ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

A CASE OF ORGANIZATIONAL (CULTURAL?) CHANGE 385cross-divisional movement remained a controversial issue. The executivecommittee members also realized that rotational moves, ifthey were to be useful, had to occur early in the career. They decidedthat such early movement would occur only if a very clearmessage about the importance of career development went out tothe entire organization.This decision led to the design of a half-day segment on managementdevelopment, which was inserted into the managementseminars that were periodically given to the top five hundred managersof the company. A new policy on early rotation was mandated,and the data from the project were used to justify the newpolicy. Once senior management accepted a conclusion as valid, itwas able to move decisively and to impose a proposed solution onthe entire company. The message was communicated by havingexecutive committee members at each seminar, but implementationwas left to local management.During this year Koechlin relinquished the job of chairman ofthe executive committee for reasons of health, which raised a potentialsuccession problem. However, the executive committeehad anticipated the problem and had a new chairman and vicechairmanready. The new chairman was a scientist, but the newvice-chairman was the chief financial officer who had shown greatleadership skills during the redirection project. Both of themstrongly reaffirmed the scientific and technical assumptions underlyingthe success of Ciba-Geigy, as if to say “We are making majorchanges but we are the same kind of culture as before.”By the end of the third year, the financial results were muchbetter, and the restructuring process in the unprofitable divisionswas proceeding rapidly. Each unit learned how to manage earlyretirements, and a measure of interdivisional cooperation wasachieved in the process of transferring people who were redundantin one division into other divisions. Initial attitudes were negative,and I heard many complaints from managers that even their bestpeople were not acceptable to other divisions. This attitude wasgradually eroded because the assumption that “We don’t throw