Nimble, Focused, Feisty. Sara Roberts
Читать онлайн книгу.
an automobile or a computer, to deliver oil or electricity, to provide a specific restaurant or hotel experience anywhere the customer happened to go, and they were built to do basically the same thing over and over as efficiently as possible in order to meet an ever-expanding market need while fending off others who tried to do much the same thing. The culture—the how—may have been instilled by a particularly intentional founder or leader, but it grew out of the processes and approaches that defined success within that model.
The more success accrued, the more that culture was reinforced. Indeed, we have seen throughout history that organizations with the “strongest” cultures are the ones that have been, in Jim Collins’ words, “Built to Last.” Collins’ research was based on the long-term success of definitive market leaders that had bested rivals with similar processes. Culture, to Collins, was the critical difference between those comparison companies. And this rings true to our understanding of twentieth-century organizations. Over decades, reinforced by success, the culture of lasting companies becomes locked-in and distinct. It was said, in the Mad Men era, that you could always tell someone who worked at an IBM or a GM by how he dressed, how he talked and acted, even how he thought.
We’ve entered a world in which companies come and go, break up and reform, and change direction at a much more dynamic rate. This started to happen in the early 1990s, when the big companies of the twentieth century, such as IBM or GE, began to divest themselves of major business lines and lay off tens of thousands of employees in response to market and financial pressures. And it accelerated as capital markets became attracted to the new technology startups of the dot-com era, when companies were formed and grew dramatically in valuation almost overnight.
The US military coined a term in the 1990s to describe the increasingly unsettled political, social, and economic environment: VUCA, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Today, it feels as though the pressures of VUCA have become even more daunting and real.
What are the root causes of this change? The suspects comprise a familiar lineup—technology, consumer expectations, globalization, capital markets, and employee expectations (you know those Millennials). However, it’s helpful to understand the influence of each in the context of the effect on corporate culture.
Technology and Consumer Expectations
Let’s start with technology. When information technology first began to change our world, it seemed as though its impact would be felt mostly in what companies could do and how people worked. Today, it’s clear that technology has had an even more radical impact on consumer expectations and habits. People now expect technology to deliver them whatever they want, whenever they want it, as cheaply as possible with no more effort than a swipe of a finger on a smartphone. This has led to incredible malleability in how and what we consume. Consumers are now willing to shift product loyalties or delivery mechanisms at the drop of a hat. Indeed, more than 60 percent of consumers who interact with brands today do so through multiple channels.11 Social media has normalized real-time responses, and consumers expect that immediacy in all aspects of their lives. They want consistency and quality regardless of time, place, device, or medium. Companies, meanwhile, are in a race to figure out how to reconfigure themselves to meet those insatiable needs and extremely high expectations.
Globalization
Globalization is another force that has affected how and what we expect from businesses. Once upon a time, products and services had a strong regional basis. Now, they can be delivered and consumed anywhere, any time, 24/7. Competitors are no longer next door; they’re all over the world and able to leverage lower overhead and a just-in-time global delivery system to beat you at whatever game you choose to play. This further reduces the value of the what and puts a premium on the how.
Capital Markets
Capital markets have the same global freedom. Once, relationships with investors and bankers were long-term, intimate, and clubby. Today, trillions of dollars zip from one side of the global economy to another in response to exciting new investment opportunities, thus abandoning less-promising ones without mercy. The appeal of “what” is more fleeting than ever; only “how” can sustain the interest of fickle capital.
Employee Expectations
Employee expectations have also changed dramatically. While people can’t move about quite as easily as goods, services, or capital yet, they are no longer as tied to geographic regions for employment. Working remotely or virtually is now unremarkable. Teams all over the world can collaborate in real time. And Millennials, in particular, are drawn to places of work that engage and stimulate them, and they enjoy the freedom to be choosy. As a group, they are adaptive and innovative by nature and prefer their employer to be so, as well. They aren’t attracted to traditional hierarchical structures, and they want to work for businesses that support innovation and thrive on change. In fact, according to Deloitte’s third annual Millennial Survey, 78 percent of Millennials are influenced by how innovative a company is when deciding whether they want to work there, and most say their current employer does not encourage them to think creatively.12
Millennials also care about company purpose and culture like no other generation before them. Forbes reports that 60 percent of Millennials leave their companies in less than three years, with the primary reason tied to the lack of a good cultural fit.13 And they consume products with the values of the companies making those products in mind. All of this points, once again, to the importance of “how” over what. Can twentieth-century culture evolve to meet the demands and pressures of the twenty-first century VUCA reality?
The difference between old-era culture and new-era culture is striking. A winning culture in the twentieth century was methodical, efficient, and hierarchical. It was built with industrial needs in mind to cohere around simple processes that could be scaled. It benefited from squeezing out variation as a way of reducing noise and controlling chaos. It won by focusing relentlessly on the what, and doing that same what over and over again. It changed when it had to, but only after long deliberation, exhaustive analysis, and as little course correction as possible.
Indeed, that description is one of the reasons why culture—so vaunted in the 1990s by the likes of Jim Collins and Tom Peters, among others—is under attack today as a force actually holding companies back. UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Chatman, a thought leader in research on organizational culture, acknowledges this when she writes, “Conventionally, researchers have argued that strong cultures that align employee behavior with organizational objectives should boost performance. More recently, research has shown that a strong culture can actually stifle creativity and innovation in dynamic environments because people are adhering too closely to routines creating behavioral uniformity, inertia, and an inward focus.”14
In other words, in a VUCA world, some believe that a strong culture can limit or hamstring an organization rather than bolster and protect it. And certainly this holds true when we think of a Blockbuster or similar behemoth. But Chatman’s research actually shows that a strong culture, in and of itself, is not disadvantageous today if—and it’s a big IF—that culture prizes adaptability and innovation over stability and process while also relying on strong alignment with values to direct people, rather than enforced adherence to rigid policies and rules. In fact, such companies—the ones with strong, cohesive, adaptive, innovative cultures—are performing better financially today and growing faster over time in spite of the turbulence of a VUCA world.
In essence, Chatman is saying that a strong culture reinforces a vigorous company’s direction because that company can successfully adapt or change depending on strategic needs or market forces. If the culture is too weak, people will not know what to do or how to act in tumultuous circumstances, and the organization will lose its way. But companies can go too far. If the culture is too calcified and inflexible, the company will be unable to adapt and innovate effectively.
I think of culture as the guide and the glue of an organization. When culture provides the kind of clarity and intentionality that support its “why” or purpose and the characteristics of its “how,” it helps people see and understand where they need to go. At the