2
WHAT IS CULTURE ANYWAY?
Three Levels of Culture
The biggest danger in trying to understand culture is to oversimplify it. It is tempting to say that culture is just “the way we do things around here,” “the rites and rituals of our company,” “the company climate,” “the reward system,” “our basic values,” and so on. These are all manifestations of the culture, but none is the culture at the level where culture matters. A better way to think about culture is to realize that it exists at several “levels,” and that we must understand and manage the deeper levels, as illustrated in Figure 2.1. The levels of culture go from the very visible to the very tacit and invisible.
Figure 2.1. The Three Levels of Culture
Level One: Artifacts
The easiest level to observe when you go into an organization is that of artifacts—what you see, hear, and feel as you hang around. Think about restaurants, hotels, stores, banks, or automobile dealerships. Note your observations and emotional reactions to the architecture, the decor, and the climate, based on how people behave toward you and toward each other.
You can sense immediately that different organizations do things differently. For example, in Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) people were constantly in meetings with each other, there were no walls or closed doors, they dressed informally, there was an intensity of feeling all around, and you got a sense of fast-paced action. In Ciba-Geigy, on the other hand, everything was very formal. People were behind closed doors, conversations were hushed, dress was formal, and you got a sense of careful deliberation and slow movement.
As a customer or new employee, you may like or dislike one or the other of these organizations; you may think to yourself that DEC and Ciba-Geigy have different cultures. But you have to be careful. All you know for sure is that they have different ways of presenting themselves and different norms of how to deal with each other. What you don’t know is what this all means.
In other words, at the level of artifacts, culture is very clear and has immediate emotional impact. But you don’t really know why the members of the organization are behaving as they do and why each organization is constructed as it is. Just by hanging around and observing, you cannot really decipher what is going on. Even when you see very similar things, you don’t know whether they mean the same thing, as in the case of pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in Mayan Central America. You have to be able to talk to insiders and ask them questions about the things you observe and feel. That takes you to the next deeper level of culture.
Level Two: Espoused Values
Imagine yourself to be a new employee or manager, offered jobs at two companies that differ as much as DEC and Ciba-Geigy did. Should you go to work for the one whose entry lobby and security procedures make you feel most comfortable? Do you know enough about either culture from experiencing the artifacts and behavior patterns, or should you dig more deeply? To dig deeper means to start asking questions about the things the organization values. Why do they do what they do? Why did DEC create open office areas while Ciba-Geigy put everyone behind closed doors? These questions have to be asked, especially about those observed artifacts that puzzle you or that seem somehow inconsistent with what you would expect. For this purpose, you need to find insiders who can explain their organization to you. Anthropologists call them “informants” and depend heavily on such conversations to decipher what is going on.
The first things you learn when you start asking questions is that the organization has certain values that are supposed to create an image of the organization. In Figure 2.1, these are shown as the organization’s “espoused values.” In DEC, you were told that they believe in teamwork, that you cannot get good decisions without arguing out what everyone’s point of view is and obtaining buy-in from those who have to implement decisions. Therefore they had to make it easy for people to communicate with each other. You may even have been told that these values came directly from Ken Olsen, the founder of the company and that at one time in the company’s history he had even forbidden having doors on offices. In this company, when they had meetings they tended to be free-for-alls and highly emotional. You may also have been given some documents, pamphlets, or short papers that described the company’s values, principles, ethics, and visions and been told that these documents reflected their basic values: integrity, teamwork, customer orientation, product quality, and so on. In Hewlett-Packard new employees were given a little book that describes the “HP Way.”
In Ciba-Geigy, you were told that good decisions cannot be made without careful thought and that they value privacy and the opportunity for employees to really think things through before going into action. You would have heard that this approach was necessary because the nature of their technology was such that careful individual research and thought was the only way to reach a good decision. In this company, meetings were formal and consisted mainly of senior people announcing the decisions made and what now had to be implemented by junior people.
In Ciba-Geigy, you would also have been given various documents that purported to describe the company’s values and principles. But to your surprise, many of the points on the list of values would be almost identical to the ones that DEC gave you. Ciba-Geigy was also customer-oriented, cared about teamwork, product quality, integrity, and so on. How could two organizations that espoused so many of the same values have completely different physical layouts and working styles? You also may have noticed that some of the values mentioned did not seem to fit the observed behavior. For example, both organizations espoused teamwork as a value, but both were highly individualistic, encouraged competitive behavior among their employees, and had reward systems that were geared entirely to the individual.
