All Hail, Edgar Schein

Friday, March 30, 2007

I’m sure you have read one of those books that made such an impression on you, that you underlined or highlighted every other line. For me, that book is Edgar Schein’s The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. Schein is a professor emeritus at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the definitive text on organizational culture, Organizational Culture and Leadership. Every so often I go back to these books to pull more insights from his wisdom and in the process gain an even greater appreciation and respect for his practical intellect.

So here are some excerpts from The Corporate Culture Survival Guide and the humble commentary of a most unworthy disciple.

The organization clings to whatever made it a success. The very culture that created the success makes it difficult for members of the organization to perceive changes in the environment that require new responses. Culture becomes a constraint on strategy. (p. 13)

This was startling to me when I first read it because of its simple truth. The only reason why a culture evolves the way it does is because its members come to believe that particular assumptions, behaviors, and norms contribute to its success and so they reinforce and repeat them over time. But when the external environment changes, too often the culture becomes the scapegoat. Leaders bemoan the dysfunctional nature of the culture and describe it as “broken” or “sclerotic.” I’ve heard leaders describe their organizations as “calcified.” But just when these leaders try to “save” the dying organization, they discover that the “patient” is very much alive and kicking and not interested in the cure. I return to the teacher’s wisdom:

Never start with the idea of changing culture. Always start with the issues the organization faces; only when those business issues are clear should you ask yourself whether the culture aids or hinders resolving the issues. Always think initially of the culture as your source of strength. It is the residue of your past successes. Even if some elements of the culture look dysfunctional, remember that they are probably only a few among a large set of others that continue to be strengths. (p. 189)

Thinking back on some of my earlier postings about the American Red Cross and Dr. Healy’s experience with its culture, I am particularly fond of this excerpt from the section on culture dynamics in mature organizations because of its Frankenstein-esque quality.

Whereas leadership created culture in the early stages, culture now creates leaders (his emphasis), in the sense that only those managers who fit the mold are promoted to top positions. In fact, one of the most dangerous aspects of culture at this stage is that it is an unconscious determinant of most of what goes on in the organization, including even the mission and strategy of the organization. (p. 143)

The potential impact of a culture on the organization’s business performance is even more frightening when you consider this insight.

We tend to think that we can separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic thinking is deeply colored by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is. (p. 33)

This calls to mind the idea of organizational blindness. We outsiders look at organizations groping to find their way in a new competitive landscape or those seemingly caught off-guard, asleep at the wheel (why does K-Mart come to mind?) and we think, “Isn’t it obvious to them?” The reality may be that inside this type of organization and culture, the answer may be “no, it isn’t obvious.”

I’ll leave you with this excerpt that should help all of us to remember that culture is not to be messed with lightly. Show a certain amount of respect, if you please.

If you treat it (culture) as a superficial phenomenon, if you assume that you can manipulate it and change it at will, you are sure to fail. Furthermore, culture controls you more than you control culture. You want it that way, because it is culture that gives meaning and predictability to your daily life. As you learn what works, you develop beliefs and assumptions that eventually drop out of awareness and become tacit rules of how to do things, how to think about things, and how to feel. (p. 25)

All hail, Edgar Schein.

A Riff on Sustainable Cultures

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

One of the expressions that we bantered about during the Michigan Leaders Read program last week was “let’s riff on that.” So in the spirit of expounding on something already “played,” I am going to pick up on a comment I made towards the end of my Friday posting: “are the Geeks a cult of personality or a culture of theater? For this posting, I’m going to take the focus up a few thousand feet because I’m curious about “how does one avoid a cult of personality and instead build a culture of sustainability?”

As I thought about this question over the past few days, it eventually dawned on me that such a discussion should acknowledge the work of Collins and Porras in “Built to Last.” I, however, have much more modest goals for this discussion than Messrs. Collins and Porras had for their work. They focused on what it takes to be a visionary company. I am more interested in thinking about what it takes to be a self-sustaining culture and my criteria are: does it survive the departure of its founder and any of its chief executives and is it recognizable to the imaginary time traveler? I’m interested in a more pedestrian version of “built to last.” How can you build a company that lasts 100 years and is somewhat recognizable?

