There's good stuff in this post, but I think a lot of a company's culture surfaces at moments that are thrust on you when you least expect it.

At Google, I can think of a few points that influenced my perceptions:

- the first DMCA request we got, from the Church of Scientology

- the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape.

- when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of all user queries

- when John Battelle grilled Eric Schmidt on stage at a Web 2.0 conference and Eric declared "We would never trap user data."

All of those situations were thrust on us from the outside, and someone had to make a call. I think those kinds of decisions are critical culture-defining moments.

The decisions a company makes when everything is fine--or when you have plenty of time to plan--can set some of the company's culture. But to me, how your organization responds to a crisis is one of the best indicators of its culture.