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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.

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.

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.

Many culture scholars would argue that you always have to deal with layers of cultures. There is the gender layer, the religious layer, the ethnic layer, the regional or nationality layer, the work layer, etc. And if you have ever worked with multinational companies you will hear these differences, and especially the nationality one,  pop up every now and then — oh, but that was an American idea, we Brits don’t do it that way.

But does it really have to be that way? Or are they just excuses?

After all, some companies claim that they don’t have to deal with national cultural differences. Francoise Legoues, VP of Innovation at IBM, said that they do not see much corporate culture differences within the various geographical cultural areas. Some other folks I had the pleasure to speak with in the context of our book said the same — they do not have to account for differences in regional or national cultures.

So how does this work?

Culture is an externalization of shared beliefs and values. The way we externalize it is in the form of rituals, language, habits, techniques and behaviors.  What companies claiming to not have to account for local cultures have is a set of corporate values and beliefs that trumps the local cultural belief system. When people are at work they are IBMers first, and not Danish, Spanish or Thai.

So what happens in those companies where people constantly bring up the differences?

It too is part of the corporate culture and not an externalization of the local regional culture. In most cases it’s an excuse to disagree and form factions. It’s a corporate habit – and a bad one. It’s an externalization of a set of shared beliefs held by subgroups of people within the company. It happens when there is no strong corporate set of shared beliefs.

Now of course, nothing dealing with humans will ever be so black and white. There are, for example, some differences in how Asians, who have a more collective culture, fill out their profiles in social environments than Westeners, who have a more individualistic culture. But those differences are subtle and secondary or tertiary in companies with strong corporate cultures and true shared values.

What do you think? Do you buy that?

Being in the process of writing a book on culture, we quickly got frustrated with the existing models to evaluate and measure culture. We found many models such as the Power Distance Index or OCAI  to be overly simplistic. Plus, they often uncover only the visible parts of culture. We wanted a model and process that would allow us to accurately describe all the subcultures, including the hidden ones.

And so we started developing the Hyper-Social Culture Index. The Hyper-Social Culture index borrows from some of the other models, as there are good elements in all of them.

The index is a maturity model that analyses corporate cultures and subcultures on 8 different axes.

• Individual Behaviors: Learning vs. Knowing (includes the degree to which people strive to learn from data and results, will engage in debate, will adopt others’ processes, and will study failures)
• Trust: High trust vs. Low Trust (includes the degree to which people desire trust from the organization and from their peers, and how vigorously people will express disagreement with management)
• Passion: Passion at Work vs. Day at Work (includes the degree to which personnel feel passion for their daily work, interest in staying with their present employer, pride of belonging to the organization, and interest in taking on new work challenges)
• Risk Profile: Risk Intelligence vs. Risk Intolerance (includes the degree to which personnel will willingly risk failure in the pursuit of progress and will assume accountability)
• Organizational Structure: Tribe vs. Hierarchy (includes the prevalence of hierarchical power structures, organizational silos, self-assembled teams, etc., and the manner in which decisions are made)
• Organizational Beliefs: Human Centric vs. Company Centric (includes customs and norms that demonstrably place people (customers and workers) before organizational interests such as financial gain or products)
• Problem Solving Culture: System vs. Component (includes practices and attitudes that foster integrative thinking about value creation as opposed to simple task performance)
• Knowledge Culture: Sharing vs. Hoarding (includes customs and practices that encourage the sharing of information, status, and other elements that the organization deem valuable)

We use surveys, ethnographic interviewing techniques, participant observation techniques, and online business problem challenges to gather the information that can populate the maturity index. So far we have been able to use the model very successfully to help large organizations improve their innovation processes and successfully go through change management programs.

We are continuously refining the model and if you or someone you know could give us feedback we would very much appreciate that.

In a future post I will describe how we use consumer culture modeling to to drive successful new product strategies.

One of the most important Human 1.0 characteristic  is culture. According to human evolutionary biologists, humans developed culture (broadly defined as tools, language, rituals, etc.) during the rapid climate swings of the Pleistocene era to deal with those climate changes without having to wait for biological evolution to help us out. So while humans from Lapland and the Sahara Desert were identical 20,000 years ago, transplanting one from one region to the other would surely have resulted in death – the cultures of survival were drastically different. When the Pleistocene era ended about 11,000 years ago, humans realized that they were the only species that could deal with change using culture – and so they started to create their own change and adapted to it through culture. That was driven by evolutionary forces that allowed humans to become the dominant species on earth. Culture is influenced by genetic evolution and vice versa, as Boyd and Richerson (Peter J. Richerson, 2006) argue in one of their great books “Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.”

Culture – referring to a body of knowledge, rituals, language and beliefs that gets passed around to help us make sense of our surroundings and drive parts of our behavior – can develop and change very rapidly. Take the culture of SMS and that of Twitter – they are both less than a decade old yet very different. They use different languages and different rituals.

Humans create culture in all the different aspects of their lives. There are cultural differences between families, consumer tribes, pop-culture fans, and employee groups. Companies that take the time to understand their customer and employee cultures, or better yet, those that can shape it, can gain game changing advantages over those that don’t. Those that don’t try to understand these cultures can continue to expect high strategic failure rates – like the classic 80% product failure rate that has been plaguing modern companies for decades.

