Corporate Culture: Your Organization’s Response to Stress

Culture is how an organization internally responds to things going badly. Revenue did not meet targets; the product was late to market; the competition beat us to market, our cost structure is out of line; our quality is suffering; we’re losing customers and market share; our web site is a disaster and our user interface isn’t much better; we’re being out sizzled and out sexied.

So what is the response? Panic? Anger? Fear? Denial? Not invented here? Blame and finger pointing? CYA? Retrenchment into process and bureaucracy? Freeze everything? Fire everyone? Reorganization? An investigative committee? An acquisition? Fraud/cooking the books? Surround everyone with everything we’ve got?