Coherent Conductors, Crabby Culture

The simplest definition of corporate culture I’ve ever seen was “the way we do things around here.”  But corporate culture is anything but simple.  It actually derives from the human infrastructure, the energy of the organization as determined by the predominating Roles and coherency of the people who get the work of the organization done.

So I was particularly interested in Daniel Rubin‘s column in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer in which he mentions the predominant newspaper culture as “crabby, but effective.”  This is the setup to compare it to the culture at the US Census Bureau which, while it sounds less crabby, is also likely much less effective.  (If you want to know more, you really want to read the My Two Census blog – nonpartisan and written by presumably crabby political journalists, this is a gem.)

I bet they have a lot of Conductors in print journalism.  Dedicated to getting things ‘right’, using the power of the pen to do the work of the sword and, in general, teaching us the truth as they see it, of course they get crabby at times.  They don’t get nearly the respect they deserve, no matter what type of organization they work in.  But show me a bunch of coherent Conductors, with maybe a coherent Vision Former, a couple of Action Formers and a few Communicators and Curators and you’ve got a team that’s going to follow the Vision and truly give you the news that’s fit to print.

And it will be worth reading.