Much of this post was taken from a comment I wrote on LinkedIn in which I talked about vision and corporate culture (http://goo.gl/UIwUv). While a lot has been said of “corporate culture”, most of the time this is under the guise of  CSR reforms and other similar bullshit jargon. Being a data man who relies on sound principles, I fully agree that an internal focus from leadership is essential. For change that “takes” there needs to be an internal process and protocol set that reinforces the change in addition to clear incentives and goals. In other words, make it so you can’t get out of it. It’s also important to remember that setting out and visualizing a corporate culture is often times different than building a sustainable and profitable culture that makes bleeding edge solutions and products that people and companies want to buy.

What I find painfully obvious, and a huge risk to building a sustainable corporate culture that breeds future relevance, is that lack of perspective and group thinking tend to build off one another. These are the banes of any culture seeking to be relevant and innovative in the highly competitive, interconnected, but often times different enough world.

Think about this: The majority of leaders and directors come from the same schools, have the same frame of mind and generally have had an upward linear career path that was safe. They went to the best schools, got good grades and were very smart. While intelligence and capability are no doubt quality prerequisites and parts of the solution, companies will inherently lack “grit” and suffer opportunity loss for the intellectual capital gained from it (Good article on grit http://goo.gl/W8Dxj) . Ultimately, the perspective that is essential for good decision making is affected (McKinsey; Kahneman and Klein article on this http://goo.gl/0bFcC).  I find grit and perspective to be the main bottle necks in building a company culture that embraces disruption and leverages it fast, the holy grail of most of this research.  So with that I challenge leaders to step up and get real with developing “corporate culture” legitimately (diverse/non group think environment) so it isn’t in parentheses as it often is.

Bring in fuck-ups so you don’t fuck up. People you might not be comfortable with and you don’t get right away. They might not have gone to the right schools, and might be a bit crazy, but have succeeded in unique ways that make you question your job, skills and thinking. You might find you are not relevant. This is obviously scary to people, but it’s necessary to motivate them into learning new skills, in addition to creating a “check down” in the corporate process that maintains innovation and relevance.

Thoughts – SWOT away.. CT