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Edgar Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide.

This book is a classic - written by one of the founders of the field of organizational culture. While most managers know that their culture vitally affects the organization’s overall performance, many don’t understand what culture is and how it manifests itself in the day-to-day realities of organizational life. Written for managers, not Organization Development professionals, this book is a practical guide and roadmap for understanding how culture works in organizations and how it affects organizational performance. Based on more than three decades of teaching in the classroom as professor at MIT and in the boardroom as a consultant to major corporations, Schein’s work is characterized by theoretical rigor, sound empirical data, and wisdom that comes from the practical experience of working in organizational settings.

The Corporate Culture Survival Guide describes how culture is created, how it evolves, and how it can be changed. On Schein’s view, all that is required for culture to be created is for people to work together over an extended period of time and be more or less successful at what they do. Eventually, these ways of working slip below the surface of organizational consciousness, go on automatic pilot and become organizational culture – “how it’s done around here.” Like any other habitual behavior, organizational culture cannot be created directly because it is a by-product of repetitive ways of working and interaction with the world. So managers can develop new business processes, demand that people adopt new ways of working, or try to stimulate new strategies or ways of thinking, yet whether these changes actually take hold and become culture cannot be directly controlled. Like any other deeply engrained pattern of behavior, once these ways of working solidify they are extremely difficult to alter which is why deep, sustainable cultural change is so difficult to achieve – it’s like changing any other habit.

More specifically, cultural change creates fear and anxiety because it threatens to alter familiar ways of doing things which forces managers and staff members out of their comfort zone. Schein characterizes this aspect of the culture change process by juxtaposing learning anxiety (fear of new ways of working) with survival anxiety (fear that we’ll lose our job, lose face, or have our identity undermined). Schein’s formula for initiating and effectively navigating cultural change is as follows:

Step 1: Managers must have some level of survival anxiety in order to even begin culture change, e.g. organizational defenses must be penetrated so managers see themselves as collectively responsible for the results the organization is getting.

Step 2: The level of survival anxiety must be greater than the level of learning anxiety in order to motivate change, e.g. cultural change requires a burning platform.

Step 3: In order for cultural change to take hold, the level of learning anxiety must be reduced by creating a climate of organizational and psychological safety, not increasing the level of survival anxiety, e.g. deep learning requires that we unlearn old ways of thinking and it’s difficult for people to learn when they’re dominated by survival anxiety.

Schein argues that our pragmatic, instant answer, quick fix, globally connected world tries to fool people into thinking that they can move directly from the old to the new ways of working. But unless an organization and its people consciously go through what the Breckenridge Institute® calls the Cultural Wilderness™ together as a shared experience, deep cultural change will not happen. When leaders, managers, and workers travel through this critical time of unlearning and relearning together, the experience itself bonds them together and creates a powerful sense of social purpose and social unity.

If you only read one book on organizational culture, read this one. It is packed with practical examples, real-world case studies, and deep insights that link the invisible forces of culture to the mundane, pedestrian realities of managing an organization.