Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

4A MATURE SWISS-GERMAN CHEMICAL ORGANIZATION

A mature organization is culturally different in many ways. The main differences result from size, age, and that it is managed entirely by promoted general managers (not founders or their children). When we talk about culture, we have to remind ourselves to specify the kind of organization, the macro cultures it is nested in, and how big and old it is. This particular case is also one from the 1980s, but, as in the case of DEC, it shows in a very mature, large, diversified organization how different the cultural issues and cultural dynamics are, and still how representative they are of contemporary large mature organizations.

Case 2: Ciba-Geigy Company in Basel, Switzerland

The Ciba-Geigy Company in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a Swiss multinational, multidivisional, geographically decentralized chemical company dealing with pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, industrial chemicals, dyestuffs, photographic chemicals, and some technically based consumer products. It eventually merged with a former competitor, Sandoz, to become what is today—Novartis. My consulting initially on career development evolved into numerous other consulting activities that lasted into the mid-1980s and focused on some major culture change.

Artifacts—Encountering Ciba-Geigy

My initial encounter with this company was through a telephone call from its head of management development, Dr. Jürg Leupold, inquiring whether I would be willing to give a ...