Building Corporate Culture

Building a Corporate Culture


What makes a company great is a great culture. The world changes, strategies change, business models change, ‘theory of business’ changes, but the same company has to deal with all of them, live through them, thrive in all of them. The only way a company, an organization, can survive and even thrive, through all these changes, is if it has a strong culture, a strong sense of what it is, why it is, and what will never change about it.

Tatas and HLL, GE and P&G, IBM and Apple.. great companies have a great culture.

What is culture? How can it be built? Can it be built?

Stories are the fabric of culture

Whenever you ask – ‘what is the Tata culture?’ you will be told a story, a story about how JRD set up the first airline, or how Dr. Irani moved his board to make the changes Tata Steel needed to become the world’s most competitive steel company. It seems we human beings can only understand culture through stories. Perhaps culture is so rich it can only be pointed to, not really explained. Perhaps it is so varied that we can only see a glimpse of it at a time, through one incident, one parable.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan’s fascinating book ‘The case of the Bonsai Manager’ is a fine example of this very effective story-telling.

Ramayana or Mahabharata?

Even more than the Mahabharata, the Ramayana is used again and again in India, to illustrate how a person should behave. The ideal of Sita is held up to all women in India, just as Rama is depicted as the ideal ruler, the ideal son the ideal husband. Nobody talks of ‘Yudhishtira-rajya’, but everyone talks of ‘Ramrajya’. The importance of the Ramayana is surely as a holder of values and culture, through its repository of stories, more than anything else.

Don’t be too subtle

What makes the Ramayana so useful as a conveyor of values, of culture? First of all, it is a simple story, it has none of the nuances the Mahabharata has – was the Pandava’s claim to the throne of the Kurus really legitimate? Was Bhima right to strike Duryodhana ‘below the belt’? – very few of these questions arise in the Ramayana .

The first virtue of a good ‘culture story’ then, is simplicity. It should be a ‘case study’ not a ‘case’! It should bring tears to the eyes, not spark a debate!

Create larger than life characters

Rama himself is ‘larger than life’, we all know we cannot be Rama, yet we think we can be ‘like’ him. Does anyone really aspire to be ‘like Arjuna?” I doubt it.
Of course, the most obvious candidates for protagonist are the company’s founders, and the CEO. It is easy enough to make heroes of them (and to get funding for such projects!). Unfortunately, current CEOs are all too visible, everyone knows their foibles, and if their actual life is quite different than what the story makes it out to be, all you will get is sniggers and rolling eyes if you try to weave stories around them. My experience is that, if you are selecting a CEO to write about, choose one who is a bit removed, preferably retired some time ago! Even today, stories are told at EDS about Ross Perot, though Ross has long left EDS and even founded a rival company! But his very distance helps to create a myth around him.

Make heroes of ordinary people

Ordinary people do heroic deeds every day. Every company has salespeople who enter a completely uncharted territory, service engineers who give their lives for a customer, plant construction teams who cross a flooding river to meet a deadline. I have heard of several such stories, as an outsider, teaching programs at companies like L&T and ABB, for instance, so it cannot be too hard to find such stories.

Building the Repository

Assign someone very well networked in the company, highly respected in the corporate staff, to write the stories. Never try to hire a ‘professional’ writer – it takes years to build the repository and it is very much a ‘hit or miss’ affair. The person you choose should love to write, have a keen ear for a good story, and also have the ability to judge what use a story can be put to. The writer should necessarily have an intuitive understanding of the company culture, else he/she will have no inner compass to judge stories by.
At the end of every off-site management meeting, set aside time for a story-telling session. Stories flow best after a few drinks!
Use ‘employee of the month’ award functions, team excellence award functions as opportunities to collect stories about ordinary people and their daily heroics. Our ‘writer’ should make a point of attending all such functions, and talking to the award winners afterwards, to try to ‘get the story’.
Start writing even if there is nothing to write about. Once two or three stories get written and published, people begin to see the point and start contributing their stories.
Keep all stories short, they should be amenable to being told in two minutes, and occupy no more than half a written page. Complex stories are not only ineffective, they can get changed and lose their punch over time as the story is told and retold.
Don’t start with preconceptions about the ‘point’ of the story, look for good human interest stories – the picture will begin to build all by itself.

Using the Stories

Induction: many years ago, my induction program with EDS in Dallas consisted almost exclusively of stories, all of which I remember to this day.
When a senior ‘lateral’ manager is brought in, the book of stories should be given to him personally by the CEO and he should be invited to comment on them. This is, of course, only a subtle way to communicate the stories to him!
There should be a small number, say 2-3 stories that everyone knows. Over time, the most effective couple of stories will emerge by themselves, but it is necessary to look for the ‘emerging winners’ and enshrine them as ‘the corporate stories’

I know of no other way to build a culture. It is not guaranteed, but it is fun, and it sometimes works! So try it!