An old Marine - there are no former Marines - once told me about a touchy situation he'd faced while with the Corps. He said, "I had no orders and no access to a superior officer, but I knew how a Marine was supposed to handle such matters."
That is the power of culture speaking.
The Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini wrote that he wondered why the English were able to perform well more consistently than other Europeans. He said all was revealed one day by a friend, George V. Bernardo, who "believed that it wasn't important for Englishmen to be intelligent (intelligence could be a hindrance) because...they all could act intelligently when the need arose. This is how it worked. They all had a few ideas firmly embedded in their heads. He said 'seven ideas,' but his figure was probably too low. Whatever the number, the ideas were exactly identical and universal. That was why, in older days, in distant lands with no possibility of communicating with their superiors, weeks or months by sailing ship away from London, admirals, generals, governors, ambassadors, or young administrators alone in their immense districts, captains of merchant ships, subalterns in command of a handful of native troops in an isolated outpost, or even common ordinary Englishmen, facing a dangerous crisis, had always known exactly what to do, with the certainty that the prime minister, the foreign secretary, the cabinet, the queen, the archbishop of Canterbury, the ale drinkers in any pub, or the editor of the Times would have approved heartily, because they too had the same seven, or whatever, ideas in their heads and would have behaved in the same way, in the same circumstances."
I'll leave it to you as to whether the English still have that advantage (The current hostage crisis may argue against it) but the point is still powerful: there can be something very liberating and powerful about a culture that inculcates its members with positive principles; guidelines that they can carry with them and use when those are the only available guidance.
What is surprising is how seldom companies and organizations go beyond simply posting a list of values, assuming they even do that. They wonder why employees kick decisions upstairs but there is little discussion of what it means to be a member of the organization and what expectations are always present.
In other words, they don't talk to their employees about what it means to be a "Marine."
3 comments:
I think it is very hard for companies to create this culture. Oh they can (with a lot of effort) create a superficial version, but remember the English in your example and the Marine grew to live and breath their principles. It was unconscious and if you asked why they would of said "because that is the way to do it."
The Marines are a prime example where the individual is re-made and in the process becomes a Marine and the principles of the Marine. The English use to have the same thing through both their military, the public service training and through their old public schools.
I think the English are now suffering from the attack that both the old public schools, military and public service have undergone. Whether the eventual end result is better or not remains to be seen (in my opinion it wont be).
Achieving this re-make of the individual is very, very hard and I don't see companies having the time or will to do it.
Good post and good point.
It gets down to the distinction between aspirational values and actual values. Too often companies (and individuals) create values lists and purpose statements that are aspirational in nature -- the values they wish to hold.
Actual values may not be as eloquent as the ones companies aspire to, but they have the benefit of being real and often ingrained in the people.
Jim Collins' work does a good treatment of this topic, most of which boils down to figuring out: what kinds of activities would a company actually fire someone for.
If a company is not willing to actually fire someone over an incidence, it probably isn't an actual value but rather an aspriational one.
Simon and Erik,
Great comments! I think three things are necessary to build such a positive culture: leadership by example, consistent enforcement of the values, and policies that don't reward - inadvertently or not - behavior that erodes the culture. The problems that each of you noted are indeed major obstacles and are extremely hard to overcome. Many organizations are unwilling to make the necessary commitment.
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