How - Dov Seidman [127]
The mission and purpose of cultures like this is survival, and the members of the group are generally coerced into the journey. Little in blind obedience cultures concerns itself with transcendence, and the pursuit of significance is largely absent from everyday endeavor. This is human doing, not human being—execution, not pursuit. A short-term temporal orientation is not unique to industrial age efforts. An Internet start-up, or similar such new enterprise, struggling to gain a foothold in a fast-changing landscape can find itself in a similar relationship to time. The race to obtain funding or appease the financial market might bring this same cultural dimension into play, causing people to ignore the long-term ramifications of their choices in favor of getting it done now. Unless these efforts can be seen within a longer-range goal, some of the forces of blind obedience can seep into even the most well-intentioned cultures.
• Informed acquiescence cultures attempt to balance short-term orientation with long-term goals. Long-term goals key them into the market and create a great sensitivity to public dynamics, so these cultures are highly responsive to the needs of the marketplace and react quickly to changes and new demands. Carrots-and-sticks approaches motivate people internally, and the culture responds to regulatory and legal requirements in the same way, looking for ways to dance with the rules in order to gain the maximum amount of carrots. Informed acquiescence cultures are compliance cultures, with specialized compliance officers attempting to regulate behavior through rewards and penalties. Thus, the pursuit of goals is always subject to external scrutiny and the limiting nature of rules-based approaches. Informed acquiescence cultures are on a journey of success. They reward achievement and measure that success by the financial return of their endeavors.
• Self-governing cultures, in order to achieve the close values alignment required for real cohesion, necessarily think about the long-term. The culture must be driven and defined by the legacy and endurance of the enterprise and its quest for significant goals. It must keep one foot always in the future to inspire common pursuit in its highly trusted individuals. This future orientation puts self-governing cultures ahead of the time curve in many areas. It creates the conditions by which they can lead and transcend the markets, and, because of the should nature of values-driven endeavors, it creates a proactive and preventative relationship toward regulatory and legal requirements. Self-governing cultures coalesce around mission, promise, and the pursuit of significance, a journey that is, in many ways, its own reward.
DOING CULTURE
In this chapter, we’ve broken culture down into its constituent parts and developed a vocabulary with which to understand the way groups in an enterprise function. These various dimensions of culture combine in myriad and infinite ways to create unique and diverse group cultures, as impossible to replicate as a snowflake. This tremendous variety means culture can become a key source of long-term differentiation.
We’ve also taken the first steps toward an understanding of both the importance of culture to our ability to thrive and the fact that culture is something we do, and can do, in an active way. Culture is made of the little things