New Book on Organizational Culture
Mark Bodnarczuk's new book entitled, Making Invisible Bureaucracy Visible: A Guide to Assessing and Changing Organizational Culture is now available on Amazon.com and at local bookstores.

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.
Mark Bodnarczuk's new book entitled, Making Invisible Bureaucracy Visible: A Guide to Assessing and Changing Organizational Culture is now available on Amazon.com and at local bookstores.

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.
The process by which organizational culture is formed has many things in common with the formation of personality. In terms of personality formation, by the time we’re old enough to know that we have a personality we’ve had no hand in fashioning it. In much the same way, an organization’s culture is like its personality and many managers wake up one day and find themselves with structures, systems, and a culture that they have not consciously chosen; in business relationships that may not be in their best interest; with assumptions about generating revenue and patterns of spending that they have not consciously chosen; with employees who are not matched to the organization’s human capital needs; pursuing objectives and goals that don’t produce the desired financial and non-financial results.

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.
We are convinced that the process of assessing and changing organizational culture must be focused on real business problems – issues that managers care about deeply. It’s a mistake to lead with cultural analysis and cultural change. Assessing and changing organizational culture is of little value unless it is linked to (and motivated by) one or more of these six interdependent dimensions of organizational life:
If the activities associated with assessing and changing organizational culture cannot be meaningfully linked to one or more of these six dimensions, then they should probably not be done. Diagnosing and changing organizational culture for its own sake is an academic exercise that provides little or no value to organizations and the managers who lead them. But if an organization needs to develop a new strategy or strategic plan; improve its execution and day-to-day operations; implement new IT infrastructure; seamlessly integrate business systems; build bench-strength in leadership and management skills; or improve the decision-making and consensus process for the allocation of human, material, and financial resources, then understanding how its culture positively and negatively impacts these issues is not only value-added, it’s probably necessary. The key is to lead with a concrete, tangible business issue, not the study of organizational culture as an end in itself.

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.
Making Invisible Bureaucracy Visible will be available on Amazon.com and at local bookstores by mid-September.

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.
A common perception is that cultural change has to start at the very top of an organization. But field experience has shown that culture change can begin with the sub-culture of a work-group where a manager who is one or two levels down from senior management decides to become and Island of Excellence® in a sea of mediocrity. As objective evidence of believable, performance improvement becomes known to other managers, change often goes horizontal across the organization through other work-groups, then up through the line organization to top managers. The Breckenridge Institute® has developed ten guidelines that managers should follow when under-taking this kind of culture change (see list below).

Like the scuba divers shown above in the Blue Hole in Belize, this Blog “dives in” to issues associated with organizational culture and cultural change. Staff members of the Breckenridge Institute® post recent research, case studies, experiences, insights, books we're reading and performance results they’ve gotten working with organizations in the area of using organizational culture to improve organizational performance and sustainability.
Ground-breaking studies like Jim Collins’ books (Built to Last and Good to Great) and John Kotter’s book (Corporate Culture and Performance) have shown that while an organization’s culture powerfully molds its operating style and can positively (or negatively) affect the performance of work-groups and entire organizations, “culture” has remained an overly-complex and somewhat mysterious topic for most organizations – until now. Research conducted at the Breckenridge Institute® has identified the constituents of organizational culture and formulated them into a Culture Equation™ that describes what organizational culture is in simple, concrete terms (see below).
POI ↔ COI ↔ ROI = Current Results™
Our work has shown that managers can use this simple equation to improve performance at the organizational, work-group, and individual employee levels simultaneously. The terms of the Culture Equation™ are defined as follows:
The key insight is that organizational culture is composed of all four terms in the equation, with each term being a distinct (but interdependent) category of business elements that interact with the others to produce an organization’s financial and non-financial results. It is the interaction of the four terms that creates organizational culture.
Here’s how the four elements work together to create organizational culture. Day-to-day operations occur as patterns of interactions (POI) within the context of interaction of an organization’s structures and systems (COI). Over time, the interaction of POI and COI functions like a group learning process that creates a repository of interaction (ROI) that becomes an organization’s knowledge-base and the tacit beliefs that managers and staff members have about the organization and the people in it. Over time, these first three elements settle down on an organization-wide pattern of interaction (POI) within the larger context of interaction of the business environment (COI) and the combination of these elements produces the financial and non-financial results that an organization actually gets. This is the underlying process that Dave Hanna is describing when he says that, “All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.”
Most culture theorists have a primary focus on one or two of the terms in the Culture Equation™ as the key elements that define organizational culture, but few systematically consider all four terms and their interrelationship to one another. For example, Edgar Schein focuses primarily on tacit beliefs and assumptions (ROI) that exist within the organization's context (COI); David Hanna focuses primarily on observable work habits and practices to explain how the organization’s culture really works, e.g. the interaction between POI and COI as producing an organization’s Current Results; and John Kotter and James Heskett focus on linking Current Results to the level of flexibility in the POI as found in Theory I: Strong Cultures, Theory II: Strategically Appropriate Cultures, and Theory III: Adaptive Cultures.
Bottom Line: Whether a leader is the founder of a new company or a top line or middle manager in a well-established company, one of their most important tasks is to create, manage, and (if necessary) to destroy organizational culture in order to get the desired results. Our work at the Breckenridge Institute® has shown that the primary way this can be accomplished is by using the precise definition of culture provided by the Culture Equation™.