Corporate Culture
Continued from page 43
effort. There’s a permanence with artifacts that unrecorded stories
simply don’t have.
Don’t get me wrong. I love stories. I love to tell them, and I
love to hear them.
Frequently I’ll ask clients to share stories of their organization
so that I can get a feel for the corporate culture. But in order to last,
these stories must take on physical form. In the end, it all comes
back to artifacts. Great stories make great artifacts – but only once
they’re made permanent, concrete, tangible. I find it tragic when
I meet companies that haven’t written any of their great stories
down. When company founders and legends retire or pass away,
oftentimes the corporate stories they hold do as well. Stories no one
thought to get on video, or in writing, so that they could be shared
verbatim with others. Stories that never made it into artifact form.
Uncovering the Artifacts of Your
Corporate Culture
44
So what about your company? What artifacts do you have
in place to support your supposed corporate culture? Or are your
corporate artifacts revealing your corporate culture to be something
entirely different from what you’re claiming it to be?
In short, are your artifacts “walking the walk” for your
company so that you’re not just “talking the talk?”
Back to Indiana Jones. If you don’t mind, let’s pretend I’m
Indiana Jones, discovering your current office place some 10, 20
or 30 years down the road. (Don’t worry; your company wasn’t
destroyed by man-eating snakes, malaria or even poor PR. You
simply moved locations. Lock, stock and barrel, you abandoned
your current office space, as well as its contents, or “artifacts,” and
moved across town to set up shop from scratch.)
When I arrive on the scene, I find your old office space exactly
how you left it.
Conference room whiteboards still hold notes from the last
Monday meeting; the desks look like they’re still in use; and the
coffeepot, of course, is empty as usual. In short, it’s a “ghost town”
– or “ghost office,” we should say.
I start digging deeper, as any true archaeologist (or Indiana
Jones) would do, and I discover artifact after artifact. What conclu-
sions would I come to about your organization’s culture from this
physical evidence? Would I imagine a company based on the values
you purportedly uphold?
Remember, I have no company representatives to talk to. I
can only base my conclusions on the physical evidence before me.
Would my discoveries lead me to conclude that your culture is
what you say it is?
The discrepancy I often find in my consulting work between
perceived culture and actual culture amazes me. I’ve worked with
many companies who say they value attention to detail, yet the
physical evidence screams chaos and sloppiness. Other companies
say they value creativity and personal expression while the physical
evidence suggests that they really value conformity.
Imagine further that I, the archeologist, discover some of your
company’s training materials, such as handbooks and videos. (These
could be analogous to cultural writings of a civilization.) In essence,
these writings document corporate values and priorities. As I go
through these materials with a fine-toothed comb, I discover what
this civilization (your company) taught its youth (your new hires).
Tell me something: Would the emphasis of these materials lead
me to come to the conclusions you want me to?
Most of my consulting work is in the customer service realm. One
of my first requests when working with an organization is to see their
new hire training materials. Many organizations that claim to value
service excellence often spend little to no training time on the subject.
For instance, one “service-oriented” company had a two-day
new hire program. As I poured through the training materials,
I kept hoping to find some content regarding customer service.
Finally I found some – about 15 minutes worth of material in
the entire two days. Sure, the ot