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The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 351

■ About organizational rituals: In what periodic meetings do you
participate? How do people behave during these meetings? Which
events are celebrated in this organization?
■ About organizational values: What things do people very much
like to see happening here? What is the biggest mistake one can
make? What work problems can keep you awake at night?

Interviewers were free to probe for more and other information if they
felt it was there. Interviews were taped, and the interviewers wrote a report
on each session using a prescribed sequence, quoting as much as possible
the respondents’ actual words.
The second, quantitative phase of the project consisted of a paper-
and-pencil survey with precoded questions; contrary to the fi rst phase,
it was administered to a strictly random sample from the unit. This sam-
ple was composed of about twenty-five managers (or as many as the unit

contained), twenty-five college-level non managers (“professionals”), and

twenty-five non-college-level nonmanagers. The questions in the survey

included those used in the cross-national IBM study plus a number of
later additions; most, however, were developed on the basis of the inter-

views from the first phase. Questions were formulated about all issues that
the inter viewers suspected to differ substantially between units. These
included in particular many perceptions of daily practices, which had been
missing in the cross-national studies.
The results of both the interviews and the surveys were discussed with
the units’ management and were sometimes fed back to larger groups of
employees if the management consented.

Results of the In-Depth Interviews: The SAS Case

The twenty units of focus produced twenty case studies, insightful descrip-
tions of each unit’s culture composed by the interviewers after the one-on-
one sessions and with the survey results as a check on their interpretations.
The case of Heaven’s Gate BV presented at the beginning of this chapter
was taken from the survey results. One more case will now be described: the
Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) Copenhagen passenger terminal.
SAS in the early 1980s went through a spectacular turnaround pro-
cess. Under the leadership of a new president, Jan Carlzon, it switched from