Week 3, blog 1

Week 3, blog 1
In Chapter 5, the most interesting section was about the eight common characteristics that Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. discovered during their study of organizational culture among the sixty-two financially successful companies they studied in the early 1980’s. Those characteristics are listed below:

1)A bias for Action: Active decision making without thinking for long time or relying on a lot of information to make decisions.
2)Close relations to the customer: Constant focus on customers and providing excellent customer service.
3)Autonomy and entrepreneurship: Empowering employees to take risk and responsibility of their actions.
4)Productivity through people: Quality workers equal quality products. Valuing everyone throughout the organization so no real division between management and line employees
5)Hands-on, value driven: Widely shared core values and common vision. Achievement is dependent on performance and performance is dependent on values.
6)Stick to the knitting: No diversification. Expansion & profits through focus on what they do best.
7)Simple form, lean staff: Leaner organizational structure.
8)Simultaneous loose-tight properties: Encourage individual and group decision making. Not centralized or decentralized. Adaptation to situation to get the job done.

What was most intriguing about this section was how Peter acknowledges that although the characteristics above are good reference point, they did not work for some of these companies because two decades later some of these companies could not sustain their success. If value-based systems are difficult to sustain over a long period of time, then can we say company culture, which is essentially value-based, is not a good predictor of financial success of a company? Peter has refined his thinking to also include two other characteristics, more emphasis on customers and need to manage amidst chaos, but I wish he had given few examples. I wish this was not an online class and we had the opportunity to discuss and elaborate more on organizational culture vs. prediction of financial success with the Professor and fellow classmates.