Leading a Culture of Change

Leading Culture Change Christopher S. Dawson Stanford University Press, 2010 213 pages, Hardcover, $28.00In the present business environment, change is a constant. Organizations and their stakeholders experience constant change, constant demands to change, and more often than not, an accelerating pace of change. Top leaders are charged with orienting their organizations to long term success and value creation using a variety of tools, the organizational culture being one of the most significant. Over 25 years of organizational consulting experience contributes to identification of five critical success factors to cultural change, and to the practical guidance the book provides that helps CEOs plan and facilitate cultural change with an eye to long term value creation. This book clearly makes the case that an organization's culture has a place in long term value creation of the firm, and organizational change can be facilitated to help achieve this end. This book provides the blueprint for a CEO to follow in doing just that.While organizational culture appears to be a significant consideration in business, the author argues that some leaders may be uninterested and uninformed regarding the power of culture as a value creating tool. He cites five fallacies of organizational culture that contribute to this overall mindset including the notion that organizational culture is: 1) irrelevant, 2) fixed and cannot be changed, 3) too complex to ever really shape, 4) the result solely of human resource levers such as compensation, benefits, performance reviews, and 5) mostly a reflection of leadership personality of an organization's founder/original leader. The book presents a challenge to beliefs that an organization's culture is not a powerful tool and cannot be changed to help an organization achieve its goals.Dawson makes a major statement that creating a strong, consistent and aligned organizational culture is one of the most important contributions that a leader can make to an organization. Defining culture as both personality and capability, he further claims that a strong organizational culture can act as the engine of value creation, helping to build competitive advantage for a firm, and that a firm's culture can be changed to achieve this end. Part of the challenge is in understanding what can be changed. In other words, what elements are embedde in an organization and may be difficult to change, which ones may not be as embedded and able to be changed, and what process and motivation will best help an organization to change.The author suggests that there are five critical success factors for cultural change including 1) defining the urgency and reason for cultural change, 2) identifying the desired culture and integration of elements from existing culture, 3) creating a cultural change roadmap that will guide the effort, 4) translating the organization's vision culture to observable behaviors and events, and 5) modeling executive authenticity. The chapters in the book outline and explain the phases of Dawson's cultural change process, providing a practical sequence of steps that the leader can use to facilitate cultural change in the organization. The three sections of the book, Culture as the Engine of Value Creation, (Section I), Implementing Culture Change, (Section II), and Practical Applications, (Section III), provide a well organized path through steps in cultural change, while each chapter includes a helpful overview, summary and real-life case studies to help illustrate key points of the identified process. Additionally, Dawson provides generous use of tools, charts, illustrations and other visuals. Of particular interest is the master view of the Cultural Change Process.Dawson's Cultural Change Process provides the reader with a well organized and easy to understand view of cultural change. It identifies four key stages in cultural change (setup, launch, wave and progress), as well as the CEO's role and activities in each of the identified stages. …