Epilogue

So, let’s go full circle. Remember how we told you at the outset we did not have a silver bullet? Although we know we have created a better approach, we must admit that it does not solve all culture problems. It expands the toolkit and brings benefits that have been elusive in the past, but it does not make culture a fast or easy topic to address.

Chapter 3, “Traditional Approaches to Culture Transformation—How Others Have Dealt with the Challenge,” walked you through pros and cons of traditional approaches to culture change. We feel it is appropriate to give you a candid assessment of our concepts, too.

You have heard the pros already, but let’s recap at a high level:

Business Practices are a good surrogate for the complex topic of culture—one that helps to draw business leaders into the work that needs to be done.

Right vs. Right is a constructive way to uncover, understand, and reconcile different ways of working and thinking—the kinds of differences that often lead to strife, delays, and lost business value if left to “work out” on their own.

Outcome Narratives explain future state expectations, especially how to handle difficult situations that are likely to arise. They are not abstract statements; they are brief, structured stories on how to meet business requirements. For that reason, they surface subtle misalignments that need to be addressed and provide an objective basis for evaluating progress and identifying additional changes that are needed.

Here are the cons in a nutshell—we explain more below:

Some people do not readily understand the concept of Business Practices.

Some are reticent to go on a journey until the path is well worn—and this is new and has been described by some as “before its time.”

It requires more leader time and elapsed time than other approaches.

It requires strong facilitation and writing skills.

Let’s start by explaining the cons we believe are short-term issues.

Despite explaining it every way we know how, some people still think “Business Practices” is just a fancy name for business processes, so there is little that is new to be gained. We have whipped out our best evidence to the contrary—including the fact that companies with the same processes do the work differently—still, we have been unsuccessful in convincing some. We hope that this will clear up as more people begin to use the term regularly. Frankly, we understand it; we realized the importance of this concept later, too. However, we long for the day that people readily recognize Business Practices and their powerful impact.

In his June 2005 Harvard Business Review article, “The Coming Commoditization of Processes,” Tom Davenport wrote about standards and how they are leading to process commoditization—and that this will lead to more and better outsourcing, among other things. In our opinion, this trend will highlight Business Practices: The processes will be the same, but there will be differences between how companies execute them. Taking this notion one step further, after companies achieve world-class capabilities, what differentiates them? We would say that Business Practices are one source of lasting differentiation because they reflect your culture. There is more to explore here, but alas, those who are not cognizant of their Business Practices will not reap the benefits.

Because the concepts are new, some people have not been comfortable going through the process. They cannot see how it will all end, and we cannot provide them with names of 10 other companies in their industry who have done it this way yet. Some have gone on a faith journey with us, and for that we are glad. And we are happy to report that they are benefiting from it. We believe that more will come along in the future.

To round out the near-term cons, we have heard this a few times: “This stuff is before its time.” That’s a double-edged sword. Clearly, IBM’s goal is to be innovative, but we know that the path to business value means doing the right thing at the right time. We hope that you will become an early adopter and that you will help us push the timing a bit.

Now let’s move on to the other cons—the ones that may follow this approach over the longer term.

There are no two ways about it: This approach requires more time from your leaders than traditional culture approaches. You are likely to need more than one Right vs. Right reconciliation session, and you will need a quorum of the right leaders to make the decisions stick. Also, these leaders need to agree that the Outcome Narratives represent their desired future. Some leaders recognize this effort as an investment in business results: The more guidance they give, the fewer escalations, personnel issues and other problems they will have to address in the future. And that will give them more time to concentrate on customers, strategies and high-level business decisions. But, candidly, others just have not carved out the time, and it impacted the benefits this approach was able to bring.

And speaking of time, this work takes more time than other approaches. It is best done with a small team—in fact, trying to do the work faster with more people will not be successful. Tangible Culture brings a sophisticated solution to a complex area. If there are easier ways to address your issues—by all means, do them! However, if you have tried other approaches, or know that they will not work for your current requirements, you have several months of work to do. But do not forget—you will get benefits along the way.

Finally, this work takes strong writing and facilitation skills. The Right vs. Rights and Outcome Narratives need to be well worded or they may become the focus of the discussions rather than enabling them. Your facilitators need to be objective—and perceived as objective. There is nothing worse than feeling that the facilitator believes your preferred “right” answer is “wrong” during Right vs. Right reconciliation! And the people doing this work need to be comfortable interacting with your business leaders—in some cases, your senior leaders. There is also the need to carefully balance between patience and drive. These are tough decisions and some groups can stew over them, whereas other groups can drive to answers too quickly and neglect some views. There is an art to “enough” discussion—we are still learning it ourselves!

We hope you appreciate our candor. And we hope that it helps you to avoid a few pitfalls. Please visit our Web site (www.almaden.ibm.com/tangibleculture) and tell us what is working—and not working—for you. We want to learn from your experiences. And thank you for giving us this opportunity to share our learnings with you!