Some companies really take the corporate culture thing to heart – praise where praise is due.
One such is U.S. web-hosted business software specialists 37signals, somewhere I would be honoured to spend some time if the opportunity ever arose.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
We have recently refined and published our overall 8-part characterisation of the main repeated themes we see across organisations of all shapes and sizes.
These are Corporate Culture as Fad, whereby leaders repeatedly become caught up in the latest trendy ways without seeing through anything to a worthwhile conclusion (if there is, indeed, anything useful to be taken from each of the successive fads).
Corporate culture as a foundational essential, not a later stage luxury .
Madeleine is just embarking on a major research project into what she calls SBC (Small Business Culture) and over the coming few years The Cultureship Practice will radically develop its offerings to entrepreneurs, seeking to make superior corporate culture a foundational asset to start-ups and smaller enterprises.
This brief article is her first publicly announced information on this exciting development in the area of entrepreneurship.
How big do you have to be to start thinking about organisational culture? Is it when an organisation reaches a certain turnover, or employs a certain number of staff? Or is it when, in an evolving and organic sense, there is an identifiable culture greater than the sum of its parts? And if it is, how do you spot that?
Madeleine and I did a corporate culture seminar for a large group of public sector people the other day and it brought home to us yet again the finesse and timing needed to get organisational change on-song and pitch perfect.
We have developed a typology to address the issues of differing and paced adoption and adaptation – The Conversion Cascade (with acknowledgements to inspiration from Everett Rogers’ innovation adoption curve), which identifies people as Champions, Persuadables, Bring-Alongs and Opt-Outs.
