How (36 page)

Though cultures within large organizations often share many traits, group cultures are generally singular; they differ from organization to organization, from team to team, and from unit to unit. A large, multinational company that has grown though acquisitions, operates in highly regulated markets, and faces domestic and international risks, laws, and standards manifests a different sort of culture than a family-owned construction company that has grown organically. A family-owned business is by its nature transparent; a small group of people sit down at the table and eat together each night, sharing the life of the enterprise and furthering its culture over chicken and rice. For a larger organization, influencing culture is a more complex challenge.

If individuals’ best response to the new global conditions of hypertransparency and hyperconnectedness lies in the mastery of their personal HOWS, the organization’s best opportunity to thrive lies in the mastery of culture. “Business leaders and the financial and industry analysts that follow them have also come to recognize that establishing and fostering the right corporate culture is not simply a way of staying out of trouble,” said Lou Gerstner of IBM on another occasion, “but represents a fundamental driver of sustainable differentiation and winning in the marketplace.”

Mastering culture is no longer a job for just those at the top of the organizational chart. An organization’s culture represents the collective action of all the individuals that comprise it, so on the journey to make the most of the new conditions of today, it is incumbent upon everyone who wants to do well to understand the intricacies of how culture works. Making HOW work for you every day requires the ability not only to change the interpersonal synapses between you and your direct associates, but to affect the synapses between everyone on your team. When the press is on to make the quarterly numbers, achieve a great product launch, or put together that great sales presentation, you want to be working in a stadium—whether filled with a half dozen people or a thousand—that can easily make a Wave. Moreover, the new conditions of the hyperconnected world put that ability in almost every worker, not just the top brass. You can approach it in a deliberate way and learn to see it as a system of HOWS that you can shape and influence, each element reinforcing the others in a powerful Wave of achievement. You, too, can master culture.

What? Master culture? Doesn’t culture just sort of
happen
?

Well, culture is organic, but it does not grow willy-nilly. To see how all its parts work together in mutually reinforcing ways, let’s first examine its components—the moving parts, if you will, that make the thing go. Let’s begin by discussing the types of culture most common in business today. This discussion might seem a bit like homework to you, but if you can see the framework it describes, then the chapters that follow will give you a deep sense of how it applies to thriving on the journey ahead.

THE SPECTRUM OF CULTURE

Myriad details shape, influence, and direct the formation of group cultures. Some are intrinsic to the enterprise and cannot be altered. A warehouse operation in which everyone communicates face-to-face or via walkie-talkie and shouting will foment a different culture than a cubicle-filled office where most people communicate at meetings and via e-mail. Both of these will differ from a culture that grows out of the interaction of remote workers or teams working out of their homes or small satellite offices. The substance of the business—what it makes, sells, or serves—also bears a direct relation to culture. A company making transmission gears will grow a culture different from a business statistics and research group. A young, hungry company in a new industry will develop differently from a long-established market leader. Factors like people’s age, what they wear, their attitude toward nepotism, or inclusion or exclusion of family in company functions all exert profound influence on the type of culture that grows there. These circumstantial factors are
tokens
of culture, and all influence the basic questions that culture seeks to answer: How are decisions made? How is power wielded? How does information flow? How do Waves happen?

Cultures in general tend to fall into four basic
types
. These types lie along a spectrum that, not coincidentally, also mirrors the historical development of organizational complexity and societal maturity, from the most simple and direct to the most complex and rational. I first spoke about this Spectrum of Culture in my testimony before the U.S. Federal Sentencing Commission in 2004.
⁴
These states are abstract, but as we discuss them, you will begin to see elements of them in almost every group culture in which you participate.

To get a sense of the broad strokes, let us pretend, for a moment, that we decide to go on a fact-finding mission to a series of factories where heavy and potentially dangerous machinery busily hums away, creating a brighter future for mankind (or just a bunch of well-made widgets that are highly profitable to sell). We want to tour these factories to get a sense of how they operate, so one day we set off to visit four of them.

At the first shop we visit, we meet the shop supervisor, who agrees to lead us around the factory. Grinding gears and large swinging booms whirl around us, and as we look around, the first thing we notice is that some people are wearing hard hats and other protective gear, but many are not. Ducking a low-hanging beam as we walk, we ask if we should perhaps wear something. “Do what you like,” he says. “It’s your life.” As a shower of sparks flies over our heads, we decide that we treasure our vitality more than the information we can gather here at Factory One, and we beat a hasty retreat.

At Factory Two, we immediately notice that almost everyone wears a hard hat, but as the tour begins, no one offers one to us, and there don’t seem to be any extras lying around. When we ask about this, the supervisor says, “Yeah, the boss makes us wear them. I hate them myself, but if he catches anyone without one, they get fired, and I need this job. He also makes us wear name tags and blue pants, because he can’t remember anyone’s name and his favorite color is blue. Go figure.”

Factory Three is clean, bright, and well organized. On the wall as we walk in are a number of hard hats clearly labeled “Visitors,” above which, on the wall, hang numerous posters spelling out safety procedures and regulations. “Everyone Must Wear a Hard Hat!” says one. “If You Do Not Run It, Do Not Touch It!” says another, and so on. We all immediately pick up bright yellow hats and put them on—all except our head salesperson, who turns to the supervisor and says, “Hey, I’ve got a meeting with a big client this afternoon and I don’t want to mess up my hair with a hat. Is that okay?” The supervisor looks around to see who is watching and thinks to herself for a moment. “Does this person really need to wear a hat?” she asks herself. “He looks pretty important, and I bet my boss would want me to make him happy. I wonder which is going to be better for me, enforcing this rule or making my boss happy?” Clearly, we are important guests, she realizes, and she doesn’t want to offend us, but the safety officer has been snooping around of late, and she decides against it this time. “I’d like to say okay,” she says, “but there’s a rule and I don’t want to get busted. If it were up to me, I’d let you slide. Let me ask someone higher up.” She disappears for about 15 minutes and then returns looking uneasy. “I couldn’t find anyone who can okay it,” she says, looking clearly like she doesn’t want to offend us, “so I guess you don’t have to wear it.”

