Ducks in a Row: the What and How of Culture
by Miki Saxon
Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.
Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.
Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:
- Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
- Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
- Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
- Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?
He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”
While I agree with everything he says, I believe he left out a most critical component.
In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.
It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.
To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.
Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.
What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.
Flickr image credit: Eirik Newth
April 9th, 2020 at 10:55 am
[…] Saxon of RampUp Solutions, Inc, contributed Ducks in a Row: The What and How of Culture. Miki continues, "Everybody recognizes that changing culture in a large enterprise is difficult.But […]