Shaping the beast

Where does culture come from?

I found myself arguing on my blog that culture is a given. More specifically, that corporate cultures are deterministically shaped by underlying economics. Companies, great companies, get good at the stuff that sits in their economic core and build rich cultures that celebrate and enhance that core. Even great companies remain mediocre at pretty much everything else, and have weak, transactional cultures in non-core areas.

I have also found myself passionately arguing on my friend Vishnu Vasudev’s blog that culture is malleable. The music lovers of Madras can be trained to sit in their seats until the concert is over. There is nothing about Madras or its culture that prevents this basic courtesy from taking hold.

Do I really believe both ideas? When is culture malleable? When is it diamantine?

Rattled the options around in my head over pints of Grolsch at Canal House last evening. Came up with a list of three culture-shapers. Economics and leadership were the usual suspects. The surprise candidate, the one I like most, was design.

Incentives shaping culture is obvious, to the point of being anodyne. It probably is the one thing Marxists and Chicago school liberals will agree on. The point worth remembering is that soft incentives - prestige, tribal membership, reinforcement of identity, shame, inertia - these are often more powerful incentives than explicit money.

So, incentives work. What else? Leadership? On no other topic have have more words been expended to say less. Naw, please. Lets not bring that cheezy, nutritionally-deficient, management jargon into this blog :)

More seriously, leadership can be transformational. Authentic leadership is rare, and can be an amazing experience for both the leader and led. I'm a huge fan of what Saurav Ganguly did for the self-belief of the ~20 Indian cricketers who played under him. Saurav and John Wright really did change the culture of the Indian cricket team. Dhoni (more than Kumble or Dravid) carries the torch Saurav lit.

But, unfortunately, authentic leadership depends on personal chemistry, which doesn't scale.

In larger organizations, leaders tend to reflect cultures more than they shape them. Strong cultures are very good at self-selecting clones. At best, change-leadership in large organizations (or even nations) is about sensing the shift in the tectonic plates the organization stands on, and preparing the organization to positively respond to that shift. Those tectonic plates are mostly economic.

So incentives work on both a large and small scale. And personal leadership works, but on a small scale. What else is out there?

Design. Architecture. Physical organization. Much more interesting.

An Agile team - with business customers, systems analysts, testers, developers and the copier boy all crammed into a messy conference room - creates a culture, a vibe, which is 10x more effective than the same people with the same incentives sitting at their desks and pinging emails at each other.

A suite of offices organized around a service hub - fully equipped with printers, sofas, steaming coffee, and streaming sports coverage on a plasma screen - creates a more social and collaborative work place than a bunch of closed doors along a long corridor.

Offices with glass doors and/or big windows opening on to the corridor takes that a step further, and also reduce the risk of corruption.

Facebook's instant messenger works on the same general principle of manufacturing chance meetings. I wind up chatting with friends I was not specifically planning to call. A laptop in the kitchen means the net gets used a lot more than when a desktop sat upstairs in the study.

My first job was at Procter and Gamble in India. While I was there, P&G formalized the dress code (made ties mandatory) as part of an effort to make the culture more formal, accountable and better at completing projects in time, within budget and up to specs. The broader effort worked. The dress code change was not irrelevant.

A petting zoo under the stands at Twenty20 cricket matches makes it easier to take kids along. I was glad to have this facility at hand at Trent Bridge earlier this summer. Changes the mix of fans in the stands.

The famous broken windows theory maintains that smartening up a neighbourhood can actually reduce crime in that neighbourhood. Policing inspired by this theory is credited with a part of reduction in urban crime in America, in very serious circles.

A lot of this can, of course, be interpreted economically. A laptop in the kitchen is less costly to use, in terms of effort. Accepting a bribe in a glass office is more costly, in terms of embarrassment or risk. The dress code change sends a "signal" about what the organization now values.

But it is more fun, and perhaps more useful while planning culture change, to think about these changes as design rather than incentives changes.