Culture Modes > Fixed Culture

If you haven't watched HBR's video on culture, you'll want to watch it first for how I arrived at this hypothesis. It's embedded below:

The Earth has seasons. There is Gartner's hype cycle. Industries and products have life-cycles. We go through stages of our lives. Call them what you will - seasons, stages, phases, modes - but they are everywhere. Why not in company culture?

Microsoft became the most profitable company in the world by strategically leveraging a static company wide culture. The hypothesis is that organizations can be even greater by getting tactical with culture modes.

The Thunderbird School of Global Management teaches style switching in leadership style, cultural values, and communication - adaptability to people and circumstances. This hypothesis is the extension of those ideas to match style switching to the phases organizations go through from teaming, to R&D, to production, to marketing and sales.

Each stage has different needs.

People mode:

When teaming, employee engagement matters most. Enjoyment, purpose, and learning jump to the top of the list while the mainstays of results, caring, and especially order drop significantly. See figure 1 below.

Product mode:

When researching and developing, customer orientation matters most. Learning is where it's at: what does the customer really want, what will they actually pay for, does this prototype have product-market fit, etc. It's a time of discovery. The culture should match. See figure 1 above.

Process mode:

A static culture will struggle to get order and enjoyment to match their strategy. While results and caring stay paramount during operations, the great drop in order for a differentiation strategy could make all the difference in the world for engineers and business people alike as they try to move the ball forward. See figure 2 below.

Profit mode:

When it comes time to sell and ship, suddenly order becomes highly important across all but one industries. Enjoyment is out the window for all but one as well, it's time to get serious and close the deal. Now I'm taking some liberty on this one for sure, and I've gone past people, process, product by adding profit, but it seems logical to me. See figure 3 below.

So, the hypothesis is that using culture modes will result in greater effectiveness for the different modes of focus: people, product, process, and profit. See figure 4 below.

Questions:

Does this exist already?

Has it been tested?

If so, what were the results?

If not, who will test this?

#Culture #HR