When I was in College and Graduate School, I used to carry around Strunk & Whites Elements of Style. In this nifty little manual, all my obtuse and not so obtuse questions regarding the writing style and grammar were answered. I carried my dog-eared, coffee-stained copy everywhere because, well my undergraduate and graduate days were filled with reading but even more writing. When I left graduate school and ventured into business, I devoured business books but few of them stood out as "nifty little manuals" in the same way that Strunk had served me.
I believe that there are a few commonly held misconceptions about organisational culture:
1. Its all about relationships and behaviour: more often than not [culture change] it is process driven: new systems, changing business conditions, new leadership. To make people 'do' things differently, you need to change the way they do things.
While I agree that new leadership and new ways of thinking are critically important to driving cultural change and that systems and disciplines are also important, without a vision of where the company needs to go, without leadership that can inspire both the vision AND the loyalty to do the hard work to get there, all the new systems and discipline won't amount to a hill of beans unless the organization knows where its headed. In other words, in many corporate cultures, especially those with deep, intricate informal networks, change is all about relationships and behavior.
2. It's heavily influenced by national culture, diversity and geography: Two businesses in the same field can be widely different. But managers in France and managers in Iceland will tend to approach things in broadly similar ways.
3. Certain business sectors will always have certain cultures: There are many examples of sectors that are deemed to be one way acting the other. If you visit Abbey in their London HQ or Nationwide in Swindon you will see that banks don't act or look like we expect them to.
Now interesting enough, although national culture, language and other societal norms driving behavior modify corporate cultures, I believe that fundamentally a bank is a bank is a bank. Yes, SOX compliance reigns in the US while Basel II in the EU but again, I think the author misses the mark. I believe there is more consistency among sectors than difference regardless of geography. Its the underlying corporate culture drives differentiation and that's where the "sector" issues come from. Lets be focused on root causes shall we?
4. A culture change programme will need to touch every part of your business: Culture change programmes can be quite small and discrete. You can change the way work is done in one part of the business. We do it all the time. A manager or employee will suggest a change it will alter the culture of that part of the company.
Of course one can compartmentalize change and in some limited cases that's warranted. But most often is the case, the interdependencies among even silo'd organizations minimize the effectiveness of discrete change management initiatives. While boiling the ocean is never a valid business strategy, comprehensive change, where dependencies among functional units are factored into the change equatoin is a must.
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