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.