What Makes you Tick — Cultural Issues

Abstract

In the mid-1980s UK companies got the culture bug. Suddenly missions, motherhoods and value statements became the passports to corporate success. If the entire personnel of an organisation shared a commonality of approach then they could communicate in the same way, achieving similar goals. Values were intoned like Buddhist mantras lifting profitability to new levels. However cultural engineering was not nearly as simple as inculcating a new corporate concept. Rather like square bashing in the army individual personalities were being subordinated in favour of group mores.