Eight principles for the most successful transform

Eight principles for successful transformation of corporate culture

corporate culture is an important part of enterprises that cannot be ignored. Therefore, enterprises will face the problem of how to transform corporate culture in the process of change. Jack Welch commented on the key role of transforming corporate culture: "if you want the train to be faster by 10 kilometers, you just need to increase the horsepower; but if you want to increase the speed by 10 times, you have to change the track. Asset restructuring can temporarily improve productivity, but without cultural change, you can't maintain the development of high productivity." In fact, the investigation and Research on many successful enterprises also show that the reason why these enterprises have successfully achieved change is that they regard the transformation of corporate culture as the main breakthrough of enterprise change, and take strong measures to make significant changes in corporate culture. Today, it can be said that the transformation of corporate culture is receiving more and more attention from the business community. As the famous contemporary British economist L. Clark pointed out in his book "reform": "many enterprises are consciously taking the change of corporate culture as a powerful weapon for the success of reform."

however, it is not easy to transform the corporate culture. A survey shows that more than two-thirds of planned corporate culture changes fail because they are not implemented to the end. Despite the great difficulties, if the following principles can be observed, enterprises can successfully transform their culture, at least the chance of success can be improved

one of the principles: the principle of market determination

this is the primary principle of transforming enterprise culture under the condition of market economy. The research of famous professors John Kurt and James hescott of Harvard Business School shows that unless corporate culture can promote enterprises to adapt to the external environment healthily, a strong corporate culture can not guarantee the success of enterprises. A strong culture that cannot promote enterprises to adapt to the external environment often hurts the success of enterprises. For example, Wang'an computer company used to be very successful, but it clings to the successful way of thinking and doing things in the past, and does not change its culture in time to adapt to the changing market demand, which eventually leads to the decline of the company. Therefore, the inadaptability to the external environment is the main reason for enterprises to change their culture. For example, facing the severe market situation in 1999, Boeing took changing the conservative corporate culture as the main problem to be solved by the company; In order to eliminate the cancer in Xerox culture that makes Xerox resist foreign changes, Anne malcahy, the new president of Xerox, proposed to completely change Xerox culture in 2001. The early brilliance of the enterprise does not mean the success of tomorrow, because the external environment is complex and changeable, and the existing culture of the enterprise is the product of the enterprise adapting to the past market environment. In the new market environment, it may become a heavy burden for the enterprise to move forward due to inadaptability. Because of this, enterprises should always pay attention to the external environment. Researchers are studying the change trend of the mixture of the following kinds, often analyzing whether the existing culture adapts to the external environment, and once it does not adapt, they should consider changing the culture. The transformation of enterprise culture must meet the requirements of the external environment, especially the market environment, otherwise it will do more harm than good

principle 2: top-down principle

Kurt and Heskett said in their book corporate culture and business performance: "usually only one or two people in a company play a critical basic role in promoting the change of corporate culture." There is no doubt that these one or two people are the top managers. IBM began to get into trouble in the late 1980s, with a cumulative loss of $16.2 billion from 1991 to 1993. In April, 1993, Gerstner took over the company. It is amazing that IBM achieved an operating revenue of $77billion and a net profit of $6billion in 1996 after only three years. This miracle is inseparable from Gerstner's efforts to reshape the company after taking over the company, especially the successful reshaping of IBM's corporate culture. And the reshaping of IBM culture can achieve the expected results, mainly due to Gerstner's personal promotion. In Gerstner's own words, it is "my most important work is to promote cultural change." For another example, in 1999, Carlos Ghosn became the new CEO of Nissan after years of decline. As soon as he took office, he immediately found that Nissan was in chaos. The production capacity of the company's subordinate factories exceeded the sales capacity by 1million vehicles, and the purchase cost was 15-25% higher than that of Renault. Moreover, the company was short of cash due to liabilities of more than $11 billion. Ghosn's diagnosis is: "Nissan lacks a clear profit orientation, pays insufficient attention to customers and pays too much attention to comparing with competitors, has no corporate culture of cooperation across functional, national and hierarchical boundaries, lacks a sense of urgency and has inconsistent views." So, in the second week after taking over Nissan, Ghosn began to transform Nissan's corporate culture. His bold move soon paid off: the downward trend of Nissan on the verge of bankruptcy was reversed, and Nissan returned to the path of profitable development. The revival of Nissan should be attributed to Ghosn's successful transformation of Nissan's corporate culture. As Nissan's executive vice president and board member Masao Matsumura said, "Ghosn's most important achievement is that he can reshape people's mental state."

