Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations E-Book

Daniel Denison

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: J-B US non-Franchise Leadership
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Filled with case studies from firms such as GT Automotive, GE Healthcare China, Vale, Dominos, Swiss Re Americas Division, and Polar Bank, among others, this book (written by Dan Denison and his co-authors) combines twenty years of research and survey results to illustrate a critical set of cultural dynamics that firms need to manage in order to remain competitive. Each chapter uses a case as a means to illustrate an important aspect of culture change focusing on seven common culture-change dilemmas including creating a strategic alignment, keeping strategy simple, and more.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise Page

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1: Building a High-Performance Business Culture

What Is Corporate Culture? Why Is It Important?

How Corporate Culture Impacts Business Performance

Some Real Examples

Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations

The Plan for This Book

Chapter 2: Supporting the Front Line

Making the Front Line the Foundation of Your Strategy

Lessons for Leaders

Strategies for Supporting the Front Line: Beyond Domino's

Chapter 3: Creating Strategic Alignment

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch!

Lessons for Leaders

Creating Strategic Alignment: Beyond DeutscheTech and Swiss Re

Chapter 4: Creating One Culture Out of Many

E Pluribus Unum

History Has Its Own Logic

Lessons for Leaders

Creating One Culture Out of Many: Beyond Polar Bank

Chapter 5: Exporting Culture Change

Can Culture Change Be Exported?

Lessons for Leaders

Exporting Culture Change: Beyond GT Automotive

Chapter 6: Building a Global Business in an Emerging Market

Building a Business in an Emerging Market

Lessons for Leaders

Building a Global Business in an Emerging Market: Beyond GE Healthcare

Chapter 7: Building a Global Business from an Emerging Market

Becoming a Global Challenger

Lessons for Leaders

Building a Global Business from an Emerging Market: Beyond Vale

Chapter 8: Building for the Future: Trading Old Habits for New

Trading Old Habits for New

Understanding the Importance of Routines

Tracking Our Progress

Building for the Future

Appendix : Denison Organizational Culture Survey: Overview and Resource Guide

Interpreting the Survey Results

Feedback and Action Planning

The Benchmarking Process

Validation

Research Overview

References

Acknowledgments

The Authors

Index

Praise for Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations

“A milestone in the culture studies arena.”

—Edgar H. Schein, professor emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“A page-turner for senior executives that embrace change.”

—Cees 't Hart, CEO, FrieslandCampina

“Denison and his colleagues provide the definitive guide for guiding cultural change during these weird and often vexing times. Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations grabs you with compelling cases, helps you with fact-based and useful advice, and is the rare business book that is a joy to read.”

—Robert I. Sutton, professor, Stanford University; author of The New York Times bestseller Good Boss, Bad Boss

“I believe ‘what gets measured gets done.’ The tools and metrics provided by Denison help organizations track their progress and performance in the all-important area of culture. All organizations have a culture, but sadly, many have a culture that doesn't lead to consistent high performance. Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations will provide you with a roadmap for creating and maintaining a culture that will provide you with a true competitive advantage. I recommend this book, and the Denison Team, as valuable resources to help you lead more effectively and create a stronger, more results-oriented culture within your organization.”

—David A. Brandon, athletic director, University of Michigan; chairman, Domino's Pizza

“Through the real-world examples in Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations, the authors bring to life the criticality of culture in global organizations, while providing leaders with an important tool for measuring and transforming it.”

—Nancy Dearman, CEO, Kotter International

“The Denison Culture Survey was a pivotal marker in the journey to get our organization focusing more on customers and thinking clearly about our strategy. There's immense power in reflecting on the collective wisdom of the entire team.”

—Mike Pulick, president, international, W.W. Grainger, Inc.

“The Marriott culture is integral to our ability to endure and adapt, and to preserve and innovate. This always requires our leaders to rely on the collective wisdom they have developed over the years, and to apply that to the future. The Denison model and method, described so well in this book, helps our leaders to understand the challenges that they face, and helps them to hone in on the key issues and actions that reinforce our culture and help prepare our organization for the future.”

—Tim Tobin, vice president, global learning and development, Marriott

“Mastering the levers needed to shape the culture of a global organization is a key task of successful leaders. In line with IMD's vision to support developing global leaders, I highly recommend this valuable book to senior business executives.”

—Peter Wuffli, chairman, IMD Foundation Board; former CEO, United Bank of Switzerland

“The beauty of the Denison Culture Model is its simplicity. By remembering that ‘more color is better,’ you're able to quickly identify your strengths, as well as the areas for improvement to drive action. Most importantly, the model enables dialogue amongst key stakeholders to drive change with a focus on results.”