Having read a lot about culture in the popular press, you are now tempted to guess that these two organizations can be fitted into a “typology.” Clearly, Ciba-Geigy seemed to have been a “command-and-control” kind of organization, while DEC seemed to have been a flatter, network kind of organization in which people felt personally empowered. You may also have had emotional reactions to these labels, based on your own past experience and values. So now you have to dig still deeper to reconcile the inconsistencies that you have observed and been told about.
The longer you hang around and the more questions you ask, the more you see obvious inconsistencies between some of the espoused values and the visible behavior. For example, both companies espoused customer orientation, yet neither was producing products that were particularly easy to understand or use, and neither had people who seemed very polite or service-oriented.
What these inconsistencies tell you is that a deeper level of thought and perception is driving the overt behavior. The deeper level may or may not be consistent with the values and principles that are espoused by the organization. If you are to understand the culture, you must decipher what is going on at this deeper level.
Level Three: Shared Tacit Assumptions
To understand this deeper level, you have to think historically about these organizations. Throughout the history of the company, what were the values, beliefs, and assumptions of the founders and key leaders that made it successful? Recall that organizations are started by individuals or small teams who initially impose their own beliefs, values, and assumptions on the people whom they hire. If the founders’ values and assumptions are out of line with what the environment of the organization allows or affords, the organization fails and never develops a culture in the first place. But suppose, for example, that Ken Olsen, the founder of DEC, believed that to obtain good decisions and implementation of those decisions, people must argue things out and get buy-in on all decisions, and that the imposition of this way of working created a set of products that were successful. He then could attract and retain others who believed the same thing (that one must always argue things out). If by this means they continued to be successful in creating products and services that the market liked, these beliefs and values would gradually come to be shared and taken for granted. They become tacit assumptions about the nature of the world and how to succeed in it. And as DEC continued to succeed and grow, these assumptions grew stronger.
In analyzing DEC’s culture you would observe two other factors. Ken Olsen was an American and an electrical engineer who grew up in the academic environment of MIT’s Lincoln Labs. Many of the values and assumptions he brought to the table reflected U.S. values, academic norms of open debate, and the technological realities of electrical engineering and computer design. No one knew what was possible in interactive computing, so strong debate was a far better problem-solving method than arbitrary authority. Experimentation and internal competition were appropriate to the development of a new technology.
In Ciba-Geigy, the founders were Swiss-German chemists working on dyestuffs and agricultural chemicals. Unlike electrical engineering, chemistry is a much more hierarchical science in which experiments have to be very carefully done because of the dangers of mistakes. Individual creative thought was as or more relevant than group debates, and researchers with more knowledge and experience were more valued and trusted. A highly disciplined organization that could efficiently implement solutions would attract people who liked discipline and order, and as they succeeded, they also came to take it for granted that hierarchy, discipline, and order were the only way to run an effective organization based on chemistry and basic research. In either case, then, one could “explain” the essence of the culture if one understood national background, core technology underlying the business, and the personalities of the founders.
The essence of culture is then the jointly learned values and beliefs that work so well that they become taken for granted and non-negotiable. At this point they come to function more as tacit assumptions that become shared and taken for granted as the organization continues to be successful. It is important to remember that these assumptions resulted from a joint learning process. Originally, they were just in the heads of founders and leaders. They became shared and taken for granted only as the new members of the organization realized that the beliefs, values, and assumptions of their founders led to organizational success and so must be “right.”
Recall the stories from Chapter One. The new CEO of Atari did not understand the tacit assumption that products (computers and video games) result from a group effort. The IT manager introducing the paperless office at Acme Insurance did not understand the tacit assumption that getting one’s normal work finished always had priority over training and that short-run productivity goals were always more important than long-range productivity improvements. The P&G change team did understand that the unionized plants would not adopt a new method until they had developed trust in management and that the culture of these plants had been built up over decades on the tacit assumption that management could not be trusted; they would first have to evolve to a new assumption and show that the new production system would actually benefit the unionized workers.
So, How Do We Define Culture?
Culture is a pattern of shared tacit assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
What really drives daily behavior is the learned, shared, tacit assumptions on which people base their view of reality—as it is and as it should be. It results in what is popularly thought of as “the way we do things around here,” but even the employees in the organization cannot, without help, reconstruct the underlying assumptions on which their daily behavior rests. They know only that this is the way, and they count on it. Life becomes predictable and meaningful. If you understand those assumptions, it is easy to see how they lead to the kind of behavioral artifacts that you observe. But doing the reverse is very difficult; you cannot infer the assumptions just from observing the behavior. If you really want to understand the culture, you must have a process involving systematic observation and talking to insiders to help make the tacit assumptions explicit (see Chapter Four).
