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William E. Schneider: Bill Schneider is president of the Corporate Development Group, Inc., (CDG) in Denver, Colorado. CDG has over 215 global affiliates. He is the developer of Culturetek!, which measures the alignment of strategy with culture and leadership, and is the author of The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work (Irwin Professional Publishing, 1994).
T he following story is true.
XYZ Company is a multi-billion-dollar manufacturer of products that are very powerful, potentially harmful, and very expensive. These products must work the first time customers utilize them. There is no margin for error.
XYZ Company is organized in a highly structured manner. People within the company operate with strict policies and procedures. Planning, engineering design, and strict implementation are critical to success. Leadership and management are quite authoritative, directive, and systematic. The work is strongly functional in nature. Decision-making is very methodical, objective, data-based, and careful. Issues of certainty, predictability, systematism, and safety pervade most of what happens every day. It is imperative that this organization remains in control of its processes.
In the organizational culture framework of our consulting firm, this company is a control core culture organization. (Organizational culture will be discussed in more detail later in this article.)
In 1987, an internal Organization Development department was established at XYZ to help increase organizational effectiveness. The number of staff members in this department grew to ten professionals plus a director-level manager. During the next eight years, this internal group and numerous external consultants introduced a series of new, management ideas that they believed were critically important for this company to adopt. These professionals insisted that the existing culture was ineffective, outdated, outmoded, harmful to people, and anachronistic. They called it the "old way" of leading and managing. They insisted that the proper and more effective way for this company to manage would include the following ideas:
- Quality circles.
- Participative leadership and management.
- Self-directed teams.
- Benchmarking and best practices.
- Total quality management (TQM).
- Flexible organization.
- Empowerment.
- Quality of work life.
- Human potential development.
- Synergy and win-win.
- Management by consensus.
- High performance work teams.
- Core competencies.
By the end of 1996, all the internal professionals had been...