The Corporate Culture Challenge

Does your organization behave in ways you find difficult to understand or frustrate your attempts to improve matters?  Do you find issues emerge that seem intractable and resistant to countermeasures?  Does the obvious not get done but without any logical reason?  The majority of these will be familiar to most people and they also tend to be the source of many anecdotes.  However, it is difficult for most people to describe exactly what the heart of the matter is within their organization, either good or bad, and they generally recount their own experiences and personal opinion in the absence of hard facts on this soft issue.  It is true to say that these will vary and anyone outside the organization can form different impressions of that organization and how effective it is depending on whom they talk to.

This soft issue challenges managers as they seek to understand the very nature of the organization they are involved with and how best to go about devising and executing strategies that further its interests.  Management face the same problem as all other stakeholders in that they will need to draw on limited sources of information, such as financial or operational, to draw conclusions about the organization and what needs to be done next.  There are numerous cases where new processes, quality initiatives or restructuring fail to meet corporate objectives and in some cases leave the organization weaker than before or even threaten its survival.  It would be reasonable to assume that the higher the quality of the information, and the more of it, then the lower the risk with any strategy or action based upon it.  However, if managers are struggling with the above questions then these tend not to be directly answered by either the financial or operational information normally available, and require a degree of interpretation nearer to an art than a science.  Those who demonstrate some mastery of this art tend to improve their organizations lot as well as their own cause.  However, interpretations based on personal judgment are inherently risky and in some cases may be an outright gamble.

The key to the above lies in the way people work together in an organization.  In simple terms ‘the way things are done around here’.  This is generally accepted as the culture of an organization and it has a fundamental impact on its effectiveness at all levels.  If insight could be gained into an organization’s corporate culture it would go a long way in addressing some of the above concerns.  This would provide managers with a powerful means to analyze their organization and devise strategies to improve its performance.  It also provides managers with a unique perspective and brings the art of interpretation nearer to a science.