Your Secret Weapon in Business: Culture

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Why do some companies stay competitive, while others fall behind?  The answer used to seem clear: great companies simply harness the best people, and invest in the most innovative ideas.  Today, however, merely having great talent, ideas, and capital no longer works.  Something has shifted.  There is a new game.

When you look at successful businesses today, their people are not necessarily smarter than their competitors’.  Their ideas are not necessarily better.  And their money is definitely not greener.  However, what they are doing is playing a different game.  And their competitors usually don’t even realize that the game has changed.

What is the new game?  My colleague Bill Tobin recently came up witha fantastic way of describing it.  Bill is a consultant at Strayer Group in Silicon Valley, and he specializes in organizational development for corporations and startups.  Bill inspired me to think about and share these ideas with you.

Bill Tobin of Strayer Group


Now, things have shifted again.  Today, the battleground is cultural innovation.  Culture is king.  If you can get your company culture right, you will maintain a competitive edge.   Culture is what gives rise, on a sustainable basis, to the best technologies and business models.  Other companies might copy your gadgets and practices, but by the time they figure those out, you are already onto the next big thing.

Through my work, I regularly interact with hundreds of organizations – large and small, public and private – around the world.  I have observed that culture and competitiveness are correlated in a profound way at every level of society.  This applies whether you’re looking at companies, cities, or even entire countries.  Get the culture right, the rest will take care of itself.

How can companies do culture well?  To explore this idea, I asked Bill Tobin to join me in a conversation about culture and its impact on innovation and business.  Here are Bill’s insights:

Victor Hwang: Culture seems like such a fuzzy term.  So what is culture really? 

Bill Tobin:  Social scientists say that culture encompasses a people's whole way of life. It includes our learned ways and habituated patterns.  It starts with our beliefs, which then influence how we think and act. Culture incorporates a common “language” to communicate those beliefs and thinking.  In a company, culture is the personality or “human operating system” that codes the dynamic of the people that work there. Culture cascades from and, at its best, is aligned with organization’s vision, mission, and core values.

Hwang:  How does culture contribute to a company’s success or failure?

Tobin:  Almost everyone in business knows examples where success was due to culture, but also examples where operating environments stifled creativity, collaboration, and results. What we need to do is develop a place where people love coming to work, and are willing to give discretionary effort to help make their company a winner in the marketplace.

When we work to “design” our cultures, we can align our individual, team, company, and even – some might say – our industry’s and country’s values and behaviors. We can better attract, repel, and recruit employees and customers. We can reduce turnover due to “cultural misfit” while increasing individual and collective performance and efficiency.

Hwang:  Where does a company’s culture come from?

Tobin:  In the early entrepreneurial stages of a business, culture is derived from the founders.  In later stages, it will be influenced and refined by the team. The opportunity is to consider and design culture from the beginning, so that it permeates the organization from the founders –through the executive team to functional groups – down to line workers, similar to DNA replicating throughout a living organism.








Hwang:  Can companies redesign and refresh their culture over time?



