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Part of what makes it so hard to “operationalize culture” (that is to predictably incorporate culture as part of all business decisions) is that most parts of culture are hidden. It’s like skiing, biking, or driving a car – after you have done it for awhile you do not think about how to turn, or how to brake. In fact you are doing most actions as part of these activities unconsciously. That is until you have an exception — a child suddenly jumping in the street or a moose crossing the trail. At that moment all your senses focus on the exception and your training kicks in. The same is true for culture — things happen mostly unconsciously until there is an exception. That is when culture becomes visible.

The other difficulty in predictably using cultural levers to achieve strategic success is that culture never forgets — it is cumulative. So you may want to become a lean organization and run into deployment/implementation issues that are totally different from other organizations that seem to share similar values with you only because they have a different cultural legacy than yours. The same could happen with the adoption of a new technology in different markets that seem to share similar needs and values — they may have very different cultural legacies.

Another issue related to the fact that cultures never forget is that your organization may be riddled with bad habits — with people doing certain things a certain way because it has always been done this way. Most people within the groups that have developed bad habits will not question those habits — for them to be questioned they need to be made visible to people who do not belong to those groups.

What do you think? Will we ever be able to operationalize culture, the way marketing and other disciplines were operationalized?

What do those three topics have to do with one another you may wonder.

Consumerization of IT, the expectation to bring your own device to work and to find enterprise user interfaces to be as simple as the Google search box, is clearly driven by millennials. While older generations will increasingly want to do the same, it is the millennials, who have never known of a world without the web, Google, and mobile devices, who will demand it.

Many marketers now agree that with the increased transparency from the inside out (us being able to listen in on customer conversations), but also from the outside in (customers interacting with internal employees on social networks, etc.), there can be no dissonance between your internal culture and your brand. So for example if you have an aggressive culture, then your brand has to stand for being bold.

So if your company has a play in the consumerization of IT space, that means that you need to get the attention of millennials. In order to do that and appear genuine, you need a millennial-friendly employee culture.

Do you buy this argument? Let me know.

Humans, like all other species, have been driven to leave a genetic legacy on this earth. Then we became the only species to develop culture to deal with change. Cultural evolution developed a symbiotic relation with genetic evolution, with humans being the main agents of cultural evolution, but with culture also impacting genetic evolution by favoring certain traits, such as non-aggressiveness.

In modern history, humans have also increasingly been driven by not only leaving a genetic legacy, but also a cultural legacy. While it used to be the purview of the cultural elite — the published writers, famous artists, architects, wealthy art benefactors, and political leaders –, the democratization of culture through the web and cheap technologies that allow anyone to become content/culture creators, has created an environment where everyone can leave a cultural legacy.

Of course, and as many leading thinkers agree, the web is not flat, and new hierarchies that curate real cultural legacies are emerging — we just don’t know who the new cultural kingmakers are.

A good example of cultural vs. genetic legacy is that of Abraham Lincoln. His gene line died off in the early 80′s but his cultural legacy will live on for many more generations.

I had a great conversation with Carnegie Mellon Professor Chris Labash this week. We discussed a wide range of topics as they relate to innovation, including:

• The role of technology
• The importance of understanding human behavior and culture
• The impact of non-financial rewards
• The need for methodologies and processes
• The limits of crowd-sourcing
• The requisite for risk intelligence
• The importance of communication and face-to-face exchanges

To listen to the podcast and read a more detailed post about the discussion, please visit the Collaborative Innovation community.

Unless your company acts as a single tribe, which most companies don’t, you don’t have a single corporate culture. Therein lies the problem with most corporate culture initiatives — they start from the wrong premise that companies are people and that they therefore can have one culture. In reality, most companies have multiple cultures which results in having competitive behavior in the wrong place — within their corporate walls instead of outside in the marketplace.

So what is going on here?

As Edward O. Wilson said in his recent book, The Social Conquest of Earth, “People must have tribes. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world.” Tribes have cultures, organizations don’t — unless they are one tribe. Most organizations have many tribes — you may have a developer tribe, a sales tribe, multiple customer service tribes, a cost conscious tribe, an innovator tribe, a middle management tribe, or a tribe of Belgian-American wine drinkers. Having multiple tribes means that you have multiple cultures. Tribes share common systems of beliefs and values, they have their own language, their own rituals, and their own leaders — who may in fact have no place on your management org chart. Having multiple tribes also means that you have many “us vs. them” or “insider vs. outsider” feelings, something that always happen among tribes.

And that is where the internal competition comes from…a generally unhealthy corporate state of affairs if you are competing against a competitor which behaves like a unified tribe and which can channel all their energy to compete in the marketplace or to achieve a “change the world” type goal.

So what does that mean?

For starters, most traditional corporate culture change management programs fail…since most of them start with the assumption that organizations have a culture. The other implication is that by having multiple tribes, and in some cases mutually incompatible tribes, you may waste a lot of energy on infighting instead of innovating and competing in the marketplace.

There are ways to analyze corporate tribal cultures properly, and there are also ways to align them more closely with corporate innovation and collaboration strategies, but more on that later.

