Culture Is What You Make It
by Miki SaxonCorporate culture only recently came into its own; no longer something more smoke and mirrors than real.
These days, academics, pundits and gurus of all stripes research, dissect, write, discuss, preach, teach, and study it, all with the goal of defining it so it can be improved.
It’s still considered a soft science, a moving target, amorphous and difficult to pin down and is often influenced by unlikely sources as opposed to the expected ones.
How in the world can that be compared to a computer, with its unyielding hardware and logical, literal software?
In computing, the term I/O refers to input, whatever is received by the system, and output, that which results from the processing.
Programmers know that the results coming out of the computer won’t be any better than the information given it and this phenomenon is know as “garbage in/garbage out.”
And there you have the similarity with culture and everything else in life.
What comes out is a function of what you put in.
Blindly accepting everything offered by even the most brilliant source will result in garbage out at some point.
Learning/improving requires critical thinking on your part. No one person, past, present or future, has all the answers. You need to evaluate the available information, take a bit from here and a bit from there, apply it to your situation and, like a computer, process it. The result will be at least slightly different from what you started with because you’ve added the flavor of your own life experiences, knowledge and MAP to the mix—and that’s good, it shouldn’t be an exact copy.
Culture is a living organism, growing and changing all the time and you’re contributing to that growth.
Image credit: flickr
