Ever watch The Wire? The whole point of it, at least in my eyes, is that often, the villain is the system.

It is perfectly possible to see a company change every person in it and still have exactly the same behaviors, especially the pathological ones. I understand that from the employee's perspective, managers and execs seem to have near-infinite power. But from the perspective of any one of those people, they are vastly outnumbered; trying to change organizational culture is at best incredibly difficult.

Waves tend to hold their shapes. Culture is a wave through individual humans. Or, perhaps more accurately, a standing wave through which humans pass.