You see – culture trumps strategy. You can develop the best internal or external strategies – change management initiatives, new product development plans, or go-to market strategies –, but if you do not have a good understanding of the cultures in which you will attempt to deploy these strategies, they are almost certain to fail. That does not mean that strategy is not important – it is. It just means that focusing on strategy without understanding the fundamental Human 1.0 cultural characteristics that underlie all successful strategies is like focusing on a recipe without having any understanding of the ingredients.

We have developed a fully comprehensive maturity model to analyze consumer and employee cultures, and I will document that in a future blog post.

There was a lot of talk at this week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference about creating unified customer experiences. Questions being bantered around included who should own the unified customer experience and what technology should be deployed to ensure a unified customer experience.

Of course, and as Tom Asacker (@tomasacker) rightfully pointed out in a tweet, you can never create a unified customer experience, as the customer experience gets formed in the mind of the customer – not in the actual transaction. That experience will be based on a customer’s context that  is totally outside of the company’s control.

But assuming that what is meant is to attempt to offer a consistent customer experience, as it would be witnessed by a neutral observer – it is interesting to see how most people focus on the company’s hardware, people and infrastructure, and don’t talk much about the company’s software, its culture.

As you (hopefully) allow more and more people within your organization to interact with your customers, prospects and detractors, you will dramatically increase the number of touch-points between your company and the marketplace. If it also your goal to humanize the experience with your company by allowing employees to be themselves and not to sound like corporate automatons, you will also increase the chances of inconsistent user experiences.

So how do you manage that customer experience across those multiple and diverse touch-points?

Technology and organizational responsibility may play a role, but the fundamental thing you have to have in place for any of this to work is the right corporate software – the right culture. And you can influence culture by adopting, and by living by, a simple set of values. Do like Dell, where the simple values are “be open, be transparent, be simple, and be caring,” or Jetblue, where the values are “safety, caring, integrity, fun and passion.” At Jetblue it allows them to predict how frontline employees with react to a customer problem within 97% accuracy – there is no software or organizational structure that would do that for you. There are of course other examples of companies doing that right, including the Ritz and Best Buy.

But how are those values different from your vision, mission, values, beliefs and other corporate documents that are often useless?

At those companies where they work, everyone lives by their values. It forms the DNA of their culture. If you cannot live by those values the organization will eventually repel you.

In those companies where it does not work, nobody, including the executives who spent fortunes on creating them, could recite their values, let alone live by them. They are a useless set of words that gets used in the annual report once a year.

Culture will trump anything in this large-scale social age, as it always has.

While attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference and hosting a great dinner with 28 thinkers in the space on Monday night (the dinner was sponsored by Clearvale, which is our client), I got a chance to reflect on what social CRM actually means, and how many people are thinking about it in a way that is too narrow.

Let’s start off by one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Ok, so creating a customer and managing the relationships with those customers should be the heartbeat of a company – we can all agree on that. That is also why Customer Relationship Management should be one of the most important processes within a company.

In the research leading to the writing of our (award winning – sorry couldn’t resist the chest thumping) book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we found that those companies that are successful in leveraging the social as part of their business, turn their business processes into social processes. So turning your CRM process into a social process makes a lot of sense.

The question is – How Do You Turn CRM Into a Social Process?

In order to answer that question, let’s peel back the various layers of the onion that make up the CRM process. And to do that it may be useful to categorize the parts of the overall process into the following elements – the actors, the processes that make up the CRM process, the places, and the data.

The actors are the people that should play a role in your overall CRM process – they don’t just  include your customers and prospects, which most companies will consider as part of their CRM process. They also include your detractors, your employees (those that interact, and those that should interact with the customers – e.g., those that share a passion with your customers), your suppliers (if you run on tight inventories and a supplier has an delivery issue, that will impact customer relationships), and your partners.

The processes that make up CRM include not just sales, marketing, and customer support, but also the buying process (most products are now being bought, not sold), the recommendation process, and the relationship management process – processes that have already gone social and been fundamentally transformed in the past decade.

The places refer to those places where you interact with your customers, or where they interact with one another while making buying decisions and sharing recommendations. They include face-to-face encounters, email, telephone, and social media environments.

The data refers too data that typically will reside in systems of record like CRM systems and financial applications. The data you keep about your customer relationship process should include customer data, transactional data, legal data, financial data, and increasingly social data.

Some people say that a CRM system that contains social data is social CRM – but when you look at all the parts of the social customer relationship process, you realize how myopic this view of social CRM is. Some consider the act of managing customer relationships in social media social CRM – an equally myopic viewpoint.

Social CRM needs to encompass all the different parts of the Customer Relationship Management Process – the Actors, the Processes, the Places and the Data.

That of course is not an easy task, and will not happen by deploying technology applications alone. Social CRM is about culture, people, and processes supported by technology.

What do you think?

I would also like to thank the people with whom I had good conversations on the topic: @elsua, @pgillin, @billives,@dankeldsen, @scratchmm, @mkrigsman, @mingk, @marklazen, @sameerpatel, @denispombriant, @absolutezero, @pitosalas, @rawn, @crmstrategies, @jyarmis, @_richardhughes, @skwilder, @debyang, @mjayliebs.