I think the key though is to recognize that culture is not some abstract thing that an organization or a company “has.” Instead, it is the “people” who make it up that have the culture. Since leaders influence people and it is the people who have the culture, this is the key reason why leaders have so much influence over the organizational culture.

Thanks for bringing this book to light,

-Kyle

For example don’t tell everyone that you think quality is your number one priority, and then spend your time asking only about productivity. If you do your people will know through your behaviour that productivity is your priority, not quality as you may claim.

In my experience, the first three on your list have far more impact than the rest. What leaders spend time and money on are they way we send messages about what’s important. Critical incidents are emotion incidents so the behavior and values we show there embed more deeply and more quickly than what happens in normal times.

We learn well from best practice – see Prêt à Manger example previously discussed. We can also learn just as much from bad practice. Finding examples of bad practice is usually easy. Look at the BBC’s ‘BPR’ initiative. I’m sure you will know that the business jargon BPR stands for ‘Business Process Re-engineering’. In this case however BPR refers to an altogether different process known as ‘Biscuit Paradigm Retribution’. This is where someone in the BBC noticed that the annual bill for biscuits was around half a million pounds. Now it takes a lot of time to eat that amount lot of biscuits! So to implement cost savings, biscuits were struck from the Corporate Culture – which took the metaphorical and literal biscuit! A rather wise competitor CEO said at the time ‘It will be the worst half a million pounds he has ever saved.’ The amount of wasted time BBC staff spent moaning about the biscuit cuts will have easily outweighed the biscuit bill. But there is no column for ‘corporate indigestion’ on the balance sheet.