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The Nature of Culture

What culture is as a working object: behaviours rewarded, tolerated, and repeated, and why the stated version and the operative one diverge.

  1. 01

    Subcultures

    Organizations do not have one culture. They have a set of them, one per supervisor, and the variance between units is usually larger than the variance between organizations.

  2. 02

    Culture Is Not Climate

    How people feel about working somewhere and how the place behaves under pressure are different objects. They can move in opposite directions, and organizations reliably measure the wrong one.

  3. 03

    The Stated Culture and the Operative One

    The gap between the two is not hypocrisy and is rarely noticed by the people who created it. It opens because stating a value is free and enforcing one is not.