ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT EXTERNAL ADAPTATION ISSUES 93about their identity and ultimate mission or functions. These arenot necessarily very conscious but can be brought to the surface ifone probes the strategic decisions that the organization makes.Shared Assumptions AboutGoals Derived from the MissionConsensus on the core mission does not automatically guarantee thatthe members of the group will have common goals. The mission isoften understood but not well articulated. In order to achieve consensuson goals, the group needs a common language and sharedassumptions about the basic logistical operations by which one movesfrom something as abstract or general as a sense of mission to theconcrete goals of designing, manufacturing, and selling an actualproduct or service within specified and agreed-upon cost and timeconstraints.For example, at DEC there was a clear consensus on the missionof bringing out a line of products that would “win in the marketplace,”but this consensus did not solve for senior management theproblem of how to allocate resources among different productdevelopment groups, nor did it specify how best to market suchproducts. Mission and strategy can be rather timeless, whereas goalshave to be formulated for what to do next year, next month, andtomorrow. Goals concretize the mission and facilitate the decisionson means. In that process, goal formulation also often reveals unresolvedissues or lack of consensus around deeper issues.At DEC, the debate around which products to support and howto support them revealed a deep lack of semantic agreement on howto think about marketing. For example, one group thought thatmarketing meant better image advertising in national magazines sothat more people would recognize the name of the company; onegroup was convinced that marketing meant better advertising intechnical journals; one group thought it meant developing the nextgeneration of products; and another group emphasized merchandizingand sales support as the key elements of marketing.