ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

350 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPautonomy had encouraged those founders to remain as CEOs eventhough they had given up ownership.Most of the managers in the room had grown up under thosestrong leaders and had enjoyed that period of their history verymuch. Now, however, all the founders had either retired, left, ordied, and the divisions were led by general managers who did nothave the same charisma the founders had. What the group longedfor was the sense of unity and security they each had had in their respectivedivisions under their founders. They did not, in fact, want a strongcorporate culture and leadership, because the businesses of the divisionswere really quite different. What they wanted was strongerleadership at the divisional level but the same degree of divisionalautonomy that they had always had. They realized that their desirefor a stronger corporate culture was misplaced.These insights, based on historical reconstruction, led to a verydifferent set of proposals for the future. The group, with the blessingof corporate leadership, agreed that they only needed a fewcommon corporate policies in areas such as public relations, humanresources, and research and development. They did not need commonvalues or assumptions, though if such developed naturally overtime that would be fine. On the other hand, they wanted strongerleadership at the divisional level and a development program thatwould maximize their chances to obtain such leadership. Finally,they wanted to strongly reaffirm the value of divisional autonomyto enable them to do the best possible job in each of their variousbusinesses.MA-COM Lessons Learned. This case illustrates the followingimportant points about deciphering culture and managing culturalassumptions:1. A senior management group with the help of an outsidefacilitator is able to decipher key assumptions that pertain to a particularbusiness problem—in this case, whether or not to push for amore centralized common set of values and assumptions.