It’s easy to get people to talk about the culture of organisations to which they belong. The conversation tends to cover a wide range of subjects and one always has the clear sense that strong, positive cultures mean happy, motivated individuals who produce better results. Simple – but for two problems. The first is that what is enabling and inspirational to some people is unstructured and directionless to others – so how do we define ‘good’? And the second is that it is difficult to measure what a ‘good’ culture leads to in terms of tangible results. Success has many fathers and it isn’t usually clear what part culture played in the conception.
So when we come across a clear link between a programme of cultural change and a phenomenal improvement in the performance of an organisation, it really is something to write home (or indeed to blog) about.
