Chasing Digital

CHAPTER 3Culture

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

Niccolò Machiavelli

 

As organisations grow, teams and business units begin to segregate. So entrenched is this pattern that anthropologist Robin Dunbar developed a theory about it. He proposed that the number of meaningful relationships a single person can have is limited to 150. In the workplace, this extends to a natural threshold of the number of people able to work together productively. When it comes to running an organisation with thousands of employees, it’s no wonder that ‘silos’ form and trusted relationships falter when groups start to compete against each other rather than collaborate. Some organisations defy this trend, however, unifying their employees despite their differences, structure and scale. Think about companies like Johnson & Johnson, The Walt Disney Company, Amazon and Google. How do they create cohesion and foster productivity? And more importantly, what aspects of great corporate culture do you need to focus on as you build a digitally enabled business?

Company culture is created in exactly the same fashion as a religion or democracy. Behaviours created from the organisation’s inception are reinforced over time by leadership, attracting like-minded people and eventually reaching critical mass to become an accepted ‘truth’. These truths drive performance, priorities, and the countless everyday decisions an employee makes without guidance or oversight. A recent ...