I had a great CMO 2.0 Conversation yesterday with Jim Davis, the CMO at SAS (I will post the conversation in a couple of weeks). As you can imagine the topic of Big Data came up.

Having done research in the area of big data for multiple clients, and having interviewed many CIO’s and CMO’s on the topic, there are a few things that stand out in this emerging market .

1. CMO’s cannot expect results by going it alone
   Some CMO’s are buying their own technology solutions to gain actionable insights from big data.  Unfortunately, most marketing departments lack the wherewithal to deploy sophisticated technology solutions and will never achieve the promise of big data on their own. Even if they have the product management skills to deploy technology, they most likely don’t have the right data-related expertise on the team to get the actionable insights from the data.
2. CMO’s cannot rely on their agency for big data
   Agencies only see a small sliver of the customer data, that related to advertising and possibly lead gen. They do not have access to the other rich data sources that most companies have about their customers, including CRM, customer support data, bricks and mortar data, credit card data, purchasing data, etc.  So relying on only a small portion of the data will leave marketers vulnerable to competitors that can truly mine and base decisions on the comprehensive customer data set.
3. CMO’s should team up with their CIO’s to tap into the promise of big data
   The only way for the CMO to tap into the promise of big data is by teaming up with the CIO. For that relation to work, however, both will have to have a shift in behavior. CIO’s have to stop considering themselves as service providers to the marketing organization and instead set themselves up as true partners to the business — with a deep understanding of the customer facing processes and desired outcomes.  CMO’s will have to become much more disciplined in how they document requirements for technology and data analytics support. As Jim suggested, a quick way to the get CIO’s and CMO’s to align is by giving them the same goals.

What do you think? I would appreciate your input on it.

Last week I wrote for the Collaborative Innovation blog about the fact that perhaps you do not need a culture of innovation, since innovation has been an integral part of the culture of modern humans for thousands of years. This implies that you need to remove the barriers for innovation if you want to increase innovation within your company — not build new structures for it.

Another important Human 1.0 characteristic that most companies are not leveraging enough is social learning. Humans are the only species that are predominantly social learners. We learn by observing others. It is genetic and also part of our culture. Think of a baby that mimics adults before they can sit, walk,or talk — in fact they do it almost instantaneous after being born. That is the hardwired social learning system that humans have had for eons at work.

Where else could you leverage this innate human characteristic?

1. With your customers
   We mimic what others do and adopt the decisions of our tribes as our own. Some call it herding. The key here is to make visible how others make buying decisions to similar people who have not yet made those buying decisions. Amazon does a great job at that — how many books or other Amazon items have you bought because their system told you, after you purchased an item, that “others who bought this item, also bought this?” It works — we tend to imitate others that are like us. How can you make the way others buy your products and services visible to prospects that are like them? Think about it. Traditional reference programs are a step in the right direction, but in this digital and interconnected world, there must be much better ways to do that.
2. With your employees
   Many companies go through massive change management programs without ever leveraging the social learning for which we are hardwired. We mimic people who are successful — that is how we learn new things. So if your change management initiative is intended to produce certain new behaviors, make sure you reward and recognize those that are exhibiting that behavior, and make it easy for others to observe this behavior leads to success. Granted, in the real world it is much more complicated than that. For starters, behaviors are an externalization of shared beliefs and values — and so the right set of values and beliefs have to be in place for the proper behavior to show up in the first place. But once you have that — too few companies leverage the impact of the observability of success. Worse than that, many companies have a total dissonance between what they say and what they do — they may be encouraging a collaborative culture, while at the same time rewarding bullying management tactics by promoting the bullies. Guess what, this will inevitably lead to a bullying culture because we are social learners.

Do you have any other thoughts on this topic — write about it.

Many companies have employer brands (that part of the brand that you show to prospective talent) that are different from their consumer brands (that part of the brand that you show to customers and prospects).

In fact research that we conducted in partnership with The Society for New Communications Research found that almost 20% of companies have an employer brand that is different from their consumer brand. And almost 70% of those that said there was a difference between the brands, also said that their organization was not attempting to make them similar.

Worse than having a different brand is when organizations show prospective employees a different organizational brand during the recruiting process as compared to the brand they experience after they are hired – they account for 15% of all companies that participated in our research (1,000+).

Having an employer brand that is different from your consumer brand may in fact not be such a great idea, and here is why:

1. A consumer brand promise in embedded in a company’s culture and how they behave behind the firewall

With more and more employees interacting with customers and prospects, your internal culture will inevitably become part of your perceived brand promise.

As John Kennedy, the head of corporate marketing at IBM said during a recent CMO 2.0 Conversation: “It is this whole intersection between not only what marketers promise and how a product may or may not perform, but also what the company is like behind the brand.” Or as Phil Clement, the CMO at Aon said during another CMO 2.0 Conversation, when he described how Aon spent two years building the brand from the inside out before taking it out to the marketplace, convinced that their consumer brand is in fact an externalization of their internal values and beliefs: “And then (we) spent about two years building consensus around the company that those characteristics were true, and built credibility around them, so that when we started to talk the talk, the employees and teammates and colleagues would be walking the walk.”

