Much work can be done to intentionally design and establish a work culture that brings out the best in people in pursuit of the enterprise's purposes and ambitions. Many organizations have undertaken various types of culture initiatives. The old adage, "the more things change the more they stay the same," is never more true than in a culture change initiative. Unfortunately, the list of companies that have undertaken culture initiatives, that have at best merely resulted in new vision and values placards in each conference room, significantly outnumber the list of enterprises that have truly constituted new and robust cultures.

For any cultural initiative to be very effective and to actually create a new culture that can be sustained over time, there are several critical success factors. These are:

To be effective and potent, a cultural initiative requires alignment between the strategy, the culture, and individual transformation thereby resulting in elevated performance.

A company's culture can enable or hinder the successful execution of its strategy. At the same time, the requirements and demands of the strategy may or may not be compatible with the culture. Throughout, all success depends on the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals. It is critical that the culture enables the strategy and that the strategy reinforces the culture. Moreover, each individual needs to see the direct correlation between his or her actions, generating the culture, and succeeding at the strategy. When alignment of strategy, culture, and individual responsibility is achieved, there is inevitably an explosion of elevated performance.

One does not have to be a leader for long to come to the disheartening realization that a drive for sustainable change can be as elusive as the fountain of youth. Perhaps the biggest contributor to this basic misunderstanding is a view that relates to the enterprise like it is a fixed and linear organized entity, where action A causes reaction B in a predictable and orderly fashion. An example of this might be communicating new values, vision, and principles in several different formats thinking that repeating the same message over and over will result in the audience embracing and internalizing the new cultural expectations.

In fact, organizations are not linear and captured in one place, but emerge from the collective behavior of all the individuals in the company, each interacting and reacting independently and locally in response to local conditions and partial information.

Thus, in the previous example, different members of the audience are hearing pieces of the message that fit their own individual frame of reference, colored by their past experience, current mood, stress level, and most recent skirmish with another functional area, their boss's latest management blunder, and pending deadlines. The message is partially heard, mostly altered, and easily lost.

The cultural transformations that are most effective and potent call upon the science of complex adaptive systems as an organizing framework and are unique and custom-designed for each company. They address key elements such as the past and present conditions, the pull of the future, and inspirational leadership.

Business enterprises are not rhetorical exercises; they are very pragmatic and realistic endeavors to add value to the economic interests of its owners, customers, and employees. We suggest that any initiative in a business enterprise must exist in service of the elevated performance of the company. Moreover, if you consider that culture is demonstrated by the behaviors of the individuals in the enterprise, it follows that a truly effective culture transformation will evidence itself in significantly enhanced business performance.

Practical experience shows that the cultures in enterprises that produce business-as-usual results are quite distinct from cultures in enterprises that produce consistent breakthroughs. The Insigniam approach's to culture development blends the formulation of a cultural framework that is unique and appropriate to your enterprise with the tools and insights from our proprietary methodology. The result is the ability to build enterprises that generate consistent breakthrough performance.

A custom designed solution for you can include an in-depth assessment, stimulating the senior leadership to reveal and unhook the past culture and then articulate and align on a new cultural framework. You, and the needs of your enterprise, will determine the content of the cultural framework. It can include inventing the vision, mission, values, operating principles and leadership competencies. The process of embedding the culture and causing a true cultural transformation will then be carried out through a set of activities and initiatives that can include key business projects, organization practices, leadership development, communication campaigns and a comprehensive cascade plan.

Cultural Transformation, Supercomputer Firm - During two years, through operating losses and restructuring costs, one of the pioneering supercomputer firms lost all of the shareholder value built up over the years. Radically and swiftly altering the, now-outdated, corporate culture was vital, but the preeminent consulting firm estimated it would take eight years. Insigniam promised to transform the culture in four and a half years with a 200% return on fees. Ultimately, the transformation was completed six months early with a 4000% return on fees invested, and most importantly, it rescued the business.

Cultural Transformation, Global Pharmaceutical - A Global 200 pharmaceutical company, under consent decree due to quality breakdowns, needed to create a culture where compliance was natural to ensure the problems would not recur. The initiative was conducted in English and Spanish and was focused on creating a culture of excellence with over 1500 associates in three plants. One of the many measurable outcomes included a return to compliance 66% faster than predicted.