The official BLOG of the corporate culture institute in Vienna.

2008-03-06

Why should we care about corporate culture?

Isn’t it rather academic to delve into the depths of corporate culture and its root causes? Don’t we have some more urgent questions to answer? Isn’t there some real work to be done? 

Maybe - maybe not. Perhaps indications advance more indirectly and from a different corner.

McKinsey - like them or not - delivered some valuable insight. They conducted a survey of executives on leadership and innovation in September 2007, receiving responses from 722 executives at the senior vice president level and above and from 736 lower-level executives around the world.

And here’s the outcome:
More than 70 % of the senior executives in a survey say that innovation will be at least one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies in the next three to five years. Well, they got it, that’s fine.

But most executives are generally disappointed in their ability to stimulate innovation: some 65 % of the senior executives McK surveyed were less confident about the decisions they make in this area.

They go on claiming that there are no best-practice solutions to seed and cultivate innovation. And that the structures and processes that they reflexively use to encourage it are not sufficient. Nevertheless most of them (94 %) knew, that “people and corporate culture are the most important drivers of innovation”.

Isn’t that interesting? Our top economic decision makers feel that they have to compete through innovations. They recognise that culture is the major driving force for success. But they are not very confident, that they have the right tools at hand to direct this force to their corporations benefit.

There clearly is a gap - at least a perceived one. And this should be sufficient to state, that it is of major importance to shed some more light on this topic. There is reason to the opinion, that corporate culture is one of the major forces that make the difference between success and failure. 

And that’s the reason, why we started the corporate culture institute last week in Vienna / Austria. We want to draw a clear and understandable picture of how corporate culture works. And we can’t do it alone. We need volunteers from all over the world, out of all kinds of corporations and from all corporate levels. And we need you. If you feel that you can contribute at least something - please join the forces of the cci.

And finally here are some useful links:

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