ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS 499. Even as the company gets very large and differentiated,it is desirable to keep some central control rather thandivisionalizing.10. DEC engineers “know best” what a good product is, basedon whether or not they personally like working with thatproduct.These ten assumptions can be thought of as the DEC culturalparadigm—its cultural DNA. What is important in showing theseinterconnections is the fact that single elements of the paradigmcould not explain how this organization was able to function. It wasonly by seeing the combination of assumptions—around individualcreativity, group conflict as the source of truth, individual responsibility,commitment to each other as a family, commitment to innovationand to solving customer problems, and belief in internalcompetition and central control—that one could explain the dayto-daybehavior one observed. It is this level of basic assumptionsand their interconnections that defines some of the essence of theculture—the key genes of the cultural DNA.How general was this paradigm in Digital? That is, if one wereto study workers in the plants, salesmen in geographically remoteunits, engineers in technical enclaves, and so on, would one findthe same assumptions operating? One of the interesting aspects ofthe DEC story is that at least for its first twenty or so years this paradigmwould have been observed in operation across all of its ranklevels, functions, and geographies. But, as we will also see later,some elements of the DEC culture began to change and the paradigmno longer fitted in some parts of the company.Ciba-GeigyThe Ciba-Geigy Company in the late 1970s and early 1980s was aSwiss multidivisional, geographically decentralized chemical companywith several divisions dealing with pharmaceuticals, agriculturalchemicals, industrial chemicals, dyestuffs, and some technically basedconsumer products. It eventually merged with a former competitor,