The topic of culture in business organization

This week's insight turned out to be unexpected

Good evening, Elena! What insights has this week brought us?

Good evening! The topic of culture in business organization has suddenly become a hot topic. It is not the same as corporate culture. Since in Montenegro, there is little that can be attributed to corporations in the conventional sense. The topic, in fact, is related to each and every one of us.

The point is that what we call corporate culture is not necessarily applicable only to corporations because it is based on personal attitudes to work, a system of descriptions of work processes, roles, functions and values. Moreover, individual and small business culture is vital as well. Because without an order built on values authentic to the type of intelligence - your computer and house and group will be a mess, efficiency is lost. On the other hand, it was corporations that were faced with the urgent need to develop an organizational culture because the scale of the corporation made the need for an algorithmically ordered attitude towards work processes.

Any idea first originates in the mind of one person - the creator, the founder. And depending on what type of intelligence he has, the idea can be expressed as an aspiration for a happy future, as a solution to an existing problem, as the creation of an environment for successful development or as a system of relationships. The founder shares the idea with his friends. At some point, he or she finds someone who understands it better than the others, and supports the endeavour by complementing the idea with some other aspects. And so gradually the core of the organization is formed. If it was a healthy development, then four people of the basic four types of intellect, thinking with the same intensity and with approximately the same level of knowledge and skills, if they do not argue with each other but rather create one common cause contributing evenly from all sides, there will be an organization gradually created.

When the first intuitive ideas have been reflected and analysed, rationalization will occur, and an operational model will emerge. This will be the basic algorithm for building the processes adopted by the organization from its foundation. To ensure the processes are incremental, new employees will be added, and it will be an operational system into which the processes, roles of performers and intended results will be inscribed. And at this point, relationships within the organization will begin to become dramatically complex. Contradictory behaviour will have to be addressed, standards will have to be developed as to who should or should not say what, how and what should and should not be done. Otherwise, a critical mass of contradictions will paralyse the organization. But also without standards of behaviour, including verbal behaviour, the organization will remain a crowd of different people with different interests and aspirations, the product will not be successfully produced, and consumers, talking to each new manager, will receive conflicting instructions and descriptions. Standards of behaviour will gradually become corporate culture.

The problem with corporate cultures is that it is very difficult to get a comprehensively thought-out operating model when founding an organization. One of the four types of intelligence that may dominate an organization is that of the founder or one of his friends who became a partner. In addition to the fact that the core of the company may not be complete to fully comprehend the operating model, co-founders may misunderstand each other, and in fact, this happens regularly, and they quarrel, disrupting the coherence of the operating model. When employees are subsequently added, the contradictions increase exponentially, because each co-founder recruits his or her preferred employees in his or her preferred way, and this generates whole clans within the company staff, which fight among themselves rather than coherently making a common product. Therefore, in the case of an unhealthy, lopsided operating model, corporate culture serves as a 'good mask for a bad game', in an attempt to iron out the effects of contradictions. In a healthy operating model, which would be ideal but is not always realizable in practice, corporate culture works as a lubricant for the smooth running of the entire mechanism that produces an excellent product. And corporate culture also continues to work as a lubricant when interacting with customers. If no one in the organization clearly argues with anyone, but everyone supports the central concept, then the whole organization resembles a single giant organism with a brand face, beautifully outlined and sympathetic.

How can we get closer to the ideal? A complete core operating model provides a comprehensive set of values on which to build a corporate culture that supports the development of all types of talent necessary for the healthy development of the company. How do we distinguish a healthy operating model from an unhealthy one, and how is this reflected in the corporate culture? Here's a simple example of Facebook. Facebook is based on the idea that people like to hear news from their friends. This idea originally came from the Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Not everything was known to go smoothly during the formation of the company, there were quarrels between Mark and his friends and partners, and third parties influenced decision-making. What do we have in the end? Suppose I have moved to another country and the new environment requires that I make new friends in the new place, specific contacts. This is critical to my survival, we live where we can communicate. This means that I will have to sort out the composition of my Facebook contacts, delete the irrelevant ones and add new ones that are critical to me, to then invite them to my events and my service pages. Have you ever tried deleting selectively old contacts on Facebook? If you've tried, you might have seen, as I did, that it's a very difficult task. When you open the "friends" tab on your profile, you find that there is no system there, no way to categorize your friends, no single standard to determine who is who. If you have 3,500 contacts on Facebook, it takes you a week to figure out who to delete and who not to. I mean, you have to check each profile manually, you simply have no way of seeing when and why which contact was added, where it came from. And after all, the right friends are the main value of Facebook. In reality, the friends tab is a mess in terms of technology.

The upshot is that corporate culture cannot emerge from nothing. In its depths lies the operating model. The realism and effectiveness of corporate culture will depend on how comprehensively the operating model has been thought through, and how healthy the operating system has been put together. A healthy integration condition of the system is love expressed in action. If it isn't there, then corporate culture becomes a cult of refined hatred that kills talent and healthy initiative, covered up by false and drawn-out ethical-like constraints. Can you find people for your soul on Facebook? No? - See the missing value system in algorithms.