Implications of This Definition
The implications of this way of thinking about culture are profound. For one thing, you begin to realize that culture is so stable and difficult to change because it represents the accumulated learning of a group—the ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving the world that have made the group successful. For another thing, you realize that the important parts of culture are essentially invisible. Members of the organization cannot readily tell you what their culture is, any more than fish, if they could talk, could tell you what water is. And this point is crucial to our understanding of why cultures cannot be “measured” and “quantified” through surveys or other techniques that only ask about behavior and espoused values.
Furthermore, you begin to realize that there is no right or wrong culture, no better or worse culture, except in relation to what the organization is trying to do and what the environment in which it is operating allows. General arguments of the sort you read in popular literature—about becoming more team-based, or creating a learning organization, or empowering employees—are all invalid unless they show how the tacit assumptions on which these “new values” are based are adaptive to the environment in which the organization has to function. In some markets and with some technologies, teamwork and employee empowerment are essential and the only way the organization can continue to succeed. In other market environments or with other technologies, tight discipline and highly structured relationships are the prerequisites to success. There is no best or right culture, as the evolution and ultimate demise of DEC illustrated.
Another important implication of this definition is that culture is a “pattern” of assumptions that are interconnected to varying degrees. It is very tempting to look for one or two key assumptions and then to label the culture on that basis, as one could do by calling DEC a “networked culture” and Ciba-Geigy a “command-and-control culture.” As we will see below, the label makes it easy to miss other dimensions that are just as important to understanding the culture; hence a culture description should always be a multi-dimensional diagram. The multi-dimensionality becomes especially important when assessing the strengths and “weaknesses” of a culture. When a dimension is identified that has become dysfunctional and needs to be changed, one also has to understand how the functional elements must be preserved and how they can actually aid the change process.
The Complexity of Culture: Digital Equipment Corporation
The DEC culture can be represented by two diagrams that illustrate not only the number of dimensions that have to be taken into account but also their interconnection (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3). The purpose of showing these diagrams and analyzing the DEC culture in some detail is to illustrate the complexity of a culture. In practice, it would take a long period of living in the organization to be able to depict the tacit assumptions in this level of detail. I was able to create these diagrams because I had consulted with DEC for over twenty-five years. For most purposes, this level of detail is not necessary, as we will see.
When DEC started, it was, in effect, helping to create the computer market. No one knew for sure what the right products were and what customers would want in the long run. The ten deep assumptions on which DEC was built were that: 
Figure 2.2. DEC’s Cultural Paradigm: Part I
• Rugged individualism and an entrepreneurial spirit in the employees are the only way to succeed.
• Employees are willing and able to take responsibility.
• Smart entrepreneurial people who are creating innovations must debate things out to arrive at “truth.”
• Work must be fun.
• Everyone is a member of the family and, therefore, has job security.
• Customers must be treated with total respect, must always be told the truth.
• Responsible people with goodwill can solve any problem. 
Figure 2.3. DEC’s Cultural Paradigm: Part II
• Engineers know best (especially when most early customers are also engineers and techies).
• Internal competition among projects and letting the market decide what wins is the best way to define priorities.
• Maintaining centralized paternalistic control is essential.
In describing and analyzing a culture, it is important to recognize that some of these assumptions interact directly with others. One cannot have strong debates without responsible people and one cannot sustain the emotionally draining emphasis on debate and pushback without the security of the paternalistic climate. Failure only meant that the person was in the wrong job and could move to another job and succeed. It is also possible for assumptions to conflict with each other, in which case one must identify which assumption has priority in cases of conflict. For example, the assumption that people can be given and can exercise responsibility is potentially in conflict with the assumption that one must maintain centralized control. When DEC was young and small, these two assumptions could co-exist, but when DEC was older, larger, and had developed strong autonomous engineering managers, these managers overrode many of Ken Olsen’s efforts to maintain centralized control.
These assumptions working in concert with each other created an incredible sense of empowerment at all levels of the organization and an atmosphere of involvement and commitment that created a highly successful company. With success, the assumptions became taken for granted as “the way we do things.” But reaching consensus by this means was a slow and often painful process. Successful negotiation and buy-in depended very much on the trust that developed in the “family,” which was based on the members’ being familiar with one another’s styles. If the hardware developer asked a software counterpart whether the software would be ready in six months and received an affirmative answer, he would know whether this meant literally six months, or maybe nine months, or maybe not at all unless he kept pressuring his associate. Engineers and managers were “functionally familiar” with each other. They knew how to calibrate each other from working closely together over some period of time.
