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Organizational Culture
11/08/2001
04/02/2003
Until recently, most executives ignored the role of organizational culture even though the greatest management thinkers such as Peter Drucker trumpeted its importance. As volatility and uncertainty have grown and as we have shifted to a knowledge economy that values innovation as well as execution, leaders are looking to this “soft” technology to make full use of employee talents and to align corporate goals with individual activity.

Gaining a good grasp of the potential of organizational culture to enable or disable a company requires executives to pull together threads of knowledge from diverse areas. No one model works in all situations. Architects of healthy organizational cultures draw on these threads to shape and adapt dynamically. That means carefully examining incentives – whether rooted in money, pride, position, recognition, or responsibility – to align individuals with corporate strategy. Despite its apparent “soft” nature, the understanding and shaping of organizational culture can draw on a hard, mathematical discipline such as social network analysis.

Culture will be affected by structural issues such as those found in the choice between degrees of hierarchy and network, by the personalities of the top leaders, and by the way performance evaluation is handled. The abstract workings of a company’s culture will profoundly affect its innovation capabilities, its ability to absorb acquisitions, achieve consistently excellent execution, minimize corruption, to and to spur teamwork and the open flow of information. The Organizational Culture topic cuts across traditional dividing lines to help you develop a rich understanding of – and an ability to foster – the right culture for your company right now.
Theory U and Theory T
strategy+business published on 04/13/2010, rated by our experts.
Back in the 1930s, Keynes famously quipped that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” If the “practical men” are business executives and managers, we might substitute “defunct management theorist... [read more...]
The Power of Pull
How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
Basic Books published on 04/13/2010, rated by our experts.
The singular power of The Power of Pull is its ability draw together for us a whole array of recent trends and changes in perspectives into one cohesive metaphor. Hagel, Brown, and Davison help us more precisely tune into the signal emanating from the noise of what might otherwise remain for us... [read more...]
How to Pick a Good Fight
Harvard Business Review published on 12/01/2009, rated by our experts.
If your goal at the gym is to build up your muscles, you need to work out hard but not too hard. If you spend most of your time annoying people by talking on your cell phone with just the occasional half-hearted set, you won’t see significant results. But neither will you achieve the best results by... [read more...]
The 35-item Integrated Cultural Framework (ICF) Survey
Pepperdine University published on 01/01/2009, rated by our experts.
The Integrated Cultural Framework (ICF) is a tool for identifying characteristics of organizations. It is based on the idea that organizational culture influences the likelihood of success for change strategies. The ICF assesses culture according to seven dimensions: Ability to Influence; Comfort with... [read more...]
Recognizing Organizational Culture in Managing Change
Graziadio Business Report published on 01/10/2009, rated by our experts.
Organizational improvements may be hard to achieve without first making cultural changes. Although that view is often stated in the organizational change literature, the authors of this article point out that cultural change is touch to bring about, requires lengthy interventions, and may be too costly... [read more...]
My Unfashionable Legacy
strategy+business published on 08/29/2007, rated by our experts.
In the high-performance systems approach of self-organizing teams and participative management, people throughout an enterprise are granted the skills, understanding, processes, and authority they need to make their own decisions on behalf of quality and business success. This contrasts with organizations... [read more...]
Employee Engagement: Beyond the Fad and into the Executive Suite
Leader to Leader published on 05/01/2007, rated by our experts.
Although plenty has been written about employee engagement, little attention has been given to the engagement levels of the leadership and management teams, says Theresa Welbourne. In this article, she sets out to examine the context and behaviors of employee engagement in order to figure out the causes... [read more...]
Building the Civilized Workplace
McKinsey Quarterly published on 04/01/2007, rated by our experts.
Have you called your boss a jerk lately? He or she may have merited the label at some point but, if you’re like the great majority, you will have adhered to the World War II maxim, “Loose lips sink ships.” One employee quoted in this article conveys the startling news that “My boss thanked me for... [read more...]
Chaordic Organization
ManyWorlds published on 03/14/2006, rated by our experts.
In most cases, we find it easy to respond to the wild ideas of social theorists by ignoring, dismissing, or laughing at them. Whether or not we are justified in these responses, the lack of working models of the envisioned social orders leaves them vulnerable. Dee Hock has spent considerable time and... [read more...]
Four Keys to Managing Emergence
MIT Sloan Management Review published on 01/01/2006, rated by our experts.
Management writers have hammered home the message that business has to operate differently if it is to survive and flourish in today’s uncertain and dynamic environments. In such environments, managers contribute to a company’s success by creating the conditions for the emergence of work processes in... [read more...]
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