—Robert J. Stuart, senior vice president, global sales and marketing, The Hertz Corporation

“Creating one common culture adjusted to the business portfolio and goals is essential for every company. This book provides many valuable insights to create one overall culture as a competitive advantage.”

—Feike Sijbesma, CEO, Royal DSM

“There is hope after all. There is a clear path to growing a strong culture that delivers for customers, staff, shareholders, and the organization. This book is a must-read for any leader that grapples with the scale, pace, and complexity of business today. Keep this book beside you!”

—Phil Morley, chief executive, Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals, NHS, UK

“In the past, Denison and his colleagues have been pioneers in showing us how culture influences business performance. In this new book, they introduce a new perspective based on rituals, habits, and routines that shows us how to access the tacit organizational knowledge that is the foundation of an organization's culture. If you need to know how to articulate and change the culture of an organization, this book can give you the answer.”

—Ikujiro Nonaka, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan

The Jossey-Bass

Business & Management Series

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leading culture change in global organizations : aligning culture and strategy / Daniel Denison … [et al.] ; foreword by Edgar H. Schein.—1st ed.

p. cm. —(J-B US non-franchise leadership ; 394)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-90884-6 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-25967-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-23510-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-22124-2 (ebk)

1. Organizational behavior—Case studies. 2. Organizational change—Case studies. 3. Corporate culture—Case studies. 4. International business enterprises—Case studies. I. Denison, Daniel R.

HD58.7.L397 2012

658.4'02—dc23

2012015526

Foreword

Much has happened in the field of organizational culture since the concept became theoretically and practically important in the 1980s. There were arguments about how to define it, how to measure it, and whether it was useful either as a construct in organization theory or as a correlate of organizational performance. The concept appealed to entrepreneurs because they saw themselves as creators of culture without always knowing just what they meant by that. The concept became important to leaders as a way of capturing all the soft stuff that they realized they had to think about and as a way of articulating their values. The concept played an increasing role in change theories, both as the biggest constraint on change and also as an element that had to change if real change were to be accomplished. The concept caught the fancy of theoreticians, who created instant typologies of different kinds of cultures. And the concept was immediately adopted by a number of social psychologists who wanted to measure it—whatever “it” was.

Among the early “measurers” was Dan Denison. His first culture book, Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness (1990), showed that culture measures did relate to performance. In this new book, Denison and his colleagues have brought that whole approach to maturity and thereby have established a milestone in the culture studies arena. Through an analysis of a number of case studies of real culture change, they provide the reader with a useful and relevant measurement tool—built on relevant organization theory in its choice of dimensions to measure—and, most important, they show how the whole survey process integrates with an ongoing process of change.

The case studies show how working with culture both quantitatively and clinically can become the key to the major strategic and tactical change programs that organizations have to undertake in this ever more turbulent world. The book illustrates how effective culture measures have evolved and can be used creatively and responsibly. I say responsibly, because I have always been critical of those who used culture surveys when they simply assumed that they knew what to measure in the first place and then fed the results back to the organization without considering how this might help or hinder what the organization was trying to do.

What is presented in this book has come a long way from those early simplistic approaches. From the beginning, Denison was concerned with correlating culture dimensions with organizational performance, to impose a useful context for culture analysis. Culture is vast, but only some parts of a given organizational culture may be of relevance to what the organization is trying to do. And only some parts of culture connect with relevant organizational theories about how organizations could and should work. So Denison wisely chose to measure only those parts of culture that should relate to performance and has shown how the combination of measurement and working with the organization does indeed improve performance.

Developing a measurement tool, even with the right culture variables, is, of course, not nearly enough. Denison and his colleagues show us throughout how measuring culture elements is truly useful in helping organizations improve only if the measurement process itself becomes a useful intervention in the organization's own change process. A change-oriented leader cannot produce change without measurement tools, but a measurement-oriented leader cannot produce change without a strategy that integrates the measurement into the fabric of the change process. This is not easy to do, yet the cases analyzed here show the way.

By looking at the culture analysis over time, we gain both some sense of how valid the measurement tool is and, more important, what it actually takes to create organizational improvement, by showing how the measures focused the change activity. This commitment to measurement over time is an important aspect of what Denison and his team have shown to be essential in a change process. In illustrating how the variables measured change over time, the authors also show us important elements of organizational theory—what does it actually take to make cultural changes that matter? How do the choices of what we measure influence our theoretical thinking about what it takes to produce change?

