And it's beginning to greatly benefit companies in their executive hiring.
It's all too common: An exciting new executive is appointed with great fanfare only to leave after a short and rocky tenure. Or the merger of two companies is pitched to investors as guaranteeing great synergies, and they never materialize. The cause of these failures often seems obvious. The executive had the right knowledge and experience but simply couldn't grasp the way things were done in the new organization. The combined balance sheets and product lines of the two merging companies looked great, but there was no way the highly collective one was going to blend well with the individualistic other. In other words, it was all the fault of "culture" and "cultural fit."
The problem with blaming culture for failures like those is that we've never been completely sure what culture means. The same is true when things go well. Chief executive officers--and the people who write books about them--are quick to celebrate corporate culture and its importance in times of success. But their stories, inspiring though they might be, are essentially anecdotal. When we talk about culture, we talk in generalities.
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