Fundamentals of Level Three Leadership

112. Organizational Culture

Concept

Culture is a set of shared VABEs. The VABEs can have to do with lots of things: food, dress, manners, religion, laws, marriage, relationships, business, and more. Organizations have cultures, too. And those cultures are enormously influential in the firm’s results. Effective executives understand and manage organizational culture. Lou Gerstner at IBM noted that culture wasn’t part of the problem, it was the problem.

Culture is what happens when you put people in your organizational design. People react to the organizations into which they are put, we could say they collide with the design. While your organizational architecture will influence organizational culture, it is the culture that produces results as ...