And these are not the only CMO’s that believe that, so do the CMO’s at SAP, Kimpton, Con-Way, and Macys.

2. The numbers show that is a bad idea to keep them separate

The same research study mentioned higher found that companies that show a unified employer and consumer brand can expect the following benefits compared to those that maintain separate brands:

• 1.6X higher employee satisfaction
• 3.5X higher employee loyalty
• 2.7X the number of self-directed employees
• 1.7X the number of new employees who have a positive impression of the company
• 1.5X the number of employees who are proud to tell others that they work with their organization
• 1.5-3X being more attractive to recent college grads

Those numbers are even worse for those organizations that show a different organizational brand during the recruiting process than they really have once an employee joins the company.

It pays to have consistent brands!

I have recently had the pleasure to interview several CMO’s and CIO’s, including the CMO’s at SAP, Macy’s and Aon and the CIO for the US GSA, and the VP of innovation at IBM. You can listen to the podcasts on the CMO 2.0 site and the CIO 2.0 site.

Here are some common themes that seem to emerge when talking to CIO’s and CMO’s:

1. Companies with strong shared beliefs and values do not have to compensate for local cultures — for them, the work culture trumps the local culture.
2. All CMO’s and CIO’s who I have recently interviewed think that understanding employee culture is an important aspect of their success. Many CMO’s are also starting to pay more attention to consumer cultures.
3. Most CMO’s who I recently interviewed are trying to humanize their brands by having people whose job is not marketing or sales to engage with their customers.
4. Most CMO’s who I recently interviewed are trying to promote global brands while staying locally relevant.
5. Every single CMO and CIO who I interviewed is metrics-driven.

If you have suggestions for other CMO’s or CIO’s to interview, please let me know.

Today we released preliminary results of the Social Workplace Trust Study, a study that was co-sponsored between Human 1.0, The Great Place to Work Institute, The International Association of Business Communicators, and The Society for New Communications Research. We will post the recording of the webinar in which we previewed a sneak peek of the results tomorrow, and you can find a copy of the deck we used on Slideshare.

So why did we release a sneak peek of the findings?

We truly believe that there is so much in the data that the more we socialize it with people who have an interest in the topic the better the findings from the study will be. If you are interested in discussing the data with us, please contact me at francois [at] human1 [dot] com.

So what are some of the high level findings?

Finding # 1 – most respondents believe that the best way to learn about a company is through social media and that the accuracy of information about a company is higher in social media than on company websites.

The people who agreed with the statement “One of the best ways for a person to learn about a company is by using social media” outnumbered those that disagreed by a factor 1.5X. When we asked the same question from heavy users of social media, that factor became a whopping 15X, and when we asked the question to people outside of the marketing and communication functions, that factor became 2X.

The respondent who agreed to the statement “What I read about a company on social media is more accurate than what I read about the company on its own website” also outnumbered those that disagreed by a factor 1.5X. When we asked the heavy social media users, that factor became 5.5X, and without the communication and marketing functions, the factor became 2.4X.

Finding #2 – if you treat your employees as adults, instead of as children, you can expect a work environment with higher trust, higher loyalty, and higher employee self-esteem.

Treating an employee as an adult encompasses many cultural traits – including risk, trust, hierarchy, passion, and a set of human-centric belief systems. We used the answers to 5 questions from the survey as proxies for determining whether employees were treated as adults or children. The subsequent findings were amazing.

People that are treated as adults are 3.3X as likely to trust management, they are 2X more loyal to the company, they have 1.7X as much job satisfaction, they take pride in talking about their work with others that is 2X that of people treated as children, and 1.5X as many people who are treated as adults consider themselves having larger social networks than others. Now can you see the benefits that companies who treat their employees as adults must be gaining in terms of talent acquisition and retention, increased innovation and word of mouth?

Not only are the benefits not incremental, they are totally non-linear. If you treat an employee as an adult, not only will they participate in conversations about their company in social media by a factor 3.3X compared to those treated as children, with 1.5X as many of them having larger than average social networks, they will buzz more to more people – and therein lays just one of the exponents.

We also found a clear link between treating employees as adults and passion. The factor there is between 2X and 12X – that means that people who are treated as adults are 2-12X as likely to be passionate at work. Now if you are familiar with some of John Hagel’s work on passion, he found that people who are passionate at work are 2X as likely to tackle tough problems and have social networks that are 2X as large as those that do not have passion at work. Again, can you see the benefits in terms of knowledge flow and innovation?

We have many other findings, including how management actually does live in a “bubble”, how there might be an employee engagement gap, how many companies still discourage the use of social media, and how they fail to use social media to humanize their brands.

Another key finding is how companies expose themselves to significant risks and liabilities by not providing training or “guard rails” on the proper use of social media to their employees.

Again, those results are preliminary. We are still conducting qualitative interviews and cross-tabulating survey results, but if you would like to get involved and make it better before we release the final findings, please be in touch.