First, you need the type of leaders who believe that it’s not just what the company achieves during his or her tenure but what it achieves after they are long gone. Legacy leadership, we’ll call it. Now some would say “it’s out of my control once I leave.” Not entirely true if you build the right culture.

And what is that right culture? Well, I don’t think it resembles a “cultlike culture” that Collins and Porras documented in “Built to Last.” By its very definition, “cult” (obsessive devotion or veneration for a person, principle, or ideal, especially when regarded as a fad) conveys a sense of rigidity and inflexibility. Not exactly recipes for longevity. Nor is it a culture that collapses like a house of cards. Side note: there is a great scene in the recent Academy Award-winning German film, “The Lives of Others” which illustrates this. In the scene, banished agents of the East German secret police, while doing grunt work in a dingy basement, hear about the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of them, a main character in the movie, just gets up and walks out and the others follow. A wall comes down and the culture of fear collapses like that. The gig is up.

So here is my educated guess as to what qualities, characteristics, and principles would sustain a culture (the proverbial, “it’s the way we do things around here”) over time and through turmoil:

• Creativity and innovation: the notion that new ideas are stimulating and fun
• Adaptability: Darwinism at its best
• Honest, humble self-assessment: both collectively and individually
• Customer intimacy: an obsession with “it’s all about them”
• Curiosity and questioning assumptions: the joy of “why”
• Openness to “death” and belief in “re-birth”

I suspect this last characteristic warrants further explanation. More often than not, when it comes to organizational life and death, it is less about a physical cessation and more about a perceptual existence. A culture that is not afraid of organizational death regularly asks the question “if we were to disappear today, who would care and why?” It makes no assumptions that the organization deserves perpetuity. It accepts the responsibility of justifying its continued existence by making itself relevant to others. And it does this because it knows or suspects that allowing a false self-perception to die opens the organization to a new degree of freedom of thought, perspective, and ideas. It places its trust in this freedom to spark some sort of re-birth within the organization.

So, Mr. or Ms. Leader, what would you need to say or do to imbed and foster these qualities in your organization? What do you want to leave behind? Why shouldn’t your organization exist for a hundred years?

Jim Gilmore and the Geeks

Friday, March 23, 2007

I had the distinct honor this week of participating in the Michigan Leaders Read program here in Ann Arbor. Four local business leaders started this book club a couple of years ago as a way to help develop the caliber of leadership in Michigan. A committee selects four books each year to organize thought and discussion.

The first book of the year was “The Experience Economy” by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore. We were fortunate to have Jim Gilmore join us to explain and discuss what an experience economy is and why business leaders should care.

Jim and Joe make the argument in their book that the drive to extract more economic value out of human activity has resulted in an evolution from an agrarian to an industrial to a service and now to a experience economy. In many market sectors, particularly those that are consumer-based, delivering acceptable customer service is not enough of a differentiator to justify premium pricing for the service. Being able to stage and deliver an experience for the consumer that blends theater, education, escapism, and estheticism is what Jim and Joe would call the “sweet spot” of an experience offering.

So one of the examples Jim talked about this week was the Geek Squad. In case you don’t know, the Geek Squad is a computer repair service that makes office calls, house calls, or in-store repair. Robert Stephens started Geek Squad in Minneapolis in 1994 and in 2002 Best Buy bought the company (with Robert as part of the package). There are now 700 Geek Squads in Best Buy stores across the country. Its shtick is nerdy computer repair people in short sleeve white shirts, black pants, black ties, agent badges a la “Dragnet,” deadpan humor, along with many, many extensions of this persona. Click here to read why Jim and Joe think the Geek Squad is a great example of a service provider wanting to play in an experience economy.

When I first read about the Geek Squad in their book, and listening to Jim this week, I couldn’t help but think this was just a gimmick. Yeah, pretty creative but still a gimmick. Even when Jim pointed out that Robert Stephens would passionately disagree that this economic theater was anything close to being a gimmick, the consumer inside me said, “OK, but why should I take you seriously?” I reflected on this conundrum over night (how does a business stay away from the gimmick trap?) and of course I turned to my favorite answer: it’s all in the culture. (Why else would this posting be on www.corporatexray.com?)

