Culture & Behavior Change

Organizational culture empowers and challenges companies in today’s business world. A culture that supports strategic and operational goals can fuel performance and spark innovation and differentiation. If the culture opposes the company’s strategy, however, the results can be disastrous. Many business leaders understand that culture plays an important role in their businesses, but most have difficulty understanding how to use culture to improve performance.

The traditional discourse on the subject often relies on abstract descriptions and “fuzzy” language, which are not easily translated into pragmatic and timely solutions. It is no surprise then that many leaders choose to avoid culture change altogether; this often results in an effort to work around culture issues or simply use it as an excuse for poor performance.

We understand that trying to use or change an organizational culture may seem a daunting and time-consuming task ... but it does not have to be.

We believe that it is best to work with and within an organization’s existing culture. By focusing on useful elements of the existing culture, leaders can identify key behaviors that will bring them closer to their cultural aspirations. A culture intervention program can deploy both informal and formal levers to promote these behaviors, which will shift mind-sets and drive long-term performance impact.

A Perspective on Organizational Culture
Booz & Company has developed a methodology to evolve organizational culture that is pragmatic and works. View a chalk talk by Jon Katzenbach >download document (419kb, PDF) >

Learn how to use your organizational culture

Stop Blaming Your Culture and Start Using It
At times, culture is made the scapegoat for lackluster organizational performance, as it is an easy target for executives to blame when they meet resistance for change. In this article, Booz & Company senior partners Ashley Harshak and Jon Katzenbach dispel common notions about the role of culture, and outline a pragmatic approach to work with and within existing cultures to catalyze organization-wide change.read more >

Creating a Climate of Mutual Help
An Interview with Edgar Schein
Booz & Company’s Art Kleiner and Rutger Von Post interview Edgar Schein, one of the earliest and most influential theorists on organizational culture and a professor emeritus at MIT. In this interview, Schein discusses common pitfalls in executing culture initiatives, mutually-beneficial relationships between managers and their subordinates, and the interdependence of teams.read more >

“Work with & within your culture.”

Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company

Client stories on
organizational culture

In each of the videos below, one of our culture experts discusses a recent client engagement where we helped evolve the organizational culture of our client. The stories illustrate how you can make use of this new methodology to evolve the culture of your organization in a practical and pragmatic way.