ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

372 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPten to fifteen days during the subsequent year as a consultant. Myclients were to be Leupold, the management development manager,and Koechlin; the broad mission was to increase the ability of thecompany to innovate in all areas.First Year’s Work:Getting Acquainted with the CultureI visited the company several times during the year, each time fortwo to three days. During these visits I learned more about the managementdevelopment system, met some of the members of the executivecommittee, and gradually got involved in what I consideredto be my most important activity: the planning of the next annualmeeting. From my point of view, if innovation was to take hold, themost important thing to take advantage of was the relatively moreopen climate of the annual meeting. My goal was to be accepted asa process consultant to the entire meeting, not as an educator comingin with wisdom for one or two days.But the notion that I could help “on line” continued to be quiteforeign to most of the managers, though at DEC I had learned theopposite lesson: unless I worked on line with real problems, thegroup considered me more or less useless. Initially I thought that thereactions of Ciba-Geigy’s managers were simply based on misunderstanding.It was only with repeated experiences of not beinginvited to working meetings at Ciba-Geigy, of always being put intoan expert role, and of always having to plan my visits in great detailthat I realized I was up against something that could be genuinelydefined as cultural. The Ciba-Geigy managers’ perception of whatconsultants do and how they work reflected their more generalassumptions about what managers do and how they work.For example, on several occasions I noticed that managerswhom I had met on previous visits looked past me and ignored mewhen I encountered them in the public lobby or the executive diningroom. I later learned that to be seen with a consultant meantthat one had problems and needed help—a position that managers