"When Worlds Collide: Culture Clash"

Jerry Want

Journal of Business Strategy

2003, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 14-21

The author of this article states "In the current age of radical change, failing corporate cultures directly contribute to more business failures than at any time in the past." In this article, the author classified various corporate cultures, gives some suggestions for corporate culture building, and identifies barriers to culture building.

The classifications of cultures are:

1. Predatory cultures—"Predatory cultures are punitive, alienating, and exploitative. They are blind to the true stakeholders of the business and are not able to anticipate future consequences of their actions"
2. Frozen cultures—"Frozen cultures are paralyzed by gridlock and denial. These cultures have an aversion to risk-taking while showing little innovation and no 'over-the-horizon' planning…New ideas rarely see the light of day while stepping outside the chain of command is not tolerated"
3. Chaotic cultures—"Chaotic cultures are fragmented and unfocused. They rarely have a focused mission or strategy that can be sustained in the competitive marketplace"
4. Political cultures—"These companies are balkanized by warring factions. The organization, as a whole, never equals the sum of its parts as turf warfare, hero building, and retaliation are normative behaviors"
5. Bureaucratic cultures—"The bureaucratic culture places the needs of customers below the needs of the bureaucracy"
6. Service cultures—"Companies with service cultures focus on fulfilling the customer's needs first, in order to serve their own. Mission, strategy, structure, systems, policies and operations all start and end with the customer"
7. New age cultures—"The new age culture is the top performing culture as it combines innovation with strong commitment to the customer and its employees. It fosters an egalitarian work environment that encourages bottom-up feedback from the workforce while employees share fully in wealth generated by the company"

Requirements for corporate culture building include:

1. Close the gap between business planning and corporate culture
2. Create a corporate culture that embraces change
3. Keep innovative people and their ideas at home
4. Break down the bureaucratic mind-set
5. Identify natural change leaders and empower them to lead the change process
6. Build a broad consensus for culture change from the bottom up as well as the top down
7. Reinforce ethical conduct at all levels
8. Create sponsorship at the top
9. The culture is about behaviors
10. Never lose track of the customer

Some major barriers to culture building are:

1. Widespread resistance and fear
2. Over-reliance on the fads, fix-its, and magic bullets
3. Not enough resources
4. Incremental goals which will not accomplish the needed change
5. The company may be too swamped with problems to make changes
6. Complacency until something major goes wrong

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