In today's business environment, changes come in staggering succession: mergers, acquisitions, rightsizing, downsizing, restructuring. As accountants, lawyers and executives scrutinize these changes for bottom-line impact, they pay little attention to how change will affect an organization's culture or how its culture will affect change. This dooms many corporate change initiatives before they even start. A whopping 75 percent of change initiatives fail within the first three years. Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change explains - in plain English - why companies need to conduct a cultural assessment like Cultural Due Diligence before embarking on any change initiative.
Bouchard and Pellet say that nothing can be more deadly to an organization's long-term ability to sustain change and grow than a dysfunctional incongruent culture that depends on the old do as I say, not as I do method of leadership. An incongruent culture destroys morale, decimates productivity and encourages workers to resist and even sabotage change. Therefore, the authors offer techniques and tools, such as their own Cultural Due Diligence process, to measure the congruence of an organization's culture and to reshape it into a healthy - and successful - congruent culture.
