Driving a Global Company's Culture

What do you do when you have a globally dispersed team and you need to get things done but people have their own ideas about culture?

"Leaders need a shared mindset on essential topics," said Dr. Simon Sagmeister, "but they have to translate it into their home country’s culture. There's some room for cultural freedom in every culture. That's the most critical part. The same message needs to be translated differently into different cultures."

When a company is globally dispersed, senior leadership needs to share a high level vision and expect that microcultures will flourish in various locations among various teams. It is the role of leadership to make sure that culture is deliberately designed rather than emerging by default, that all teams stay focused, and that all members understand the value of their contributions or the motivations. But it is also the role of senior leaders to see that the world outside is changing, that customers have new needs and expectations. In a fast-paced environment, as companies restructure and shift their policies, people and resources, strategic thinking feels like a luxury. But it isn't--it is the lifeblood of the company's future.

Business culture is a house specialty at Science House, which I co-direct with James Jorasch, a named inventor on over 650 patents, including those at the core of Priceline. Whether he's working on intellectual property or high value, marketable ideas, he brings a very unique inventor's perspective to aligning culture with business value. Our partnership with Dr. Simon Sagmeister of the Culture Institute took this work to a whole new level because of the Culture Map tool, which makes all the nebulous aspects of culture visible so they can be seen, measured and transformed.

Earlier this year, one of our clients, a multibillion dollar global company with significant influence, commissioned us to map its IT organization as it transformed through a state of disruptive change. The Culture Maps from 350 employees in New York were extremely similar, but what would the maps look like when created by colleagues in London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore? The expectation at the company was that these locations would generate a different current map and desired future state map, but when the employee in Singapore finished his maps and held them up, they were an exact match. People are different in various places, but an organization's culture is extremely strong--for better or worse.

Large companies share a set of problems that have intensified dramatically and can no longer be ignored. They want to be innovative, but they aren't set up to attract, retain and reward the right talent. This is a major struggle, but it's not the only one. They need to be agile, but they've been collecting bureaucratic processes for decades, and they're stuck in their own quicksand. Many large companies encouraged employees to see their jobs as permanent, creating job security for employees and less transitional work for companies, but the downside in a rapidly changing world is significant. If the company doesn't survive, those jobs disappear.

In addition to those obvious problems, there's a hidden issue. The most senior executives are so tied up with busy work on a daily basis that strategy gets lost in the shuffle. We're all in a constant process of being pulled between our inner worlds of thought and the outer world of constant demands, which is full of information that needs to get processed. Senior executives tend to be on the move constantly, with little time to think strategically. Thinking is a very hard thing to justify on the calendar, especially with the crushing pressure to constantly produce, to be busy and, most importantly, to show how busy we all are, struggling to keep pace with the changing times.

Imagination is the key to making exponential future gains. Imagination is what gives you the ability to see the dynamic parts of the whole for what they are. It gives you a tool for seeing the common humanity and desire to achieve our goals, no matter how different the local customs are in the places where we work.

If we aren't taking the time to concentrate in the present, we lose the opportunity to achieve strategic excellence, no matter where we are in the world.

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Rita J King is the EVP for Business Development at Science House, a cathedral of the imagination in Manhattan focused on the art and science of doing business. She is a strategist who specializes in the development of collaborative culture by making organizational culture visible so it can be measured and transformed. She is a senior advisor to The Culture Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and a Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum. She makes Mystery Jars, writes about the future for Fast Company and invents story architecture, characters and novel technologies for film and TV as a futurist for the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Follow@RitaJKing on Twitter.