Is Culture the Key to Fixing the Dysfunctional Enterprise?

The ongoing troubles at Boeing are just the latest example of the costs of gutting a company’s culture. The path to restoring Boeing and other companies like it, we argue, is also through culture.

This week, we explore resources to turn that aspiration into action. Is it possible to measure corporate culture to prompt meaningful change? What real-world examples can inspire leaders to do better? Read on.

Spotlight: Culture Quant Framework

“A company’s culture is essential to unleashing ingenuity.” But how can investors measure the elements of that culture?

This study by 2015 Aspen Institute First Mover Thomas Kamei (Morgan Stanley Investment Management) and Ethan Rouen (Harvard Business School) discusses their ongoing efforts to quantify culture. In it, the authors dive into one of the questions critical to understanding the role of corporate culture in value creation: How can companies and investors move beyond the anecdotal to develop a quantitative approach to corporate culture?

News Roundup

1. Boeing’s Long Fall, and How It Might Recover (The Seattle Times:?Dominic Gates) How has Boeing’s strategy over the past several decades undermined workers, suppliers, and its own performance? And now that the company’s issues are in the spotlight, Who Is the Leader to Put Boeing Back on Course? (Yale Insights: Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian)?
2. America’s Most Powerful Union Leaders Have a Message for Capital (The Financial Times:?Rana Foroohar) “Our task right now is not just about technology or the environment, it’s also about whether people have a better life.” What do workers have to contribute to the vision of 21st century economic success?
3. Corporate America: Employees Need Stability, Not Constant Change (The New York Times:?Ashley Goodall) Avoiding the costs of knee-jerk disruption: “I think we’d do better if we trained leaders to look for sources of stability. What can be kept the same? What is valuable in an organization in terms of its rituals, its rhythms, its structures, its cadence? And then on a basis of that stability to ask the question, what might be better?”
4. Starbucks Is Negotiating With Its Unionized Workers. Here’s Why This Is Good News for America (Fortune: Roy Bahat) Does Starbucks’ evolution on unions offer insights for how Boeing can change its relationship with workers?
5. Won't You Be My Friend? (Korn Ferry:?Arianne Cohen) The ties that build value: “Gallup numbers show that a corporate culture in which best friends are common correlates with company-wide profitability, safety, inventory control, and retention. So how do you make everyone become friends?”

One for the Road

We welcome your thoughts and ideas on the ins and outs of corporate culture, and thanks for reading, forwarding and following!

— The Business & Society Program