Denkwerkstatt für Manager

Geschwill & Nieswandt

Culture: Economic success and excellent organizational culture are siblings!

Corporate culture pays off. This is evidenced by the worldwide Heidrick Consulting 2021 Study.
500 CEOs worldwide were surveyed with a concise result: companies that want to grow and prosper should focus above all on a good corporate culture. A survey of 500 CEOs worldwide, including 50 from large German companies, shows: Companies whose bosses see corporate culture as the top success factor achieve twice as much growth as those that don't. In short, an excellent corporate culture and economic success are indispensably linked.

Like people, organizational cultures are unique. It is very difficult to transfer success models from companies to other organizations. One milestone was Spotify's agile structure. Instead of hierarchy, there are tribes and quads. Agile consulting firms gave formerly hierarchically organized service companies the Spotify structure.

At ING-DIBA in Frankfurt, this led to employee satisfaction ratings plummeting after the introduction. In the business newspaper -brand eins-, employees reported that no one knew who was responsible for what anymore.

In our experience, corporate cultures are unique and difficult to transfer to other companies. The same is true for the Netflix culture. One reads in the book NO RULES, with which Netflix should have been culturally successful. If you go to Netflix's homepage, you will find these 5 principles:

  1. Promote independent decision-making by our employees
  2. Share information openly, widely and intentionally with others
  3. be extraordinarily open with each other
  4. Keep only highly effective people in the company
  5. Avoid rules

Many managers in many European companies would subscribe to this. The difficulties only begin when these rules are to be transferred culturally into existing companies. This is where the questions arise:

How do we put these principles into practice?

Where do we need to get better in these 5 fields?

What is there to learn for our leaders?

By Dr. Martina Nieswandt, June 2021