So what would be some features of the culture of an experience-based enterprise? Well, for one, since the experience economy is all about staging “economic theater,” you would need “actors” and not simply employees. And you need these actors to buy into the persona (both character and environment) that you have created to stage this experience. In the Geek Squad’s case, the persona is “comedy with a straight face.” If I, as a consumer, have any chance of crossing over that imaginary line of buying into the Geek Squad experience, the Geek Squad Agent, in that moment of truth with me, needs to stay in character and not let my view of our shared reality define the moment.

Their role models should be the stoic guards of Buckingham Palace. Not only because of their ability to “stay in character” but also because there is an element of truth in this persona: guarding the Queen of England is no laughing matter. Neither are fixing or installing complicated, temperamental home computers and networks.

So if our working definition of organizational culture is “it’s the way we do things around here,” the Geek Squad agents have to buy into the fact that “playing” this nerdy character somewhere connects with his or her personal values and is ultimately an act of self-expression and not merely corporate expectations. For this to happen, the culture would need to “pull” out of the employee the behaviors, language, and attitudes that feed and support the desired experience. This is a key ingredient if the culture has any chance of be self-sustaining over time. But the type of culture that will ultimately undermine this experience is one that “pushes” this persona on to the employee and ultimately undermines the employee’s buy-in and leads to scripting. Therefore, the Geek Squad culture needs to be an improvisational culture rather than an acting culture if it is to avoid being simply a gimmick.

The ultimate question in my opinion is “to what degree is this a self-sustaining culture?” A good indicator of this is to find out whether the new embellishments to the Agent persona come mostly from Robert Stephens (the founder) or from the actual geeks themselves. In other words, if Robert Stephens were to walk away, would this culture and persona continue or would it peter out over time? I’ll leave you with this. Are the Geeks a cult of personality or a culture of theater?

What say you?

American Red Cross: Part 2

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

It’s time for Part Two of the American Red Cross case study. In my March 9 posting, I talked about how we can look at corporate culture through the lens of social or behavioral styles and described how the styles of Dr. Healy and the American Red Cross culture were polar opposites, the Driver-Steadiness tension. I wanted to spend a little more time talking about these two styles and the dynamic that can often surface from their interaction.

Let’s start with the Steadiness style as it relates to a culture. Given that the mission of the American Red Cross is to “provide relief to victims of disasters and help people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies,” it’s reasonable to assume that the culture of the rank-and-file would be Steadiness. Think about it. Unpredictable, and often catastrophic, events, along with all the stress that comes with such responsibilities, define the whole operation. By virtue of its mission, preventing and responding to disasters and emergencies is the daily mindset of anyone involved in the Red Cross, particularly the closer the person is to the front-line.

Naturally, people who work in such daily circumstances would probably look to their work environment, whether consciously or sub-consciously, to be as predictable and stable as possible. Therefore, both individually and collectively, the Red Cross rank-and-file is likely to reject and resist anything that threatens to disrupt stability or add unnecessary distractions.

My experience with this type of organizational culture and the individuals that support it is that they are not necessarily opposed to change but they are very skeptical about the transition required to get from the current way to the new way of doing things. Their experience tells them that leaders don’t often have the patience or devote the necessary resources to ensure that everyone experiences an orderly, logical, and supportive transition. Too often, in their eyes, the change is abrupt, poorly justified, and under-financed.

So enters the Dr. Healy character into this drama. Hard charging, intelligent, impervious to excuses, more interested in the future than the past, thrives on challenges: the classic change agent. She comes in talking about the need to change, pointing out where there are problems (which only injects conflict into the work environment, in the minds of a Steadiness culture) and starts to set aggressive goals.

The Steadiness culture often pulls back at first, in some ways recoiling from the push of a Driver leader and in other ways, stepping back to take in the entire situation. It usually doesn’t take long for the Steadiness culture to conclude that they can wait out this leader and all the changes he or she is pushing down their collective throats. Their mindset is one of, “I can wait you out because I know I am here forever. Your track record is one of not staying long at an organization. You will get bored or get in trouble. You will be gone long before I am.”

