ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

ASSESSING CULTURAL DIMENSIONS 355Apple Lessons Learned. This case illustrates the following importantpoints:1. If a motivated insider group is provided with a process fordeciphering its culture, members can rather quickly come up withsome of their most central driving assumptions. I revisited Appleseveral years after this event and was shown a recent report on thecompany’s culture. The same set of assumptions was written downin this report as still being the essence of the culture, though thevarious assumptions were stated in somewhat different order andwith some additional comments about areas that needed to change.2. Stating these governing assumptions allowed the companymanagers to assess where their strategy might run into cultural constraints.In particular, they realized that if they were to grow rapidlyand enter the broad business market, they would have to deal withmembers of their organization who grew up under the assumptionthat business should involve more than just making money. Theyalso realized that they lived too much in the present and wouldhave to develop longer-range planning and implementation skills.3. Apple reaffirmed its assumptions about task primacy and individualresponsibility by starting to articulate explicitly a philosophyof no mutual obligation between the company and its employees.When layoffs became necessary, the company simply announcedthem without apology and carried them out. Apple was one of thefirst companies to articulate that employment security would graduallyhave to give way to employability security, by which they meantthat one would learn enough during some years at Apple to beattractive to another employer if laid off. There should be no loyaltyin either direction, in that employees should feel free to leave if abetter opportunity came along.Case Example Three: U.S. Army Corps of EngineersThis case example illustrates the culture-deciphering process in adifferent type of organization. As part of a long-range strategy-planningprocess, I was asked in 1986 to conduct an analysis of the cultureof the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers because of concerns that