Page 108 - Successful Onboarding

Teaching Culture So That Our New Hires “Get It” • 97

conflict strongly with your new organizational culture. In the early 1980s,
John Sculley transitioned from President of PepsiCo to CEO of Apple
Computer. Scully had grown famous in his old job for being a “marketing
guy,” the executive who had successfully introduced the “Pepsi Challenge”
and won share from Coca-Cola, a challenge deemed similar to Apple’s
need to win share from Wintel (Microsoft Windows- and Intel-based per-
sonal computers). Upon entry to Apple, Sculley needed acclimation into
at least three distinct and new cultures—that of the personal computer
industry, Apple, and finally the Silicon Valley tech community. Think
about how challenging it must have been for an accomplished leader famil-
iar with Pepsi’s process and data-driven culture to encounter the entrepre-
neurial, personality-driven world of Silicon Valley for the first time. In fact,
it was too challenging. As Wired magazine summarized the shift, “the suave
East Coast marketing executive … took for himself the mantle of Apple’s
visionary leader. Nearly everyone pretended not to notice how badly it fit.” 3
If new hires do not enter a firm with ingrained habits, sometimes they
come brimming with positive and potentially unrealistic expectations
about the culture, only to become disappointed when these expectations
don’t pan out. Such disappointment often occurs when the organizational
culture a new hire enters breaks from a well-known consumer brand asso-
ciated with the company. A high-end luxury company, for instance, might
convey in its advertisements the very epitome of sophistication, elegance,
and extravagance. Show up at its corporate headquarters as a new hire,
and you might discover evidence of a very different internal culture and
associated performance values. The office furniture is dated, employees
come dressed casually, and mid-level employees operate in a bit of a
frenzy. In short, everything about the place seems unrefined and decid-
edly inelegant. If you came to work thinking that every day would be “spe-
cial,” you would be in for a rude awakening.
In this case (involving a real-life company, by the way), important aspects
of the organizational culture are at least immediately visible. Organizations
such as IDEO, Nike, Best Buy, Bloomberg, and The White House possess
visually unique work environments that create an impression of the culture.
The vast majority of workplaces, however, are visually every bit as generic
as that portrayed in the television show The Office. Consider how much
more puzzling these workplaces are for new hires. Even if you don’t come
in primed for a certain culture, you still find that your most important