Business success and the corporate culture factor

Section A: Context

Understanding, and leveraging corporate culture for competitive advantage is certainly on senior management's agenda. According to practitioners and commentators interviewed for this Report, it is fast climbing their list of priorities.

According to research for this Report there are several key reasons for this. First, the 1980s and 1990s have seen companies inundated with organizational change programmes, be they incremental, as in continuous improvement initiatives, or breakthrough, as in business process re-engineering projects. The evidence is that the volume of change programmes will grow further in the future.

This fact has been repeatedly demonstrated by original research by Business Intelligence throughout the 1990s. For example, 1995 research of 100 Times top 1000 companies for the report Re-engineering: The Critical Success Factors found that 60 per cent of organizations had attempted to re-engineer their business.¹

Similarly research for the 1996 Business Intelligence report Transforming HR to Support Corporate Change found that 86 per cent of the 231 responding companies had implemented major change programmes.² Moreover research for the 1996 report The Strategic Management of Internal Communication found that, on an importance index of 0–10, respondents rated, at 8.6, 'supporting major change programmes' as the most important role of the internal communication function in the organization, thus suggesting a high level of change activity within their companies.³

The organizational change consultancy, Organizational Development Research (ODR) interviews senior executives on a yearly basis to study the volume, intensity and complexity of change programmes. For 1997 their research found that:⁴

-  48 per cent of organizations reported a greater volume of change than one year previous

-  65 per cent said the momentum of change was increasing

-  68 per cent stated that the complexity of the changes they are facing is on the rise.

According to ODR's data there is no evidence that this upwards trend is going to plateau. This belief is supported by the findings of 'Culture and Change Management',⁵ a survey exclusively commissioned for this Report of the culture change activity within 236 mainly European and North American companies. A total of 79.32 per cent of respondents believed culture change to be currently a more important issue within their organization than five years ago. And 74.44 per cent believed it would become more important over the next five years. (This survey is touched on in section F of this Chapter and its findings are analysed in detail in Chapter 3).

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