"individuals work with one another"

Dedicado ao meu colega das conversas oxigenadoras:

"Culture. You can only change it by altering how individuals work with one another.

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So, what is culture and why is it so persistent and limiting to strategy?

There are as many definitions of culture as there are for strategy, but I think of it primarily as a book of rules residing in the minds of employees that guides how they interpret situations and decisions. Culture is what helps a manager understand "how things get done around here,' "what I should do in this situation," and "who must I pay attention to." The rules making up the culture are developed by each person's observations of how people around them react to and explain situations and decisions, particularly those involving extreme outcomes with significant impact for the people involved, even if such decisions or events are unusual.

The strength of a company's culture is determined by the similarity of the mental rule books of the employees. A culture is weak or diffuse if the rule books vary across peopleso that employees' interpretations of a given situation or decision are heterogeneous. Cultures are powerful when the people all have a very similar rule book and consequently interpret and react to the same decision or situation in the same way.

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Somewhat like a neural network in the brain, culture emerges from the interaction between the environment (the formal mechanisms) and individual behaviors (the interpersonal mechanisms). Because of that, little can be done to change the culture of the organization directly by fiat, and CEOs who make the attempt usually lose their jobs.

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For a culture to align with changes to the formal mechanisms of the organization, changes are required in the way members of the organization interact.

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When executives try to change an organization's culture, they often bring the wrong tools to the task-changes to formal processes and systems along with righteous admonition. This approach is doomed to failure because culture depends not on systems and processes or a leader's beliefs but on how individuals react to each other in the context of their rules and relationships. To achieve real culture change, executives should focus on and show discipline in how they structure the human interactions that make up an organization's working day. That requires investing time and committing to repetition. People won't change their ways overnight, but when they do, the consequences are profound and durable."

Trechos retirados de "A New Way to Think" de Roger L. Martin.