Organizational culture is often referred to as “the way we do things around here,” but it goes far beyond in determining an organization’s fate, success, and reputation. Culture drives the defining characteristics of successful companies and is also the explanation for the decline of companies that once prospered.
In this eBook, you will find real and practical cases of how organizations’ culture builds best-in-class reputations, as well as questions and exercises that you can leverage and use with your team to understand both where your culture is and where it should be.
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“Zuckerberg’s New Leadership Style Sparks Turmoil at Top,” screamed a large headline on the front page of a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, based on the CEO gathering his 50 top execs together and telling them that Facebook Inc. was at war and he planned to lead the company accordingly, “causing unprecedented turmoil atop Facebook . . . and driving several key executives from the company.” For many, a comment like this would elicit a “Ho-hum” from any executive hearing it. It may be that the article’s author confused leadership style with a crude attempt at culture change.
One of the big things that culture does is to make an organization a more predictable and safer place for its members. What Zuckerberg did was to step all over Facebook’s predictability and safety. Zuckerberg told his execs that “during times of peace, executives can move more slowly and ensure that everybody is on board with key decisions.” An alternate interpretation of Zuckerberg’s awakening to “war” is that he had discovered that it is a whole different game swimming downstream in a fast-growing company and swimming upstream in a company challenged by competition, regulation, and public criticism. Organizational cultures form an answer to a single question: What does it take to be successful? And when the answer changes, the culture has to change or fail.
To start on the path toward moving your culture to where it should be and how to build a best-in-class reputation.
