Coming up soon on the DishyMix podcast, an interview with Dov Seidman. Here is the third question in a series (from Matt to Dov) to whet your appetite. Here is the first, from Ian Schafer, Deep-Focus and the second from Sarah Fay, Isobar US/Carat.

Q: Matt Blumberg, CEO, Return Path: It’s easy to standardize the “what” of a company. Six Sigma manufacturing is the extreme example of this, but we humans have gotten very good since the days of the first assembly line at churning out identical widgets. But how do we go about standardizing the “how” of a company? And then…even if we figure out how to do that, how do we make it genuine and authentic?

A: Dov Seidman, Author of “HOW: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life)” I think its important to realize that a person’s or a company’s hows can’t be standardized or copied. Our hows are our values, principles, reputations and cultures – they are personal manifestations of our pasts, shaped by years of unique experiences and interactions. These are the things that define how we collaborate with co-workers, how we inspire more people throughout our global networks, how we interact with – not just serve – customers. These are the things that can not be copied, and therefore, the things that provide lasting differentiation. I often make the comparison between a company’s culture and another’s family. I think you would find it impossible to copy how your neighbor’s family conducts itself – you might be able to buy the same car and eat dinner at the same time every night but it would be an impossible challenge to copy how that family interacts with each other, how they make decisions, how they cope with challenges life throws at them.

At the end of the day, a company that went down the path of trying to copy another’s hows would have a series of inauthentic engagements and fists full of wasted dollars. That said, a company can get very good at shaping their own cultures – deepening employees’ understandings and embrace of a set of shared values and creating an environment that encourages employees to live to them.