The Importance of Corporate Culture

Zappos Knows Corporate Culture

How Important is Culture to a Company?

The culture of a company is the quintessential representation of it’s style.  An organization’s body and life blood is it’s most important asset, it’s people.  Any group’s culture can be characterized by a selection of the following traits they share:

• inherent rules of engagement
• accepted priorities and methods of interacting both internally and externally
• founding and binding principles of the corporation
• socially defined
• language
• dress and clothing style

Without a well developed corporate culture a business is little more than a managed group of mercenaries.  Without culture, a business is likely to blend into the background and fail to stand out to potential customers, collaborative business partners, and to potential leaders/employees.  It is clear that having a legendary (or at least reputable) corporate culture is extremely beneficial to any organization.

Corporate Culture Cannot be Synthesized by Systems

What many larger companies experience is an eradication of the socially defined aspect of corporate culture.  In an attempt to redefine a fading corporate culture new systems are branded and described to management throughout a large team.  The fault of the majority of these strategies lies not in their implementation, but in their lack of foresight.  These system solution failed to consider the most important factor in corporate culture, that it is fundamentally a socially shared style.  The culture is propagated by members from all levels within the business structure, who temporarily act as culture leaders to newer members.  The problem is not simply quantitative, it is based upon and passed on via  immeasurable qualities.

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