Two Sides Of Cult Culture
by Miki SaxonDid you do your homework from Saturday?
I asked you to read Heather Clancy’s take on great culture and said that I’d explain today why I disagree.
The problem I have is with the idea of culture as a cult.
The definition of cult is given as “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work,” and culture as “set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices;” Heather sees ‘devotion’ and ‘shared’ as interchangeable—and that makes me very uncomfortable.
Another definition for cult is “obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.”
The examples she uses, Apple, Google and Salesforce.com, are superb companies.
But when someone says ‘cult’ to me I think of Jim Jones, whose followers had great devotion, so much that they followed Jones to the death—literally.
Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street banking houses had/have strong cult cultures as does AIG. Their people had great devotion and passion to cultures that were focused on winning no matter what and we all know where that got us. Another enterprise that comes to mind is Enron.
The point I’m making is that cult culture, like most concepts, cuts both ways.
When culture becomes a cult it can lose its flexibility and willingness to grow and change—necessities in today’s fast-changing world.
It’s always tempting to choose examples that highlight the positive view of a business (or any) concept, but it is imperative to avoid assumptions and remember that there are two sides to everything.
Image credit: Gúnna on flickr
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