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Somebody said culture eats strategy for lunch and that to successfully implement social CRM the organization's culture needs to change. And then I got this interesting definition for culture: "What happens in an organisation when no one is looking" from Debabrat Mishra on twitter.
A few minutes back I got another nice definition from this HBS blog post titled "Culture trumps strategy, every time" shared by my good friend Brian Vellmure: "Culture's all that invisible stuff that glues organizations together".
And then I got to know of a different definition that presumably paraphrased Gil Yehuda: "Observable behaviors". This is in stark contrast to what the other two perceive about culture in an organization. There was even a healthy discussion yesterday on the #scrmsummit hashtag around the clichéd Zappos culture, how it was costing Amazon in goodwill dollars and that it needs to be scalable too.
For me culture has been about behaviors in the organization that manifests due to beliefs. Having worked in the same organization as it grew from ~3,500 to ~100,000 or ~30x in 10 years I have seen how culture varies in the organization with the number of years a person has spent in the organization as well as whether the person joined the organization fresh out of the campus or from other organizations.
As I grapple with the dichotomy of the customers' & businesses' priorities on social media as Mitch Liberman, VP Marketing at Sword Ciboodle, shares this interesting graph from IBM in his latest post highlighting the "Perception gap in Social", what are your thoughts on this 'culture' puzzle? How do you tackle it in your organization?
Prem,
ReplyDeleteThanks for including my post here, much appreciated (with the follow even). I think culture is an interesting topic, but do not think that it is as observable as people might think. Culture is visceral and more pervasive through an organization.
Good culture can be felt and is more about values than behaviors. Values are core to people and thus to an organization, behaviors can be taught and be changed contextually. Values run deeper and are more important. I think values are (as you suggest) driven off of beliefs.
Good stuff - Mitch
Thanks for the comment Mitch. Yes, values & value are quite intricately intertwined in business over the long term, aren't they?
ReplyDeleteWhat about the clash of cultures in organizations? M&A or a fast growth both are bound to bring in differences, not to forget the millenials.
Hi Prem,
ReplyDeleteAs far as it relates to the perception gap in the image, I think a main problem in corporate culture is that people take on a different set of views at work than they do in their personal lives. IE at work, I work hard on developing a community around my product, but at home, I have limited interest in engaging in that type of community. I think this is one of the ways, however, that social CRM has a chance to improve culture; if the culture truly lets the company's employees hand the reigns of the conversation over to the customer, the corporate priorities should begin to resemble the customer priorities a bit more.
@andrewbschultz