And in most cases, they are right. The Driver leader does get bored when progress towards the new way slows down or others stymie his/her push. Regardless of how the Driver leader responds to the resistance, the Steadiness culture knows the leader’s days are numbered. There is a sense of impatience in the leader’s body language and actions. He or she starts to overreach, frustrated by the lack of progress and desperate to experience any sort of movement forward. The Steadiness culture digs in deeper, walking a delicate balance between resistance and perceived effort, waiting for others to step into the fray. Often it is the Board of Directors, concerned about the lack of progress, or complaints coming from the organization about the leader’s style, or questionable actions the leader took when overreaching. The Steadiness culture smells blood in the water. Be patient, lay low. Rumors begin to fly. And then the magical day arrives. The announcement. “President and CEO Dr. Bernadine Healy to Leave the American Red Cross.”

But wait, there’s even more. To be continued…

Culture and the Start-up

Friday, March 16, 2007

I recently attended a meeting of the New Enterprise Forum here in Ann Arbor. They “link entrepreneurs to management expertise, potential joint venture partners, mentors, business services, capital, and other critical resources.” During the Q&A session, one entrepreneur asked about how to go about creating a culture for his small enterprise. That got me thinking about what start-ups need to know about something as nebulous as culture. So this goes out to all you up-starts as you start up your new venture.

You have plenty of things to contend with as you work to get your business up and running. So let me make a pitch for why consciously creating your company’s culture should be higher on your list of priorities.

First, let’s be clear on what culture is and why it’s important. The practical definition of culture is, “it’s the way we do things around here.” Therefore, behavior and decisions are tangible evidence of the intangible culture.

We often base behaviors and decisions on a set of beliefs and values we hold. Since we all carry around our own unique beliefs and values, the potential for a particular way of doing things is always present. You may be the only employee in your company right now, but you have already laid the groundwork for a culture to take shape, based on how you are currently conducting yourself and how you envision your business operating. A dynamic culture is one that supports your company’s business model and reflects your values as the creator of the business, without being in conflict with each other. Such a dynamic culture can serve as a competitive advantage.

So here are some reasons why being proactive on building a desired culture is a smart idea.

You can’t be everywhere, at the same time, keeping an eye on everything. The benefit to you, personally, of building a strong, intentional culture is that you can have greater confidence in your employees to do the right thing when you’re not around. Having a strong culture is invaluable as your company grows and takes on additional employees because it will be your tenured employees who will convey and reinforce the desired behaviors. Remember, culture is fundamentally “this is how we do things around here.”

Reputation is everything. As a start-up, the reputation you establish with your customers is critical. Reliability, responsiveness, and quality are all factors in what becomes your reputation. It can be a potential deathblow if employee #4 doesn’t buy into “how we do things around here” and demonstrates it at the worst possible moment with one of your more important customers. You could easily lose that customer.

You can be your own worse enemy. Just because you had this great idea and started this new venture doesn’t mean you have the personality or habits to make it succeed. Plenty of start-ups succeed in spite of the founder. You want to force yourself to answer in a conscious, intentional way this question: What are the values and beliefs I want my employees and myself to convey in our behavior and decisions?

If you don’t, someone else will. It is often unintentional, but circumstances can dictate what your culture becomes. It goes like this: you’re busy, absent, or distracted and one of your employees handles an important situation in an inappropriate manner. You don’t say anything or bring it up with the employee because you’re busy, unaware, or prefer to avoid conflict. Your non-response still sends a message, leaving your other employees to conclude, “it must be okay to do that.” Have this happen enough times and you will have a mess on your hands in no time. Now, if this sounds like I am insinuating that your employees are like children who take their cues from mommy-boss and daddy-boss, let me clarify something. I’m not insinuating -- I’m stating a fact. A parent and a boss share something in common: they hold the power. Your employees look to you to establish and enforce what is right and wrong, especially since the company is your creation. Use this to your advantage.

