Neglecting Culture
Last year Dr. Andrew M. Jones of Lancaster University Management School wrote an interesting article in the Consulting Times entitled “Neglect Cultural Issues at your Peril.” In this article Dr. Jones talks about the need to map cultural change aspects to changes in strategy and of how shareholder value is often destroyed where people issues are not dealt with up front. Merck’s CEO, Dick Clark, states it bluntly: “The fact is culture eats strategy for lunch. You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement that strategy, the culture of the organization will defeat the strategy.” In other words, strategic imperatives must be built from there. Otherwise, you can have a great strategy, all the technology and cash that you could ever wish for, but if you don’t manage your stakeholders and the company culture you are setting yourself up to fail.
When an organization’s culture becomes out of sync with its strategic objectives or even outright dysfunctional, changing the culture is rarely an easy proposition. A necessary first step, then, is to acknowledge that change is neither easy nor natural. Evolutionary psychologists have recently taught us that change itself is not natural. Humans quickly and very adeptly establish routines and behavioral patterns to accomplish the things they need to carry out on a daily basis. In an evolutionary sense, routines provide us with great comfort and a sense of security that our basic survival needs are being met. This is true both outside and within organizations. Culture is a difficult thing to change and a huge amount of planning and execution effort needs to be applied in order to understand the core ingredients of its culture. Successful change is a two-pronged effort: managing the project and leading the people. Projects are all about scheduling, cost and product, but people are all about cooperation, concerns and...
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