These cases and the analysis will be of great use to researchers, consultants, and leaders who face the difficult problem of how to get culture change started and how to keep it on track.

Edgar H. Scheinprofessor emeritus,MIT Sloan School of Management

Preface

The idea for this book first came up in a discussion that Robert Hooijberg and I had in 2009 while we were preparing a program stream for the International Institute for Management Development's (IMD) flagship executive program, Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP). Each year in June, OWP brings together nearly five hundred executives at our campus in Lausanne, Switzerland. The IMD faculty are all in town to present their newest and best ideas, and this combination creates a lot of excitement and learning. That year, Robert and I had the opportunity to create a weeklong sequence of half-day sessions that we decided to title “Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations.”

We had both worked for years with organizations as they tried to carry out significant culture changes. Some were a lot more successful than others! We had written a set of case studies, and we became especially interested in the group of companies in which we had tracked a successful set of changes over time using our Organizational Culture Survey. We knew the stories well, because we had worked with them closely throughout the change process. When we started to add up the possibilities, we quickly realized that we had a lot of global diversity: Domino's in the United States, Swiss Re from Switzerland, DeutscheTech from Germany, GT Automotive from the UK and the United States, Polar Bank from Scandinavia, GE Healthcare from China, and Vale from Brazil. All were global organizations, but they were looking at the cultural challenges of globalization from very different perspectives.

We managed to convince several of the executives from these companies to join us as guest speakers at OWP that year, and that gave us the opportunity to prepare several more teaching cases on these firms. Our coauthors Nancy Lane and Colleen Lief both began their involvement with this book project by writing teaching cases on several of these firms to prepare for their presentations at IMD. Everything went well at the OWP sessions. But as things were winding down after the program, we realized that we were on to something good. It was time to start writing this book.

With lots of good suggestions from Kathe Sweeney, our editor at Jossey-Bass/Wiley, we put together our plan of action. The chapters in this book cover a rich set of culture topics: the importance of supporting the front line, the dynamics of creating strategy alignment, the challenges of cultural integration in mergers and acquisitions, the process of importing culture change from one country to another, the lessons from building a global business in an emerging market, and the lessons from building a global business from an emerging market. Each of these topics is the focus of a chapter, and the company examples are used as cases. The survey results that we followed over time helped to ensure that we were on the right track in describing a change that, in the eyes of the organization's members, really made a difference.

The leaders of these organizations are the heroes in this book. We played an active role in these stories, and we are proud that most of these organizations would say that we helped them a lot. But the best parts of these stories are always the actions that the leaders took to transform their organizations by positioning the culture of the organization as a key part of the change process. This book is written for those leaders who are trying to manage their own organizations and want to learn more about how the culture of the firm can be an important point of leverage.

In this book we also aspire to make a practical contribution to the research literature. Since the beginning of the academic discussion of the importance of corporate culture, there has always been an emphasis on the deeper levels of culture that are hard for us to see—and even harder to change. Ed Schein explained all of this to us years ago: the importance of distinguishing the underlying assumptions from values and behaviors, or superficial artifacts. But it is still always difficult for us mere mortals to see these levels in practice. It's especially hard when we keep looking for a fundamental set of underlying assumptions that form the foundation of an organization's culture.

But at the end of this book, as we started to summarize what we had learned, we realized that a lot of the challenge of the change process involved changing rituals, habits, and routines. Habits have deep structures too and are hard to change, but they also have a fairly narrow bandwidth compared to the broad-based fundamentals that make up the set of underlying assumptions that culture researchers have been examining for years with limited success. Some were good habits, some were bad; some were old habits, and some were new. This insight led us to start looking at the organizations that we studied as interesting bundles of these interconnected habits. All of these habits had their roots in underlying assumptions, all were anchored in the value systems of their organizations, and all were manifested in a visible set of behaviors. As we worked with several companies to help them understand the cultural transformations that they were going through, we also found out that this framework was very useful. There's lots of work to do to develop this set of ideas for culture researchers, but this approach has already proven to be helpful in action.

The challenge of building a positive culture in a global organization is a daunting task. It is humbling to contemplate the scale and scope of the challenge, but inspiring to see what can be accomplished once things get started. We have had the privilege, in our careers, of watching a number of global companies try to pull this off. We hope that we have captured some of those lessons for you, so that you can help us put those ideas in action.

Chapter 1

Building a High-Performance Business Culture

Every human organization creates a unique culture all its own. From a small family business operating in its hometown, to a large global corporation spanning national cultures and time zones, each organization has a distinct identity. Tribes, families, cults, teams, and corporations all develop a complex and unique identity that evolves as they grow through the years.