Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

“That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

This connects to Sune’s quote that, “culture is as much about what we encourage as about what we permit.” I had been interviewing so many hockey people at this point, players and coaches and general managers and board members and so many of them talked about “culture” in a way that was only about practicing hard and winning games. And then I met one person who said, “It’s funny that when we talk about a winning culture we talk a lot about rules, but almost never about ethics. We talk a lot about how to train, but almost never about how to behave. One would assume they’re part of the same thing, no?” And that stayed with me for a long time, and that’s where that whole dialogue comes from.