ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

18A CASE OF ORGANIZATIONAL(CULTURAL?) CHANGEThe purpose of this chapter is to further illustrate the complexity ofculture and culture change when one applies it to a particular organizationfaced with particular problems over a period of time. Inpractice, the drive for culture change derives from the need to solveorganizational problems. It is only when cultural assumptions get inthe way that the culture change issue arises. In this chapter I willexamine a case of a major multiyear turnaround that was designedto fix a great many problems that Ciba-Geigy had generated in the1970s and that was viewed at the time as a real example of culturechange. The story illustrates many of the mechanisms discussed inthe preceding chapters but also raises some fundamental questionsabout whether or not real culture change took place at Ciba-Geigy.In the earlier description of the Ciba-Geigy paradigm, I tried toshow how certain deep shared assumptions related to each other,and how that pattern of assumptions explained a great deal of theday-to-day behavior of the organization. In this chapter I also wantto show how a change process revealed some of the elements of theCiba-Geigy culture and how that culture did and did not change,even as the organization changed. In laying out the case it will alsobecome clearer what I mean by a clinical approach to studying culture.I will present data from Ciba-Geigy along with contrastingobservations from other cases to illustrate, through concrete events,how the change process unfolds and how the consultant gets involvedwith it.The cultures of DEC and Ciba-Geigy did not reveal themselveseasily or automatically; rather, I had to reconstruct, with the help365