ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT EXTERNAL ADAPTATION ISSUES 105ductions are late, key customers complain about product quality, orthe like—by what process is the problem diagnosed and remedied?Consensus is needed about how to gather external information,how to get that information to the right parts of the organizationthat can act on it, and how to alter the internal production processesto take the new information into account. Organizations canbecome ineffective if there is lack of consensus on any part of thisinformation gathering and utilization cycle (Schein, 1980). Forexample, at General Foods the product managers used marketresearch to determine whether or not the product they were managingwas meeting sales and quality goals. At the same time, salesmanagers who were out in the supermarkets were getting informationon how store managers were reacting to different products bygiving them better or worse positions on the shelves. It was wellestablished that shelf position was strongly correlated with sales.Sales managers consistently attempted to get this information tothe product managers, who refused to consider it relative to theirmore “scientifically conducted” market research, thus unwittinglyundermining their own performance. In the same vein, in the earlydays at DEC the person who knew the most about what competitorswere doing was the purchasing manager, because he had to buyparts from competitor companies. Yet his knowledge was oftenignored because engineers trusted their own judgment more thanhis information.If information gets to the right place, where it is understoodand acted upon, there is still the matter of reaching consensus onwhat kind of action to take. For example, if a product fails in themarketplace, does the organization fire the product manager, reexaminethe marketing strategy, reassess the quality of the researchand development process, convene a diagnostic team from manyfunctions to see what can be learned from the failure, or brush thefailure under the rug and quietly move the good people into differentjobs?At DEC, both the diagnosis and the proposed remedy werelikely to result from widespread open discussion and debate among