(With Ash Mukherjee)

Corporate culture matters because it provides the framework for what and why employees and managers prioritize business objectives and how they go about executing them. Transformation depends on this adaptive workforce that drives and defines the organization.

In today’s markets, business leaders must be able to execute and go to market ever faster. Business agility defines your organizational ability to respond, decide, embrace, change, and execute quickly. Your corporate culture must be open and flexible enough to adjust to continuously changing customer expectations, market landscapes, and technology innovation.

Your corporate culture defines how your organization thinks about itself and how it tackles the challenges of permanent change, hence, in order to enable your organization to become adaptive, you must develop a culture that is sustainable and adaptable. Developing an open culture matters more than ever because:

  • Culture is not a soft issue but the toughest nut to crack. A rigid, conservative, and inflexible corporate culture lies behind most failed transformation initiatives. A lack of diversity in teams, misaligned incentives, inside-out thinking, and hierarchical command-and-control structures are a reflection of outdated management cultures that hold back transformation.
  • Open culture is reliant on organizational and management transformation. Transforming into an adaptive enterprise requires a broad perspective. Culture sets the tone for organizational structures, types of technology, management techniques, and processes.
  • Technology evolution and cultural transformation are closely intertwined. Culture impacts ways of working, thinking, and managing, hence a culture strategy has to include the technology real estate, as well.

The report “An Open Culture Becomes The Underpinning For The Adaptive Enterprise” investigates the overarching role that culture plays in becoming an adaptive enterprise. It helps business leaders develop a strategy to support ongoing cultural transformation.