It’s all about congruency. As a start-up, you don’t want your company to convey one thing through your marketing materials and then have your employees act in a way that is counter to the image you are trying to project. If this happens, you will end up magnifying the incongruence because you have little or no track record or reputation to balance out a bad experience. Your customers will experience the incongruence and question whether you have your act together. This may be enough of a reason for them not to take a chance on you.

Building an intentional culture

Here is what you can do to make sure your company’s culture is intentional and designed to support your business plan and reflect the values and beliefs that led you to start the venture. When the time is right (usually about the time you’re ready to open your doors for business), spend some time thinking through a few specific customer scenarios. Your business plan will help to remind you who your targeted customers are, how you plan to identify them and make them aware of your product or service, and how they will most likely contact your business.

Using this information, write up two different case studies; one that describes the worse case scenario of the customer’s experience with your business and the other, the ideal scenario. Then share these scenarios with your employees (or even applicants) and discuss the importance of doing things the way as described in the ideal scenario. Share your perspective on the potential impact on the business if the worse case scenario occurred. Also, be willing and able to openly share your values and beliefs and how you feel they make this business endeavor unique. You can also use the ideal scenario to find out if your employees see any barriers to being able to respond in this manner. You don’t want to set certain expectations and unknowingly place barriers in the way. This can easily foster frustration and undermine your credibility.

Having detailed and relevant case studies also helps you clarify values that have room for interpretation, such as “customer focused.” A thorough case study will help illustrate exactly what it means to be customer focused in this particular company with your particular customers. Start-ups often don’t have the leeway to leave such things to individual interpretations.

Onward and upwards

As you go forward, be vigilant and prepared to address any behavior or decisions that you feel run counter to your desired culture. You need to be able to correct the behavior as soon as it appears so you can send a clear and credible message that you are serious about “how we do things around here.” It doesn’t take as long as you might think to get people on-board. And once that happens, your small start-up takes on a personality and character that makes it stand out in the marketplace. Not bad for something intangible.

What’s “endogenous” got to do with it?

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

We had great weather here in southeastern Michigan over the weekend so I decided to drive into Detroit and see the other half of an exhibition that is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). It’s entitled “Shrinking Cities” and MOCAD and the Cranbrook Museum of Art in the Detroit suburbs (Bloomfield Hills) are co-sponsoring this exhibition locally. I’ll let the folks at MOCAD describe it for you:

Shrinking Cities, a project by Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, explores a form of urban development that has become a global phenomenon. Starting in 2002, local teams were commissioned in Detroit (USA), Manchester/Liverpool (Britain), Ivanovo (Russia), and Halle/Leipzig (Germany) to investigate and document processes of urban shrinking. In more than fifty exhibition contributions, artists, architects, filmmakers, journalists, culture experts, and sociologists reveal and illuminate the changing realities of these cities.

Here’s why I’m talking about this on a blog dedicated to corporate culture. It’s all about perceptions, human systems, and leadership.

When I toured the Cranbrook part of the exhibition a few weeks ago, the story of Detroit’s devastation overwhelmed me. It added to my familiar perceptions of Detroit (being a non-Michigan native) as being a city totally devastated, a wasteland, with little viable human activity. If pressed, I would probably conjure up images of its citizens on the brink of psychological paralysis because of the overwhelming devastation. Think of post-World War II Europe without the Marshall Plan. And the Cranbrook exhibit gave me examples of where civic leadership contributed to the devastation through corruption, complacency, or incompetence. I left the exhibit with the perception of Detroit as devastated beyond hope and any private or public intervention would only postpone, but not prevent, its inevitable death. Then I went to MOCAD.

One of the exhibits at the MOCAD is a documentary video produced by Interboro, a New York City-based research and design firm in collaboration with the Center for Urban Pedagogy. The video describes, among many things, the phenomenon in the city of Detroit called “blots.” A blot is the larger lot that results from a homeowner taking, borrowing, or buying one or more adjacent lots. Some residents have been able to piece together a number of contiguous lots because the City of Detroit has demolished a significant number of abandoned houses over the years. By acquiring adjacent lots, these residents have acquired an acreage size that is typically available only in suburban communities. Some have added gardens, gazebos, parking space, or just left the lots empty. The video authors use the homeowners’ grass roots efforts as an example of a positive, “endogenous” (produced from within) response to localized, urban blight and name it “The New Suburbanism.”

