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As a leader on a major change initiative, you may be worried about whether your organization's culture will help or hinder your efforts. Or you may be sure it will hinder but not be sure what to do about it. How do you create a culture that sustains innovation? How can your organization effectively team and collaborate globally, and with external partners? You need practical approaches - not "feel-good" exercises.
Historically, culture-change work has been hampered by:
- inconsistent definitions and terminology - what does "culture" really mean?
- recommendations with a dubious connection to business results - or a history of wasting time and money while leaving problems unresolved; and
- inability objectively to measure progress.
Some situations, like mergers and acquisitions and alliances, have a built-in excuse for failure - culture clash. Can anything be done about culture clash, or do you simply hope for the best?
These are some of the issues IBM faced when integrating the $3.5 billion acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in 2002. Knowing the existing integration toolkit was inadequate, the team of consultants and researchers developed something new. The result is an approach named "tangible culture" and its three concepts - "business practices", "right vs right", and "outcome narratives" - which can be used in various situations.
The "tangible culture" approach explained
I am the lead author of a new book, Can Two Rights Make a Wrong? Insights from IBM's Tangible Culture Approach , in which these concepts are explained:
Business practices - the unseen hand (or autopilot) that propels organizational action.
Business practices are the informal rules that tell people how to execute their work. Business practices exist for every area of the organization, including processes, policies, leadership, measures, technology, strategy, rewards, and recognition. Business practices are a sufficient surrogate for the complex topic of culture in business settings. They are...