Sustaining a Culture of Process Control and Continuous Improvement

Chapter 10

Creating a Culture of Operational Excellence (Culture, Principles, Systems, Behaviors and Results)

The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening

Edgar Schein

Professor MIT Sloan, School of Management

Organizational Culture

Edgar Schein’s model of organizational culture, originating in the 1980s, identified three distinct components of organizational culture: artifacts and behaviors, espoused values and assumptions. These three distinctions refer to the degree to which different cultural phenomena are visible to the observer.

Artifacts and behaviors are what we see. They are tangible, ...