As we walk onto the shop floor at Factory Four, a worker walking by immediately stops what she’s doing and hands us all hard hats and protective goggles. Just then, the supervisor walks up and greets us all warmly. The salesman, still concerned about his coif, makes the same appeal, but without hesitation the supervisor says, “At this company, we really believe in safety and if you are not wearing the proper equipment, I’m afraid I can’t let you go past this point.” The salesman, to our surprise, becomes incensed (he’s a bit of a maverick with an overdeveloped sense of importance) and complains loudly that he is a friend of the plant’s owner and he should be allowed to do as he pleases. “I’m sorry, sir,” the foreman replies, “but I take personal responsibility that nothing happens to you. I don’t want to offend you, and you can call my boss or the owner if you like, but I believe your safety and the safety of everyone are paramount.”

THE FOUR TYPES OF CULTURE

The culture in Factory One views safety from a state of
anarchy and lawlessness
, a state where everyone acts in their own self-interest with little regard for the group dynamic or organizational ethos. Village markets, desert traders, and local artisans operated in these conditions long ago, independent operators unbound by formal organizational principles. Needless to say, the turnover rate at this factory is quite high (as is the incidence of missing limbs and major concussions), but no one seems to care because they have no health plan anyway and there are lots more workers waiting to take the place of the injured when they can no longer perform their jobs. These cultures, by their very nature, build little of the predictability and certainty that capital-based enterprise requires to thrive (you can’t get people on a TRIP if they are all going their own way). Few of these cultures survive today in any significant way, though, as we will see, remnants of their habits and behaviors do.

Factory Two’s culture treats safety as a matter of
blind obedience
. Blind obedience characterizes many of the traits we associate with early, industrial age capitalistic enterprises, the culture of the manufacturing facilities of nineteenth-century Europe and the old assembly-line factories of early twentieth-century America, as well as the culture of the feudal societies that preceded them. Labor was plentiful back then, largely unskilled or manual in nature, and jobs were few. Robber barons, industrialists, and monopolists fought to gain dominance over their spheres of influence, and ruled with an iron hand. In Factory Two, no one questions the boss and everyone does what they are told or faces the consequences. They do not necessarily understand why they wear those hard hats and blue pants, nor do they necessarily care. It is enough for each to achieve their individual goals, so they wear the blue pants and ask few questions.

Factory Three, as clean and efficient as it is, is infused with a culture of
informed acquiescence
. Informed acquiescence cultures are rules-based; those wishing to participate in the culture learn the rules and agree to abide by them. The rules are clearly spelled out for everyone, and workers either embrace the rules without qualm or spend time dancing with the rules as they try to make things work. Informed acquiescence cultures dominated twentieth-century capitalism, and for good reason. Rules-based cultures are efficient and scalable. In a top-down organizational model, management can issue directives and have them sift down through the organizational chart in predictable and controllable ways. As operations scale up, larger numbers of people can be trained and governed easily. The variables of individual behaviors are minimized. With organizational boxes clearly defined, they can be filled with qualified individuals who understand the box they have to fill, the rules of the game in which they fill it, and the road up the ladder to success. As such, informed acquiescence cultures tend to be management-oriented, with an established managing class and a well-entrenched bureaucracy.

Informed acquiescence represented a brilliant and innovative step forward from blind obedience. The majority of companies, until recently, ran fairly successful operations governed by these principles. People could share more information (albeit in controlled ways), had a much higher degree of certainty and predictability, could collaborate better, and for the most part knew just where they stood. Informed acquiescence expresses the highest goals of rationalism. It treats people as rational agents: people who like carrots and hate sticks, people who like to be motivated because motivation leads to concrete results. Rationalism takes an impersonal approach to the vast complexity that is human behavior, in all its complicated glory. It strives for a world that is more black-and-white and contains fewer shades of gray; thus it is easier to manage and simpler to control. Workers are rationally informed about what is expected of them, their reward is clearly articulated, and they, in turn, acquiesce to those rules and expectations. Informed acquiescence lets us set our sights and strive. Trillions of dollars of wealth and value were created upon its back, great companies were built, humankind advanced, and many people progressed and improved their lives.

It is Factory Four, though, that most interests us. In Factory Four, everyone takes personal responsibility for maintaining a safe working environment, because they have come to believe that safety is in everyone’s best interests. It is, in a word,
valuable
. This represents the fourth general type of culture,
values-based self-governance
. There is a difference between employees who believe in a value and ones who comply with a bunch of rules. The former are governed by
should
, as in “Keeping people safe is something I value, so everyone should wear a hard hat.” They believe it; they act on their belief, and they self-govern in the name of it; when faced with a choice, the value they hold close guides them surely. The informed acquiescence employees, who are only concerned with rules, live in the world of
can
. Because the rules live outside of them, they work in a
gapped
relationship to regulations. Faced with a VIP who does not want to comply (or any situation that does not fit neatly within the rules), they are left to make decisions absent guidance other than enlightened self-interest. If they cannot decide, they call someone else to do so, a manager or boss, and so it goes up the line until someone makes a decision. Into the gap between the individual and the rules falls time, efficiency, and perhaps safety itself.