I’m not saying this documentary gave me hope, but it did alter my perception of this human system called Detroit. It gave me examples of where people are making efforts, albeit small and localized, to re-claim their immediate surroundings. And these folks have often taken initiative in the face of antagonistic or distracted civic leadership with their own agendas. Action to fill the vacuum of true leadership. And in numerous cases, these actions have been a creative response to improve their bleak circumstances. Innovation born of self-interest. Any application to other types of human systems, such as corporations?

What if we looked at organizations that are going through their own version of decline and possible extinction and the perception that outsiders have of the viability of the organization as a human system. Keeping with our Detroit theme, let’s take Ford Motor Company as an example. The perception is that it is on life-support. Bleeding billons of dollars. Closing facilities left and right. Selling off assets like Aston Martin to get its hands on some amount of cash. Leadership that has not kept the company competitive and responsive to rapid changes in the global market. A devastated workforce, emotionally paralyzed, waiting for the hatchet to swing their way. It’s easy to imagine the new CEO, Alan Mulally, and his management team totally focused on survival. Do whatever it takes to stop what some think is inevitable: Ford’s disappearance from the global marketplace.

So, Mr. Mulally, before you start blaming the Ford culture as one of the many culprits for Ford’s predicament, look deep into the organization for your version of blots. Listen. Ask questions. Send out your spies. You, yourself, poke and probe everywhere in the organization to find those pockets, albeit small and localized, of innovation borne of self-interest. As Lester Burnham said in “American Beauty,” “I’m just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose.” The Lester Burnham’s of Ford have something to show you.

Case Study: American Red Cross

Friday, March 9, 2007

Any of you remember in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks hearing about the head of the American Red Cross resigning? Given all that was going on during the fall of 2001, I know it slipped under my radar. That is, until I read a feature article by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times Magazine in its December 23, 2001 issue. The title: “Who Brought Bernadine Healy Down?” And let me tell you, I found it to be a captivating tale of “culture clash.” But the battle wasn’t between two cultures; it was between a leader and her organization’s culture. And guess who won?

You can go to the New York Times archives and purchase a copy of the article for $4.95. I highly recommend the article as a vivid case study of what can happen when a leader with a particular style and agenda goes up against an organizational culture with a very different approach and values. I often ask my coaching clients to read this, not necessarily because they share similar characteristics with Dr. Healy but because the article describes very clearly how and why a leader can end up digging their own hole.

I think you will find this story that much more compelling if you read it through the lens of behavioral styles. There are numerous models of human behavior/personality and their complementary instruments that have been around for a while, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Predictive Index, the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, Wilson Social Styles, and the DiSC Personal Profile. Though I work with a number of these instruments in my practice, I find the Wilson/DiSC models to be more useful.

Here’s a quick overview of the four quadrant model of human behavior that are reflected in the Wilson Social Styles and DiSC Profile (I’ve mixed and matched the style titles to use what I consider to be the better descriptors):

Driver: characterized by a strong desire to move things forward. A person who has a strong preference for this style can come across as a steamroller if he or she is unaware of the impact their behavior has on others.

Influence: characterized by enthusiasm and a strong desire to work in a positive, energetic environment. A person who has a strong preference for this style often finds that others don’t take him or her seriously because they don’t convey to others a certain gravitas.

Steadiness: characterized by a strong desire to maintain a steady, predictable, conflict-free environment. People who have a strong preference for this style often avoid anything resembling conflict as well as changes that disrupt their familiar patterns.

Analytical: characterized by a strong desire for high standards, quality, and logical processes. A person who has a strong preference for this style can come across as demanding because he or she has very high professional standards for themselves and co-workers.

Keep in mind that the Driver-Steadiness and the Influence-Analytical combinations have significant differences between them and therefore have the greatest potential for misunderstanding and conflict. So now let’s look at this case study through the lens of behavioral styles.

