Preface

The idea for this book first came up in a discussion that Robert Hooijberg and I had in 2009 while we were preparing a program stream for the International Institute for Management Development's (IMD) flagship executive program, Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP). Each year in June, OWP brings together nearly five hundred executives at our campus in Lausanne, Switzerland. The IMD faculty are all in town to present their newest and best ideas, and this combination creates a lot of excitement and learning. That year, Robert and I had the opportunity to create a weeklong sequence of half-day sessions that we decided to title “Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations.”

We had both worked for years with organizations as they tried to carry out significant culture changes. Some were a lot more successful than others! We had written a set of case studies, and we became especially interested in the group of companies in which we had tracked a successful set of changes over time using our Organizational Culture Survey. We knew the stories well, because we had worked with them closely throughout the change process. When we started to add up the possibilities, we quickly realized that we had a lot of global diversity: Domino's in the United States, Swiss Re from Switzerland, DeutscheTech from Germany, GT Automotive from the UK and the United States, Polar Bank from Scandinavia, GE Healthcare from China, and Vale from Brazil. All were global organizations, but they were looking at the cultural challenges of globalization from very different perspectives.

We managed to convince several of the executives from these companies to join us as guest speakers at OWP that year, and that gave us the opportunity to prepare several more teaching cases on these firms. Our coauthors Nancy Lane and Colleen Lief both began their involvement with this book project by writing teaching cases on several of these firms to prepare for their presentations at IMD. Everything went well at the OWP sessions. But as things were winding down after the program, we realized that we were on to something good. It was time to start writing this book.

With lots of good suggestions from Kathe Sweeney, our editor at Jossey-Bass/Wiley, we put together our plan of action. The chapters in this book cover a rich set of culture topics: the importance of supporting the front line, the dynamics of creating strategy alignment, the challenges of cultural integration in mergers and acquisitions, the process of importing culture change from one country to another, the lessons from building a global business in an emerging market, and the lessons from building a global business from an emerging market. Each of these topics is the focus of a chapter, and the company examples are used as cases. The survey results that we followed over time helped to ensure that we were on the right track in describing a change that, in the eyes of the organization's members, really made a difference.

The leaders of these organizations are the heroes in this book. We played an active role in these stories, and we are proud that most of these organizations would say that we helped them a lot. But the best parts of these stories are always the actions that the leaders took to transform their organizations by positioning the culture of the organization as a key part of the change process. This book is written for those leaders who are trying to manage their own organizations and want to learn more about how the culture of the firm can be an important point of leverage.

In this book we also aspire to make a practical contribution to the research literature. Since the beginning of the academic discussion of the importance of corporate culture, there has always been an emphasis on the deeper levels of culture that are hard for us to see—and even harder to change. Ed Schein explained all of this to us years ago: the importance of distinguishing the underlying assumptions from values and behaviors, or superficial artifacts. But it is still always difficult for us mere mortals to see these levels in practice. It's especially hard when we keep looking for a fundamental set of underlying assumptions that form the foundation of an organization's culture.

But at the end of this book, as we started to summarize what we had learned, we realized that a lot of the challenge of the change process involved changing rituals, habits, and routines. Habits have deep structures too and are hard to change, but they also have a fairly narrow bandwidth compared to the broad-based fundamentals that make up the set of underlying assumptions that culture researchers have been examining for years with limited success. Some were good habits, some were bad; some were old habits, and some were new. This insight led us to start looking at the organizations that we studied as interesting bundles of these interconnected habits. All of these habits had their roots in underlying assumptions, all were anchored in the value systems of their organizations, and all were manifested in a visible set of behaviors. As we worked with several companies to help them understand the cultural transformations that they were going through, we also found out that this framework was very useful. There's lots of work to do to develop this set of ideas for culture researchers, but this approach has already proven to be helpful in action.

The challenge of building a positive culture in a global organization is a daunting task. It is humbling to contemplate the scale and scope of the challenge, but inspiring to see what can be accomplished once things get started. We have had the privilege, in our careers, of watching a number of global companies try to pull this off. We hope that we have captured some of those lessons for you, so that you can help us put those ideas in action.