Defining That Binding Thread of Every Organisation - Culture

What defines you as an organization? Is there a way of doing things in this organization? Is there that invisible binding thread that characterizes the purpose of the firm and what they stand for? That mystical rubric is called Culture.

It is very often we hear the speeches – “Our key success factor is our culture!”; “There is something wrong with our culture”; “We want people who will fit into our culture!” ; " We are like that – only!" Most management pundits glorify culture as the difference between the pioneers and the laggards or from the winners and the ‘alsorans'. Culture is like the pulse of an organization. It cannot by itself give you a lot of information – slow, fast, normal, weak et.al. But it is an opportunity to peek into the portals of the organization. It helps you to ask questions to delve deeper into the institutional psyche at the moment – what ails or what could be the probable causes? With the mindset of organizations moving from being 'asset-based' to a 'people-based outlook’, this discussion populates your guesses and surmises about the organizations. Like a lot of management disciplines, ‘culture’ is best understood by questions and reflective observation and not necessarily answers. 

There is also a general tendency to demean culture as something esoteric and intangible and is also a popular and convenient excuse. While we often use clichés and banal statements to describe it, it always presents an interesting cue point to understand the organization. The better you understand it, the better you can leverage it to build a high-performance organization.

Edgar Schein the 'supreme guru' of culture defines it as: