1. The leader can create a new organization with new procedures, but the formation of culture requires collective learning and repeated experiences of success or failure.
2. It is no accident when a “turn around manager” arrives, the top layers of management are usually replaced and massive reorganization occurs. These drastic measures destroy old culture and initiate a new culture building process by removing the people who carry and represent the old culture. The destruction of culture is extremely costly on human level. The new people have to start building process all over and it is not even clear whether this is possible.
3. An organization built on individual incentives cannot become a set of teams simply because the CEO announces that teamwork is now necessary and launches a team-building program. However, if the CEO understands culture dynamics, he or she will begin to reward individuals for helping others and for contributing to other projects, thereby acknowledging the deep individualism of the organization but broadening the concept of individual competence to increasingly include “working with others”.
4. Leaders cannot arbitrarily change culture in the sense of eliminating dysfunctional elements. Leaders can evolve culture by building on its strength while letting its weaknesses atrophy over time. If an organization is successful over time and has evolved mental models based on these methods, they will not abandon the mental model. The leader jobs is too broaden the Mental models. Focus should include developing new standards of judgment and evaluation so that competitive behavior is viewed as more negative and cooperative behavior more positive.
5. Management development is typically very function in young organizations. For example, the organization may promote the people most likely to be entrepreneur or who are technically the most competent, rather than seek out people who have managerial talent. Founder builders often glorify the technical functions such as research and development, manufacturing, and sales and demean managerial functions such as finance, planning, marketing, and human resources. Potential successors may be blocked from taking over and gaining learning experiences. Successful leaders at this stage grow with the organization and change their own outlook or recognize their own limitations and permit other forms of leadership to emerge.
6. The leader builds culture in one of three ways: a) by hiring and keeping subordinates who think and feel the way they do; b) by indoctrinating and socialize subordinates to think and feel as they do; c) by establishing a role model that encourages subordinates to identify with them and thereby internalize their beliefs, values, and assumptions.
Additional Thoughts about building culture: 1. Culture is not arbitrarily changed. Culture is evolved by building on strengths, broadening mental models of successful methods and processes 2. Get back to understanding what the product is about and focusing on customer oriented strategies. 3. Increasing vision and comprehension communication between top management and employees 4. Pushing data to unexpected places, encouraging participation and intrepretation of the data, and getting feedback that will cause temporary formation of teams and engineering of new processes 5. Creating new procedures that transform the organization 6. Creating and environment of learning 7. Getting people to thinking and value the same things the leader does.
7. Healthy, open minded skeptics can become effective leaders and, eventually, champions at work. If they find new approaches to enhance results, they will commit time and energy to them.
8. Local line leaders focus is at a business unit level. They may not think much at learning within the larger organization.
9. Leaders can use free-market choice inside an organization to liberate the entrepreneurial spirit of their people. As organizations move toward indirect leadership, the key role of senior leaders is to increase their people choices in ways that still focus the organization on its mission. Organizations viewed as economies.
10. In the future, most employees will work in intraprises that provide services to the core businesses. The core business will be run by small groups of line managers who will buy much of the value they add from internal intraprises.
11. What is leadership? Leadership is the process of empowering subordinates to learn from their mistakes, make changes, adjust to new circumstances, and preserve. Leadership brings into play elements of planning, commitment to innovation and problem solving, and energy ensuring dynamics of the organization are fair. The group looks for leadership to unlock paralysis in the direction to move. Leadership establishs policies, identifies targets, set priorities, and allocate resources and money. Leadership job is to create a feeling of security for their employees and influence young talent to come and work for them. Leadership creates blue oceans by creating a utility proposition. Leadership is gained by competence not position. Leadership creates conditions of comfort for their employees. Leadership talks openly about a wide variety of issues, sponsors democratic forum where creative members are reward for initiative, ingenuity and bravery. Leadership leads by example. Leadership uses work exchanges to show how things are to be done, giving each job a sense of dignity and enhanced standing with the crew. Leadership values the individual. Leadership creates free market choice inside their organizations to liberate the entrepreneurial spirit of their people. Leadership gets difficult projects started and results in long-term impact.
Leaders inspire confidence, fight fear, initiate positive and productive actions, define goals, and paint brighter tomorrows. The character of society’s leadership may substantially determine how that society fares in an environment of change. Leadership values must be based on standards that benefit society.
12. The ethnic, cultural, and gender characteristics of America’s population and labor force is rapidly changing. The emigration of nonwhites from Asia and Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and West and East Africa, represent people in the America’s melting pot rising relative to that of Americans of European descent and represent an estimated that one third of all new entrants to the labor force.
13. Leaders must be willing to accept five fundamental challenges in the work force: a. They must be willing to be more sensitive and understanding with respect to ethnic, cultural, and gender differences. B. They must have a vision for the workplace that will result in significant broadening of the corporate culture and environment. C. They must craft and implement new and different employment and communication processes to enhance and promote perceptions of fairness and equity. D. They must bring a commitment to the effective utilization of a diverse work force. E. They must establish a place where people want to work and be productive and to develop new markets and maintain existing ones.
14. Effective leaders do not earn their role by position or Herculean work efforts, instead, effective leaders nurture dignity in those around them; their area of expertise are listening, propagation of values, and assurance of dignity; they foster relationship as a source of their power.
15. When people are experiencing fear, dread, foreboding, and exhaustion, people have an emotional need for a leader. A leader combats fears, instills confidence, and moves the group forward.
16. Leaders lead because they create a passionate commitment in other people to pursue the leaders strategy and succeed.
17. Leaders are the keepers and shapers of the company culture and constantly communicate these held values.