Page 233 - Executive Warfare

Culture

Lou Gerstner, who took over in 1993, describes the problem vividly in
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?:

To someone arriving at IBM from the outside, there was a kind
of hothouse quality to the place. It was like an isolated tropical
ecosystem that had been cut off from the world too long....
This hermetically sealed quality—an institutional viewpoint
that anything important started inside the company—was, I
believe, the root cause of many of our problems.

Gerstner wound up shocking a lot of IBMers by reminding them that
business is a competitive endeavor and that outside the hothouse, the
competition was beating them viciously.
The problem with working in a self-absorbed culture is that its leaders
stop responding to normal stimuli like competition and opportunity—
and talent and ambition—and fixate
only on their own obsessions. So if you
offer what would normally be seen as a THE PROBLEM
fantastic array of abilities, in the wrong WITH WORKING IN
culture, they may be ignored or even A SELF-ABSORBED
punished. CULTURE IS THAT
Cultures tend to devolve especially ITS LEADERS STOP
quickly in places where the top people all RESPONDING TO
think alike. For example, I once worked NORMAL STIMULI
at a place where the cronyism among the AND FIXATE ONLY
leadership was just remarkable. They’d ON THEIR OWN
all known each other for years, they’d all OBSESSIONS.
had similar upbringings and training,
and they were all utopians who believed
answering society’s unmet needs was their primary mission. That once very
successful company has now vanished into the sands of history, thanks to
the foolish decisions of this tight-knit group.

213