tossed back and forth in every article / book on building great companies. As I always wanted to add my 0.02$ on the subject here goes my short how-to on building a “great” company culture. A culture of burnout, low-performance, high employee turnover, but not necessarily low incomes. The list is not in any particular order (as chaos is one of the pillars a “great” burnout culture is built upon).

1. Make sure there are always too little resources to complete a task, so people get frustrated each time they haven't completed a task on time (or as people in the burnout culture like to say - miss a deadline).

2. Oh, while we are at it – use the word deadline often, as it emphasizes the fact that if you miss that date many people will actually die (regardless if it makes sense in your project or not).

3. Metric fixation – measure everything, jump fast to conclusions without doing a root cause analysis. When someone quotes the famous words attributed to Einstein - “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,” acknowledge that he was a great physicist, but knew nothing about management.

4. Performance is the ultimate goal. People should work like machines. After months of intensive work you can’t give people slack, you need to throw even harder tasks at them. “Steel is forged in fire” – remember that.

5. Make sure your employees are working at least as long as you. And you always work a 12-hour work day at minimum (even on sick leave).

6. Demand improvements, but also expect to maintain the status quo (conflicting requirements are the best way to make your people go crazy).

7. Public shaming. Do I need to add more? The best way to make your people feel stupid and worthless is publicly bashing them and calling them failures.

8. Assign tasks which are not suited to position, skills or attitude. Make the introvert, shy guy responsible for direct sales, pitches and customer care. Make the Java guy build solutions in C++ and vice-versa.

9. Complete lack of transparency. Random awards and raises and everything under NDA so people are afraid to talk to each other.

10. Don’t trust your people will do their job well. “You want something done right you better do it yourself”. You would do this yourself, but to this day you haven’t invented bi-location yet, so that’s why you still need employees. Micromanage. Be like Kim Dzong Un and show you farmers how to sow rice. The only thing that your people should learn is that whatever they are doing you can do better and they are inferior.

11. “R.E.S.P.E.C.T – this word means nothing to me!” – this is your favorite “cover” of the famous Aretha Franklin song. The only people worthy of respect are only those “above” you – your boss, the guy that has more money, the person you want something from at this moment, others (especially your employees) are not in this group.

This list is a good place to start when building a culture of burnout, but remember that “sky is the limit”. I would love to hear from you in the comments about tools and techniques you have observed in various organizations which help change enthusiastic and dedicated people into zombies.