How Do you Revolutionize a Complacent Company Culture?

Burton Lee

It is said that when it comes to business success, ‘Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast.’ The biggest single barrier to agility and innovation is a stodgy corporate culture. So how can you revolutionize a complacent culture? Changing the corporate culture is one of the toughest tasks that a new CEO faces. If you want to replace comfort with energy and risk aversion with innovation where do you start? Here is a twelve point checklist which Burton Lee, a Venture Capitalist and lecturer at Stanford University, recently shared at the CIO Summit in London.

Take actions to:

1. Include employees in defining the vision and values.


2. Clearly communicate the vision and values.


3. Foster transparency and openness.


4. Replace competition with collaboration.


5. Reward effort with authority.


6. Hire great people without worrying too much about fit to job descriptions.


7. Focus on outcomes not adherence to processes.


8. Encourage innovation at every level.


9. Encourage people to speak out.


10. Flatten the hierarchy.


11. Remove from authority anyone who does not embody the culture and values you want.


12. Listen – to employees, customers and the market.

Words are not enough. It is actions which change behaviours and action is needed to embed the changes needed in the culture. It takes a sustained effort across several fronts to change a corporate culture. A good example of how to do this is given by Lou Gerstner in his book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Gerstner had worked at RJR Nabisco and American Express before being brought in to IBM as CEO in 1993. When he started IBM was in serious trouble but over the next seven years he turned the supertanker around from being a product company to a services company. Gerstner transformed IBM into a leading services company. He realigned a deeply embedded culture and he did it with actions.

If you need to turn around the culture of an organization then read Gerstner’s book – but if you do not have time then Burton Lee’s 12 points are a very handy guide.

How Do you Revolutionize a Complacent Company Culture?