What You Do is What You Are

Lesson 1- Corporate Culture: An Introduction

Every company or business has its own composite culture that dictates the norms, values, and work ethics of that company. In this era, we have however seen a mix of multiple cultures. Moreover, these cultures are created unintentionally without any conscious thought. For instance, some managers were accustomed to screaming at their subordinates, others neglected to give any feedback, while some didn’t bother returning emails. 

There are several questions that end up determining the corporate culture of a company. These are related to what factors determine the prioritization of returning phone calls, whether it is fine to ask for a raise before the annual review, what is more important, whether the price or partnership, etc. No business with different cultures produces the same answers to these questions. There aren’t any right answers to those questions. The right answers for your company depend on what your company is, what it does, and what it wants to be. In fact, how your employees answer these kinds of questions is the culture. Identifying the culture you want is hard: you have to figure out not only where your company is trying to go, but the road it should take to get there. For instance, in the case of many startups, a culture of frugality is vital. The culture that works for Apple would never work for Amazon. That is because, while Apple focuses on product design, Amazon practices frugality. Apple designs more beautiful products than Amazon, while Amazon’s products are cheaper than Apple’s. Culture clearly has a powerful effect.

In business, it is often perceived that if you have a strong culture but a product nobody wants, you fail. So the culture might appear to be weaker than a product. But on closer inspection, it is found that over time, culture can overcome the structural barriers and transform the behaviour of entire industries and social systems. From this broader perspective, culture is the strong force in the corporate universe.

Companies are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily micro-behaviours of the human beings that compose them. However, it is not easy to decipher such a culture and its direct impact upon the working of the company. In this insight, we shall look into identifying the factors that affect corporate culture and identify ways to methodically reshape it.

Lesson 2- Lessons from History

Slavery has been around since the beginning of recorded history. It was endorsed by all the major religions; long and detailed sections of the Bible and the Koran are dedicated to it. In our long history, there has been only one successful