This has been resonating in my mind since the last few weeks when I attended a conference and Ashok Soota (Co-founder of Mindtree) made a reference to this quote from Peter Drucker. The concept of organizational culture and development used to sound alien during the early stage of a corporate career but as we grow and as we encounter transitions, these terms mean something vital beyond obvious. This equally applies to senior/mid-level managers where your team culture has a huge impact on your strategic execution.
We tend to spend a lot of time on strategy and planning but the end of the day, the bottom line is all about a perfect synergy and synchronization between culture, capabilities and strategy, and missing one of them has huge impact on the organization sustainability. As they say, “Anyone can copy your strategy but no one can copy your culture”.
It is a general belief that there are seven identical faces like you living in different parts of the world (doppelganger) and the same way, I believe, any new business idea has at least 700 similar twins in different brains across the globe. End of the day, it is the kick-off and execution with an organizational culture that makes a difference.
Our company, OptiSol Business, is forced continuously to reinvent and reorient our culture as we work with startups, SMEs and large enterprises and when we talk about digital transformation, we have to practice what we preach. When we say reorient/reinvent, it doesn’t mean, we change our values but it is the cultural reorientation towards changing customer’s problem statements. Being a services organization, we at OptiSol, believe that our people are the major differentiators and it is the ONLY sustainable point of differentiation. In the age of digital transformation, few pointers that could help you:
1. Employees/team members are loyal to culture and not to strategy and they work for a purpose. We need to visualize and communicate our journey on regular basis.
2. If you are a startup, incorporate a cultural element from day one. We have seen many of our clients doing that successfully and it has done wonders for them.
3. Though there will be macro influential factors, culture does not get built by itself – Informal chat with random employees on their general insights/perception about the company with an open mind will help in building and maintaining the right culture.
4. Remove or annihilate negative cultural disruptors at regular intervals.
5. Create positive stories and celebrate victories when your culture has helped your customers in any of their endeavors.
6. Though we have not done this yet, this is something in our pipeline. If there is a strategic plan, a business plan, why not a culture plan?
