As a business, you are your culture. It’s the essence of who you are. The good news is it’s the one thing the competition can’t usurp.
Culture within a business setting
Culture isn’t a plaque in reception, a consulting exercise or a memo to all employees. It isn’t limited to the organisation’s values, exclusively the province of HR, a repackaged engagement survey or something you “do” and then forget about until this time next year.
If the term never passed the CEO’s lips your culture would still define what’s possible. And it will change … whether you want it to or not. As a business, you are your culture. It’s the essence of who you are. The good news is it’s the one thing the competition can’t usurp.
Culture within a business setting is a container for diversity. Here, one is faced with the law of requisite variety. For a system to sustain itself, it needs at least as much internal variety as exists in the environment in which it sits (context). If you look around your organisation or team and, for the most part, those involved all look and sound the same, know that you are ill-equipped for a world where ideas are the lifeblood of tomorrow’s success.
The challenge culture presents is that it is the behavioural equivalent of the water in a goldfish bowl. We mostly don’t know that it’s there but it, nevertheless, sustains life.
To survive is to adapt. “Are you managing your culture?” If any of the seven questions that follow receives a negative response, the answer is, almost certainly, “not so much.”
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John O. Burdett is founder of Orxestra® Inc. He has extensive international experience as a senior executive. As a consultant he has worked in more than 40 countries for organisations that are household names. John has worked on organisation culture for some of the world’s largest organisations. His ongoing partnership with TRANSEARCH International means that his thought leading intellectual property, in any one year, supports talent management in many hundreds of organisations around the world.
