Lean Enterprise

Chapter 11. Grow an Innovation Culture

The ability of your company to be competitive and survive lies not so much in solutions themselves, but in the capability of the people in your organization to understand a situation and develop solutions.

Mike Rother

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

Peter Drucker

You know, I’m all for progress. It’s change I object to.

Mark Twain

Culture is the most critical factor in an organization’s ability to adapt to its changing environment. However, being intangible, it is hard to analyze and even harder to change. Every organization has its own unique culture, and there are “as many successful cultures as there are successful companies.”¹ In Chapter 1 we presented the characteristics of a high-performance, generative culture. In this chapter, we discuss how to understand your organization’s culture and what you can do to change it.

Culture is constantly changing in every organization. New employees and leaders join, people quit, strategies and products evolve and die, and the market constantly shifts. The most important question is: can we mindfully evolve our organizational culture in response to these changes in environment?

To understand how to influence organization culture, we need to understand its foundations. We introduce a model of organizational culture and discuss how to measure it. We follow with strategies to kick-start ...