Workplace culture - content or context?

I heard myself talking about Bamboo [see photo]. I was addressing 100 talented staff of a start-up inside a global bank. What are you saying and why are you saying it? This feed-back was written all over the tiger-teams assembled to listen to my weekly briefing. They did not want to be there because they had better things to do than stand around and listen to me rant. But they did stay for the whole 20 minutes of it. Later, I got a series of hard-hitting questions - bright people can be so brutal. At the end of another 45 minutes I was exhausted yet oh so happy. The Q & A session tells me whether I have done my job. This time I had moved the needle on what a start-up means to stagnant workplace culture - I had done my job. Bamboo is thick and seemingly endless if one becomes trapped within it. In this riff, I was using it as a metaphor for workplace content. It can suffocate a worker. It can exhaust those who have taken their sharpest long blades to it to cull it or even to level it. Bamboo is not everywhere. Thus it is not the impenetrable barrier to progress that it seems to be. To truly assess its threat we need context. Why is the Bamboo here? Can we move onto a patch where no Bamboo exists? Richard.