Company Culture—Laws
Company Culture—A Look At Its Structure
When you change a company culture, you change a general
system. Here are some characteristics of general systems to keep in mind.
A General System has Subsystems That Share the Characteristics of the Larger System.
For example, a department is a general system because, like the whole organization, it has similar components such as people, financial systems, and customers. This is also true of the next level up, the division. In contrast a person is not a general system—your parts do not have characteristics of your whole body, e.g. your arm does not think.
The parts of a general system reveal the whole. For example:
- You can understand a company's culture by carefully interviewing only a handful of members.
- What you see in one department, you will see in others.
- What one person experiences, so do others.
Changing One Part of a General System Affects the Whole System.
All parts are related, none is isolated. Changing the Fed. interest rate affects every company in the nation, and our relationship to international markets. Working in one area of a company's culture will affect the whole system. This is why developing a culture has great leverage.
If You Maximize Each Part of a System the Whole System Will Not Work as Well as It Could.
A car’s parts must work in harmony and fit the car’s purpose. Maximizing each machine on a production line, guarantees that the whole line will not be optimized.
The corollary: If you optimize a system, you must run some parts below their
optimum. For example, optimizing a production line may require sometimes idling
some of the machines.
The Characteristics of Any System Come Mostly From the Larger System of Which It Is a Part.
General systems evolve in relationship with their environment. For example, to understand why a company makes what it makes, look at the marketplace. You cannot understand parts by looking downwards at lower levels or subsystems. To understand a system you must look upwards, at the situation. To understand any event, look at its context.
To say that another way: for a company to evolve, its context must change. Leadership is that context.
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