ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

A CASE OF ORGANIZATIONAL (CULTURAL?) CHANGE 391fore, suggestions coming up through the project structure were listenedto, and proposals that were accepted were effectively implementedthrough the existing hierarchy as a result of clear top-downsignals.The design of the redirection project—with an externalizedsteering committee that created project groups with consultantsand challenger managers and provided clear goals, timetables, andtime off to work on the problem—reflected skills embedded in theCiba-Geigy culture. They knew very well how to design group projectsand work in groups. In this sense Ciba-Geigy used its culturalstrength to redirect itself more rapidly than might have been possiblein a less structured organization, or one less sensitive to groupprocess issues.The driving force and the source of many of the key insightsbehind this change effort was Koechlin, who, as mentioned before,was the kind of leader who could step outside of his own culture andassess it realistically. The willingness of the chief financial officerand various division managers to step outside their own subculturesand learn some new approaches also played a key role. But in theend the culture changed only in peripheral ways by restructuringsome minor assumptions. Yet such peripheral culture change isoften sufficient to redesign the core business processes and therebyto fix major organizational problems.As a postscript, Ciba-Geigy eventually merged with Sandoz tobecome Novartis, a larger multinational now focused more specificallyon pharmaceuticals. I had occasion to ask the CEO of Novartisabout this later merger and was told that it went very smoothly,even though these two companies had been competitors and “enemies”at the time of my work with them. If this merger wentsmoothly, it is probably because the two companies had some strongcommon elements—the Basel culture and the industry culture ofpharmaceuticals.