Zoho's Sridhar Vembu Says Forcing 'Discipline' On Employees Can Backfire, Explaining Trade-Off In Organisation Culture
· Free Press Journal
Company culture debates usually settle on one word - discipline. But Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho, argues that leaning too hard on that word can quietly kill the very initiative organisations need.
Two paths, two very different workplaces
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Writing on X, Vembu laid out a contrast between two kinds of organisations. In the first, employees look upward for direction and execute against clearly set targets. In the second, employees act on their own judgment, push back on each other, and drive things forward without waiting to be told.
Firms that lean heavily on metrics, he noted, tend to drift toward the first model. That brings predictability, but it also means the entire organisation is only as good as the calls made at the top, if leadership gets it wrong, everyone gets it wrong with them.
On org culture: Do people wait for instructions from the top? Or do they seize the initiative and run?
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) August 24, 2026
Highly metric driven orgs tend to produce the "wait for instructions from the top" culture and there is more predictability and certainty in that culture. Unless the top always…
Why initiative-led teams feel messier
The alternative isn't smooth sailing either, in Vembu's telling. Teams built around individual initiative tend to argue more, second-guess each other constantly, and rarely feel satisfied with where things stand. He illustrated this with a wry aside about engineers: hand one programmer another's code, he said, and the instinct is almost always to assume it could be done better.
In that kind of setup, he added, it's often the market itself - not internal process - that ends up imposing order.
No easy middle ground
For Vembu, this isn't a problem with a clean fix. Either an organisation accepts a degree of predictability at the cost of initiative, or it accepts initiative at the cost of constant friction and unease. Attempting to engineer both - what he called a 'disciplined culture of seizing the initiative' - tends to backfire, leaving companies with neither benefit intact.
A tougher business backdrop at Zoho
The post arrives against a strained operating environment for Zoho itself. The company has been contending with a steep climb in memory prices, partly fuelled by AI data-centre demand, alongside rising costs tied to AI token usage.
Responding to figures showing memory prices up roughly 500 percent over the past year, Vembu said his firm had so far avoided passing the cost on to customers, though maintaining that position was growing tougher.
Industry pricing data referenced in the discussion illustrated the scale of the jump: certain DDR5 kits that cost under $100 last August are now priced well above $400, with high-capacity kits reaching into the thousands of dollars.
A push for leaner code
Vembu tied the cost spike to a broader shift he thinks software development now needs to make. Much of modern programming, he argued, was built on the assumption that memory would stay cheap indefinitely - an assumption he says no longer holds.