ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

HOW LEADERS EMBED AND TRANSMIT CULTURE 251accuse him of incompetence. If the manager attempted to defendhimself by noting that his situation either was the result of actionson the part of others over whom he had no control or resulted fromprior agreements made by Olsen himself, Olsen would emotionallytell him that he should have brought the issue up right away toforce a rethinking of the situation and a renegotiation of the priordecision. In other words, Olsen made it very clear, by the kinds ofthings to which he reacted emotionally, that poor ultimate performancecould be excused but that not being on top of one’s own situationand not informing others of what was going on could neverbe excused.Olsen’s deep assumption about the importance of always tellingthe truth was signaled most clearly on the occasion of another executivecommittee meeting, when it was discovered that the companyhad excess inventory because each product line, in the process ofprotecting itself, had exaggerated its orders to manufacturing bya small percentage. The accumulation of these small percentagesacross all the product lines produced a massive excess inventory,which the manufacturing department disclaimed because it hadonly produced what the product lines had ordered.At the meeting in which this situation was reviewed, Olsenindicated that he had rarely been as angry as he was then becausethe product-line managers had lied. He stated flatly that if he evercaught a manager exaggerating orders again, it would be grounds forinstant dismissal no matter what the reasons. The suggestion thatmanufacturing could compensate for the sales exaggerations wasdismissed out of hand because that would compound the problem.The prospect of one function lying while the other function triedto figure out how to compensate for it totally violated Olsen’s assumptionsabout how an effective business should be run.Both Steinberg and Olsen shared the assumption that meetingthe customer’s needs was one of the most important ways of ensuringbusiness success, and their most emotional reactions consistentlyoccurred whenever they learned that a customer had notbeen well treated. In this area the official messages, as embodied in