Abstract

This book focuses on seeing, understanding, and learning to shape an organization’s essential cultures. The book is grounded on a fundamental assumption that every organization has a de facto culture. These “de facto cultures” appear at first glance to be serendipitous, vague, invisible, and unmanaged. An invisible and unrecognized de facto culture can undermine business goals and strategies and lead to business failures. The authors believe that humans can learn to “see” culture around them and understand their influence on individuals, teams, organizations, and societies. At its core, the book lays out the levels of culture to help the reader “see” and learn how to shape a knowledge organization’s cultures. Learning to see and understand the culture, mainly organizational culture, is critical in today’s hyperdynamic knowledge economy. Culture will always dominate strategy in any economy. However, it can play an even more significant role in the knowledge economy, where knowledge is the primary form of capital and the most critical production factor. To thrive and survive in the knowledge economy, managers must “see” their company culture’s power to shape the company’s course and learn to gain and sustain knowledge, learning, and collaboration (KLC) cultures synergy. Hyperdynamic business reality requires smart actions. When managers “see” their cultures as an asset, they have an opportunity to shape those cultures and use them for the company’s best.

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