Organizational Culture: Myths and Management

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Boss Magazine, Sept. 2018

by David Mallon


Organizational culture. It can be a free-flowing front of competitive advantage or an insurmountable obstacle to change. What it can’t be, is ignored.

It can’t be ignored because culture persists. Strip away everything else from a company—its strategy, operating model, and customer offerings—and its culture remains. That’s a major reason why 82 percent of the respondents to Deloitte’s 2016 Global Human Capital Trends survey cited culture as a potential competitive advantage.

The persistence of culture is a good news/bad news story. The good news is that an organization’s culture—that is, the norms, values, and behaviors that govern how things get done within a company—can make it strong and resilient. The bad news is that an organization’s culture can threaten its very existence if it is too hidebound to accept change. The paradox is that both the good news and the bad news can exist in the same culture.

These days, employees and customers are demanding greater cultural clarity and authenticity than ever before. They especially want “the way we do things around here” to include a robust concern for corporate citizenship, which we at Bersin define as a company’s ability to do social good and account for its actions. In our 2018 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 77 percent of the respondents cited citizenship as important and 36 percent rated it as very important. Read the rest here