almost all successful cases of corporate culture transformation show that the transformation of corporate culture can only be carried out from top to bottom. This is because the transformation of corporate culture means putting forward new values and determining the corporate culture that needs to be formed; It also means changing policies and systems that are incompatible with new values, and only the top management has the power to change values and deep mechanisms. At the same time, new values should permeate the whole enterprise, and only from the top to the bottom can they achieve practical results. Without the determination and example action of the top management, it is difficult for new values to take root, and the new corporate culture cannot flourish when conducting gap impact experiments. Therefore, it is crucial that the top management publicly express their firm attitude in favor of transforming the corporate culture and spend time and energy on promoting the change of the corporate culture

principle 3: the principle of random adaptation

the principle of random adaptation requires that in order to successfully transform the corporate culture, we must seize the opportunity and find the breakthrough point.

whether we can promote the corporate culture reform in time at the right time has a great impact on the success of the cultural reform. Terence Diller and Allen Kennedy, the authors of corporate culture: etiquette and rituals of corporate life, believe that, In at least five cases, top management should consider reshaping culture as a work closely related to their main mission. These five situations are: when enterprises have always relied on values as the driving force, and the environment is undergoing fundamental changes; When the industry in which the enterprise is located is highly competitive and the environment changes rapidly; When the performance of the enterprise is flat or deteriorating; When the enterprise is really about to become a large enterprise group; When enterprises grow very rapidly. In addition, the merger and reorganization of enterprises also need to adjust the culture accordingly, especially when there is an important difference between the enterprise culture of the merging party and the merged enterprise culture. When enterprises encounter these opportunities, "take the opportunity" to promote the transformation of corporate culture, they are more likely to succeed. On the contrary, if the timing is not appropriate, the top management attempts to impose the new culture on the enterprise. Because it is not easy to be accepted by employees, the result is usually that the new culture is inferior to the old culture. Therefore, it is important to grasp the opportunity to transform the corporate culture if there is residual chlorine and some oxidizing fungicides in the water

the so-called finding the breakthrough point is that different enterprises should establish the direction and goal of corporate culture reform according to the situation of the enterprise and for some problems or challenges that have not been faced up to. For example, in order to change the poor service attitude towards passengers, British Airways has set the goal of corporate culture reform as putting customers first. For another example, when Ford bought the American tiger automobile company, the American tiger automobile company had obvious quality problems. Solving this problem to achieve "total quality" has become the focus of reforming the American tiger automobile company culture. In fact, there is no "best" corporate culture, only "appropriate" corporate culture. Only by combining the transformation of enterprise culture with the solution of the outstanding problems faced by enterprises can it be practical and more acceptable

Principle 4: the principle of mechanism support

once the goal and direction of corporate culture change are determined, we should re-examine the existing policies and systems, and start to change those systems and policies that are inconsistent with the requirements of the new corporate culture, push them to the direction of new culture change, and create a mechanism to support the new culture, the most important of which are the distribution mechanism and promotion mechanism

for example, when Ghosn was transforming Nissan's culture, in order to transform Nissan's corporate culture into a profit oriented culture, he abandoned some traditional practices, including the system of seniority, and made it clear that pay and promote employees according to performance. It is precisely because of this reward mechanism that Nissan's culture has been successfully transformed

Newco was originally a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Ken Iverson built it into the third largest steel enterprise in the United States with his original management method of "70% culture and 30% technology", which has attracted the attention and attention of the management academia. Ken Iverson, the president, believes that culture plays at least half of the role in newcomer's success. An important reason why Newco can create a culture that can form competitive advantages is that the company has reformed the distribution system to support the company's new mission and values. In the words of Ken Iverson, "most of the things that Newark admires by other enterprises, such as team spirit, extraordinary production efficiency, low cost, application innovation, high morale, and factory loving employees, are rooted in our wage system."

the distribution of rewards and promotion should be based on the evaluation mechanism of employee performance, and the benchmark of evaluation is whether the employee's behavior meets the requirements of the new culture. An effective evaluation mechanism can organically link the individual behavior of employees with the goal of corporate culture reform, and make them complement each other, thus helping the existing culture to move closer to the new culture

in short, effective