ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

WHAT LEADERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HOW CULTURE CHANGES 299In that case the process worked to make Ciba-Geigy both more marketingoriented and more strategically focused on pharmaceuticals,ultimately resulting in the merger with Sandoz to create Novartis.Filling key positions with people who have the beliefs, values, andassumptions that are viewed by senior leaders as the necessary onesfor the future growth and survival of the organization is, in fact, thecommonest culture change mechanism observed.Transition to Midlife: Problems of SuccessionThe succession from founders and owning families to midlife undergeneral managers often involves many substages and processes.There are so many ways in which companies actually move frombeing under the domination of a founder or a founding family to astate of being managed by second-, third-, and fourth-generationgeneral managers that one can only identify a few prototypical processesand events.The first and often most critical of these processes is the shift fromfounder to a second-generation chief executive officer. Even if thatperson is the founder’s son or daughter or another trusted familymember, it is in the nature of founders and entrepreneurs to have difficultygiving up what they have created (Dyer, 1986, 1989; Schein,1978; Watson and Petre, 1990). During the transition phase, conflictsover which elements of the culture employees like or do not likebecome surrogates for what they do or do not like about the founder,since most of the culture is likely to be a reflection of the founder’spersonality. Battles develop between “conservatives” who like thefounding culture and “liberals” or “radicals” who want to change theculture, partly because they want to enhance their own power position.The danger in this situation is that feelings about the founderare projected onto the culture, and, in the effort to displace thefounder, much of the culture comes under challenge. If members ofthe organization forget that the culture is a set of learned solutionsthat have produced success, comfort, and identity, they may try tochange the very things they value and need.