A thought about culture

This morning, as I was driving to business school, I traveled on a route I do not often use, borderline avoid altogether. Instead of the accustomed blood-boiling scenes of taxis meandering through traffic, racing on the shoulder lane, skipping over the embankments, bullying other motorists... I'm sure you get a vivid picture, it was different. Instead of all that, I saw several of the taxis on the median strip at an off-ramp fork, with their drivers animating stories to police officers bowed over traffic fine books, clearly not obliging the drivers' symphony of pleas. The road ahead was, as a result, orderly and quaint. I then started lamenting on culture, how a "culture" of bad-driving had developed, and as much as it irked a lot of us, taxis moved with impunity, literally. The root to all of this is "standards" , or the lack thereof. If there is no enforcement of set-standards in any situation or environment, conditions will deteriorate, and an anomaly takes a foothold and overtime, becomes the norm. Is this dissimilar to what happens in organisations? Cultures of cheating, stealing, misappropriation of resources, are created when, at the first onset of such behaviors, they are not curtailed. With nobody saying "stop", the wrong culture will continuously develop over time, perniciously hurting members of the group and even the external environment. 

Back to the taxi analogy - I have been to countries where a culture of bad driving is so fully-developed and entrenched that almost all motorists straddle lanes, do not use turning signals, and do not stop at red lights. We need to maintain and enforce standards for the right kind of culture to persist and keep the wrong type from developing, on the road or in organisations.