韩国裸舞

This week's interview is with聽Ed Schein, a senior Professor聽at MIT.聽 Ed is one of the pioneers in thinking about Corporate Culture, we catch up with Ed and find out his latest thinking on this important topic.

KM - You wrote, and it's now in its fourth edition, Corporate Culture and it's something you are one of the pioneers in - what is your thinking these days of the importance of Corporate Culture and can we or should we try to change it?

ES -The real answer to that is that Corporate Culture is no longer the relevant topic. I think the relevant topic is macro culture, nations, corporations, corporate culture (where all these nationalities and occupations play out), and micro cultures where you have problems in the operating room and in teamwork because you have multi-nationals, people from different occupations that cultures, all interplaying. So in this last edition of the book I am emphasizing that we have to take corporate culture at a much more general level and look at both occupational cultures and national cultures and how they play out in the corporate cultures.

KM - We have already recognized that a doctor views the world different than a nurse; that a manufacturing engineer looks at the world different than a finance person. So you are saying that these things are really critical.

ES - I am saying that we haven't understood that these are occupational cultures that are themselves very strong. So therefore to help leaders deal with multi-cultural teams, which is where it's going to be at, two things need to happen - leaders have to become much more humble and learn how to seek help, because the subordinates under them will be much more knowledgeable than they, and secondly leaders will have to create cultural islands where people from differently occupational and national cultures can spend suspend some of the rules and talk to each other more directly, for example, about how they view trust, how they view authority, or how they deal with bosses that make mistakes. If leaders can't create those kinds of cultural islands, they won't be able to create teams that can actually work.

Read full article: , November 29, 2011