Foundation Considerations for Corporate Cultural Transformation

 

We seem to be bombarded from all directions lately with suggestions that it is important, if not imperative, that we learn to change the way we do business in this country if we are to successfully compete in a global economy. From an organizational perspective, we live in an age of change that may be unprecedented in history. Recently, an editorial in Fortune suggested that we keep diaries to help answer future questions of how we made it through the great business revolution of the late 20th century [6]. As further indication of this phenomenon, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, editor of Harvard Business Review and an expert on the topic of innovation and corporate change, says that "a revolution is taking place... as dramatic to me as the revolutions in Eastern Europe." This revolution, she says, is "a sweeping cultural transformation" [5].

 

Amidst this environment of chaos and revolution has sprung up a preponderance of organizational consultants and theorists espousing various models and beliefs about how American business should respond to be successful in the tumultuous times ahead. We have the Total Quality Management advocates in Deming, Juran and Crosby, reengineering is the brainchild of Hammer and Champy, Covey pushes interdependence and "principle-centered leadership," and Senge champions "systems thinking." All are promoting models for dealing with various aspects of transforming corporate culture.

 

Acceptance of the notion that organizations have unique cultures is a relatively recent occurrence. The ethereal nature of defining and quantifying culture, particularly as it exists within a company, is a major reason for the delinquency of business to accept and study it. However, developments over the past decade have begun to demonstrate tangibly that an organization's culture, and its ability to transform its culture when faced with a changing marketplace, is the difference between survival and bankruptcy. This article shall attempt to define, amalgamate, and simplify the major features for consideration in effecting corporate culture transformation.

The logical starting point for a definition is the dictionary, hence the following excerpt from the American Heritage Dictionary:

culture (noun) l.(a) The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. (b) These patterns, traits, and products considered as the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population: Edwardian culture; Japanese culture; the culture of poverty, (c) These patterns, traits, and products considered with respect to a particular category, such as a field, subject, or mode of expression: religious culture in the Middle Ages; musical culture; oral culture.

 

From the perspective of organizational culture, or corporate culture if you will, no consensus of definition may be found. Indeed, Allaire and Firsirotu [1] have identified eight different schools of thought on the subject. For purposes of this article, I will use the definition that Brooke Tunstall developed:

... the amalgam of shared values, behavior patterns, mores, symbols, attitudes, and normative ways of conducting businessthat, more than its products or services, differentiate it from all other companies. Cultural uniqueness is a primary and cherished feature of organizations, a critical asset that is nurtured in the internal value system [10].

 

Or perhaps an even simpler definition is what Bro Uttal calls "the soft, bewildering underpinnings of business" [12].