Culture within a country, industry, and organization is the key force. Culture is what glues people; every country has its unique culture. Similarly, every industry has its own unique culture and environment. Culture is a solid part of entities’ lives.
“Culture’s all that invisible stuff that glues organizations together, as David Caldwell, my management professor at Santa Clara University, taught me many years ago. It includes things like norms of purpose, values, approach — the stuff that’s hard to codify, hard to evaluate, and certainly hard to measure and therefore manage. Many other experts, such as Senge and Kotter have certainly added to that understanding with complex and nuanced constructs, but Caldwell’s invisible glue comment holds a truth.” Nilofer Merchant, HBR
It impacts their perspectives, their qualities, their silliness, their expectations, their loyalties, and their stresses and fears.
Organizational culture is what keeps employees within the organization; it’s the respect, tolerance, approachability to senior management, assignment of authority, clearly defined responsibility, independence to take decisions, and unbiased decision-making process with appropriate accountability, etc. It this that sets the culture of the organization. When an organization has all these traits, only then, well thought through strategies can be developed and implemented. Organizations hire consultants to develop their strategy; many such exercises have failed; if the culture of the company is not conducive to what the people within the company see as a culture that needs to be in line with the similar organization (leader companies) within a particular industry. Case in point is the high-tech information system industry; it has a uniquely open (no cubicles), flexible (not only 9 to 5), accommodating needs (child care services) for parents with young children, etc. Thus, if you are in this industry, the organization has to come up to these standards set within the industry. Only when you have such a culture, you’ll be able to get best out of the people working there; with a great culture in place, you can get your amazing strategy executed and achieve the end goals set within the strategy.