I think we can make an educated guess that Dr. Healy’s preferred style is probably a combination of Driver and Analytical. Here are some excerpts from the article that point in that direction:

Healy, baldy showcasing her impatience toward Red Cross sanctities about tradition, had long displayed a saying attributed to Clara Barton above the mantle: “It irritates me to be told how things have always been done…I defy the tyranny of precedent.”

A blunt-talking New Yorker born and bred in working-class Queens, she was not known as a diplomat. Rather, she was known as a driven professional who ruffled feathers but made things happen.

Given the following descriptions of the Red Cross culture, I think it’s safe to say that its organizational culture reflects a Steadiness orientation:

The remaining 30 governors, who are selected by local Red Cross chapters through a competitive nomination process, really control the organization. They tend to be lifelong Red Crossers who have worked their way up from local to national prominence within the organization; they also tend to be protective of traditions – and of veteran employees with whom they have longstanding relationships.

In a confidential memo to the board in late October, Healy bitterly described how the organization’s internecine dynamic was summed up for her by another executive when she arrived in September 1999: “Red Crossers will give you the shirt off their back, but will as easily put a knife in your back.”

Can you see the battle being set up? Driver vs. Steadiness. It doesn’t get any better than this. Let’s stop here so you have a chance to read the article and let me know what you think. But I’ll come back to this story. There’s even more to this ultimate culture clash.

It's Launch Time - Where's the Champagne Bottle?

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Welcome to the inaugural posting of Corporate X-Ray and thanks for your interest in this topic. I thought I would start with why I came to start this discussion and what I hope to accomplish with it over time.

For some time now, the influence an organizational culture can have on its members has intrigued me. Through my personal experience with client organizations and my reading, I’ve glimpsed how culture can affect how one acts, or how someone perceives reality, and even more so, how decisions are made and the quality of those decisions. And yet, often these rules of conduct, perception, or thinking go unspoken, unrecognized, or unchallenged. It’s as if there is some mysterious, hidden mechanism that is operating just behind the public face or below the personal experience of an organization that is calling the shots much more so than the executive suite. All this becomes even more intriguing to me when these unspoken values differ from the organization’s publicly stated corporate values. What could be more captivating but to poke about something that is both intangible and powerful?

But when I would go looking for this type of investigation in the mainstream business press, such as the Wall Street Journal or Business Week, I often came back empty handed or unsatisfied, and understandably so. It’s tough to justify the amount of print space that these types of stories require. Just as much, few publications can devote the necessary time it takes for a journalist to do a sufficient job of not only uncovering and explaining the dynamics of an organization’s culture but more importantly how it ultimately influences business performance. This is a tall order for a one-shot deal like a feature article. And when it comes to business academic research, it’s not often that I have found it to take a layman’s perspective or have a practical application in mind. Therefore I’ve turned to blogging technology as a way to address the limitations of mainstream business media and academic research while at the same time opening up the discussion to a wider audience. By doing so, my hope is that this collaborative approach will uncover insights far richer than any one person could on their own, all to our mutual benefit.

So by the name Corporate X-Ray, I mean to convey the idea of looking beyond the obvious and concrete to see what lies below the surface and how it drives human action, and ultimately business performance. Or in other words, digging deeper into “that’s the way we do things around here.” Besides, I thought Corporate X-Ray was an improvement over Corporate Autopsy.

What I hope to bring to this discussion is both my natural curiosity as well as my experience in working with a variety of organizations and different industries. The simple fact that I know from my experience that not all organizations do or view things the same way gives me a different perspective than those within an organization. This is especially true if their frame of reference lies exclusively with one organization. I am in a position to “compare and contrast” organizational cultures to sharpen my vision as I peer in to what’s below the surface.

I suspect my blogs will run the gamut, from personal observations within organizations, to commentary on applicable articles in the media, to excerpts from business books and research, to reactions to your postings. My plan is to post every Tuesday and Friday.

So my hope is that a destination like Corporate X-Ray, through our conversation that builds over time, will provide all members of the business community with insights not readily accessible elsewhere. I invite you to share your own knowledge and experience on the topics I post so we can mutually develop a penetrating vision. That’s cool.