Culture is Everything: How to Become a True Culture Warrior and Lead Your Organization Victory (Book Review)

Abstract

Professionals who work in quality and continuous improvement often speak of company culture; we blame it when improvements fail and change doesn’t stick, and we ignore it when we celebrate success with our teams. If culture is so critical to success, are we doomed to fail as a result of “bad” culture? Are we guaranteed success if our organization has “good” culture? According to Jeff Veyera, the answer is an emphatic no. As he points out, our fatal flaw is that we mention culture and proceed to plow forward without any attempt to understand, categorize, or evaluate the current culture and the impact it will have on our efforts. Mr. Veyera’s book is written to fill the gap between knowing that culture is important and truly understanding and evaluating the existing culture. He not only provides a clear definition of culture, he breaks the definition into three smaller chunks (communicated, understood, and lived) to highlight the various disconnects that can occur between stated values and reality. As we walk through an example, Mr. Veyera explores a continuum of organizational behavior which can be evaluated by applying objective rating scales (similar to FMEA). When combined with his recommended cultural dimensions, we have a way to actually document and categorize the culture of an organization. Understanding and articulating the existing culture then provides the opportunity to assess gaps between our current state and our desired future state. As you may imagine, a simple concept quickly becomes exponentially more complicated, and the author does a nice job demonstrating this through examples. In doing so, he provides a structure and language that should be useful to anyone interested in understanding or changing the culture of an organization. This is a book for anyone interested in organizational culture. It may be overwhelming to those new to culture discussions, but those with experience will likely find themselves exploring familiar territory in a meaningful way. If you lead or work with a team that has frequent conversations about culture, sharing and discussing the text as a group could be beneficial. Beyond simply establishing a common language, the author provides assessment tools to document culture and facilitate conversations about what to do, and where to focus our efforts, as well as next steps. Don’t overlook the appendices where he explores the implications of company size, globalization, and generational differences; there is even a section dedicated to culture and job searches.