Coporate Culture

My friend was frustrated about how she and her boss cannot agree on the objectives in her company's marketing planning. She is into long term planning and her boss insists on short term planning.

I took that as an opportunity to discuss with my favorite marketing lecturer, Bob Miller.

This is my takeaway:

The Universities are teaching us the latest theories/practices in business management. However, the people sitting at the top and middle are generally the baby-boomers. In their time of struggle, such theories and practices were not adopted. It's a matter of mindset. They are comfortable with the way they do business (which was proven) and they will re-train you to be like them.

Stallkamp mentioned is his book SCORE! A better way to do business: Moving from conflict to collaboration that western automobile companies recognized Toyota's global success in their unique way of business and tried to mimic it. They all achieved little success or failed. Their implementations plan made a lot of sense, however, the mindset and culture prevented the success of those implementations.

I guess the word here would be change leadership. Drawing reference to a famous case study of Bill Bratton, it does require a position of power to bring about change in a large organization. this sadly implies that at lower level position, one cannot create significant changes.

Do we stop then? Bob suggests that we can try to make small changes (within your jurisdiction) which produces significant results and get the attention of higher management. Perhaps, that could serve as a portfolio when you have the opportunity to contribute to greater positive changes in the organization.

Or join an organization that already has that culture. Keyword: LEAN

On a lighter side, we could all just wait for these stubborn people to all retire or die off .