If a decision was made and down the road someone questioned it, it was his or her obligation to “push back” and “do the right thing” (as the deep assumptions put it). This process often unraveled decisions and improved them, but it took much longer and only worked if the functional familiarity among the players was high and they could trust each other not to bring up trivial issues. This model of how to work with each other was enormously successful and catapulted DEC into the Fortune 50.
But success brought growth, and as the organization grew, the debate was increasingly with strangers rather than trusted colleagues. Functional familiarity became rare and was replaced with formal contracts, checking on each other, and playing power games to make things happen. At the same time, the technology itself became more complex; this required a shift from an environment in which individual engineers designed complete products to one of large teams of engineers having to coordinate their efforts to build the complex products that were becoming possible and desirable. The highly individualistic, competitive, creative engineers found themselves increasingly having to coordinate their part of the design with others whose ideas they did not necessarily respect. The sense of involvement and commitment that characterized small projects was hard to sustain on large projects with multiple parts that had to be coordinated in a disciplined fashion. Whereas early in its history DEC engineers were kings and dominated decisions, as the business matured other functions such as finance and marketing became more powerful; the result was growing conflicts among functional groups that had created their own subcultures over time.
DEC’s success attracted competitors, and as computers increasingly became a commodity, time-to-market and the cost of development and production became major factors. These external forces made the original assumptions about individual autonomy and empowerment increasingly dysfunctional. The empowered engineering managers became powerful. Not only could they not agree among themselves, but they also ignored or overruled Ken Olsen’s efforts to focus because they now felt more powerful than their founder. DEC leadership recognized these new forces and talked about shifting to smaller units in which the original assumptions that people believed in could be implemented, and would allow focusing on a smaller number of products, more discipline and hierarchy. But leadership could not give up the tacit assumptions of individual empowerment and debate because that was the basis of their success as innovators. As they grew, they became increasingly victim to a political process in which baronies grew and mistrust replaced the functional familiarity on which the culture had depended.
Central control became ever more difficult. Excessive costs, slow time-to-market, and inability to develop a coherent strategy in an increasingly complex market caused serious financial problems, until finally in the 1990s DEC had a major change in leadership and embraced a more hierarchical structure that would allow the discipline and efficiency the market now needed. As this happened, DEC old-timers lamented what they regarded as a loss of the DEC culture and many of them left voluntarily to build organizations of their own on the DEC cultural model. Paradoxically, even as DEC the economic entity disappeared, the DEC culture survived in its alumni.
The lesson is that a good or right culture is a function of the degree to which shared tacit assumptions create the kind of strategy that is functional in the organization’s environment. If you were the kind of person who preferred the open, confrontational type of organization that DEC represented and went to work there in the 1970s, you would have had a blast. If you were there with the same mind-set in the 1990s, you might have found yourself bored by all the rules or out of a job.
The Bottom Line
It is clear that culture is a complex concept that must be analyzed at every level before it can be understood. The biggest risk in working with culture is to oversimplify it and miss several basic facets that matter:
1. Culture is deep. If you treat it as a superficial phenomenon, if you assume that you can manipulate it and change it at will, you are sure to fail. Furthermore, culture controls you more than you control culture. You want it that way, because culture gives meaning and predictability to your daily life. As you learn what works, you develop beliefs and assumptions that eventually drop out of awareness and become tacit rules of how to do things, how to think about things, and how to feel.
2. Culture is broad. As a group learns to survive in its environment, it learns about all aspects of its external and internal relationships. Beliefs and assumptions form about daily life, how to get along with the boss, what kind of attitude one should have toward customers, the nature of one’s career in the organization, what it takes to get ahead, what the sacred cows are, and so on. Deciphering culture can therefore be an endless task. If you do not have a specific focus or reason for wanting to understand your organizational culture, you will find it boundless and frustrating.
3. Culture is stable. The members of a group want to hold on to their cultural assumptions because culture provides meaning and makes life predictable. Humans do not like chaotic, unpredictable situations and work hard to stabilize and “normalize” them. Any prospective culture change therefore launches massive amounts of anxiety and resistance to change. If you want to change some elements of your culture, you must recognize that you are tackling some of the most stable parts of your organization.
Questions for the Reader
So what should you do differently tomorrow?
• Take some time to reflect on your own concept of culture and to integrate into it some of the insights from this chapter.
• Think about the organization in which you work, and see whether you can come up with some of its espoused values. Does the organization live its espoused values? If not, what are the deeper, shared tacit assumptions that explain daily behavior.
• Start by thinking about the artifacts around you and the behavior you observe. Locate things that puzzle you; ask an old-timer why they are that way. Try to see the culture as an outsider might (but for now, try not to evaluate it or think about changing it).
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.