Page 230 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

Second, you must consider whether or not the culture is one that will
reward your efforts.
Third, you have to make sure that the culture doesn’t wind up warping
you in ways that will damage your career.
Fourth, to be a leader, you have to try to influence the culture in posi-
tive ways.

EVEN IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY,
THERE ARE STILL TABOOS
The first thing you have to understand about your organization’s culture
is its taboos. Otherwise, you can be smacked in the head for something
you naively think is good—or rejected completely, like a donor organ the
body may desperately need but does not want. Until you are CEO—and
are CEO for a good long time—if there is a serious conflict between you
and the culture, the culture usually wins.
Consider the sorry case of Julie Roehm at Wal-Mart, who was brought
in as a senior vice president for marketing communications in 2006 to
enliven Wal-Mart’s image. She’d made a name for herself at Chrysler by
conceiving racy commercials and sponsorships. Unfortunately, working
at a desperate-for-attention American car company is not the same as
working at the dominant, conservative, proud company of Sam Walton.
First, Wal-Mart pulled a commercial Roehm had developed showing a
husband giving his wife lingerie for Christmas, after just a couple of com-
plaints. New York Magazine reported that the company wasn’t happy,
either, when the new advertising agency she’d chosen after a long review
published an ad in a trade magazine featuring lions copulating, with the
tag line, “It’s good to be on top.”
Within a year, Roehm was fired, and bitter recriminations soon fol-
lowed on both sides, with Wal-Mart accusing her of everything from hav-
ing an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, to violating its
gratuities policy by accepting a case of vodka from the agency, to sitting

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