Behaviours create culture, not the other way around.

Extract taken from my new book The Flipping Point - Deprogramming Management. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

Behaviours create culture, not the other way around.

Change behaviours get culture. Behaviours are copied (homo imitans) and scaled up peer-to-peer. Culture is not trainable in classrooms. Everybody copies everybody but some people are more copy-able than others. It turns out that 5 – 10% have very high (non-hierarchical) influence. Find them, ask for help and give them support. Tell stories of success all the time. Make sure leaders do support the peer-to-peer work, but don’t interfere. This is the ‘what’ of Viral Change? in a box. The ‘how’ is what I do for a living.

My two books on Viral Change? are: Viral Change? and Homo Imitans. These days I recommend starting with the latter and going backwards, if there is any appetite left.

Culture is hard stuff.

Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, or 3 people making the same decision in 3 days. Culture is the difference between hiring costly employees and retaining them, or hiring costly employees and losing them after 6 months. Culture is the difference between making a decision and implementing it, or making the same decision and waiting to see if it sticks or people take it seriously. Culture is the difference between agreeing the plan in the meeting room, or trashing it at the break in the toilets. Culture is hard stuff. Do you need me to give you an ROI on these differences?

Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, or 3 people making the same decision in 3 days. I use lots of these examples to show that culture is ‘hard’, not ‘soft’. Anybody with a calculator can see it.

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The Flipping Point, asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores.

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New webinar series launching in June.

Feed Forward webinar series - the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us. Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun. 

All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.

Webinar topics:

1. The myths of change.
2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? 
3. The myths of company culture.
4. The myths of management.
5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

Request more information about these free webinars.