The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces That Drive Your Organization’s Success

By Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry and Greg Urban

Corporate culture is critical to any organizational change effort. This book offers a proven model for identifying and leveraging the essential elements of any culture.

In a world that changes at a dizzying pace, what can leaders do to build flexible and adaptive workplaces that inspire people to achieve extraordinary results? According to the authors, the answer lies in recognizing and aligning the elusive forces—or the “puzzling” pieces—that shape an organization's culture.
 
With a combined seventy-five years' worth of research, teaching, and consulting experience, Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry, and Greg Urban bring a wealth of knowledge to creating nimble organizations. Globally recognized business anthropologists and management experts, they explain how to access the full power of your culture by harnessing the Four Forces that drive it:
 
Vision: Embrace a common purpose that illuminates shared aspirations and plans.
Interest: Foster a deep commitment to authentic relationships and your organization's future.
Habit: Establish routines and rituals that reinforce “the way we do things around here.”
Innovation: Promote the constant tinkering that produces surprising new solutions to old problems.
 
Filled with case studies, personal anecdotes, and solid, practical advice, this book includes a four-part Evaluator to help you build resilient organizations and teams. The Culture Puzzle offers the definitive playbook for thriving amid constant transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781523091843

Mario Moussa

Mario Moussa is president of Moussa Consulting and an educator at Duke Corporate Education. His work has been featured on NPR and in Time magazine, Businessweek, U.S. News and World Report, Fortune, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, the Economist, and the Financial Times. His consulting clients have included such prominent organizations as State Farm, PNC Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, McKinsey and Company, Nielsen, UnitedHealth Group, and Mastercard. He is the coauthor of the bestseller The Art of Woo and Committed Teams.

Book preview

Cover: The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces that Drive your Organization’s Success

The Culture Puzzle

The Culture Puzzle

Copyright © 2021 by Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry and Greg Urban

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First Edition

Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9182-9

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9183-6

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9184-3

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-9185-0

2021-1

Book producer: Westchester Publishing Services; Text designer: Westchester Publishing Services; Cover designer: Wes Youssi, M80 Design

For Robin Komita, as ever

—Mario Moussa

For Carolyn, co-gardener of my most cherished community

—Derek Newberry

For my little family, where community starts for me

—Greg Urban

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Art of Giving and Getting

One rainy, sweltering morning in rural Brazil during the summer of 1975, a young anthropologist named Greg Urban sat on the dirt floor of a wooden hut in a village hundreds of miles from São Paulo. Across from him squatted an elder named Knowing One. Knowing One had come of age decades earlier, before his tribe had established peaceful contact with the Brazilian government. Greg had made the long journey through the jungle to learn all he could about Knowing One’s unique culture.

Greg began the conversation by asking about customs and beliefs that stretched back to a distant hunter-gatherer past. He was struck that a strong spirit of give-and-take permeated every aspect of life in this isolated community. To the elder and his fellow tribe members, nothing mattered more than treating everyone with the utmost generosity. This custom helped ward off evil, selfish witches, who cleverly disguised themselves as humans in order to prey on hapless victims.

As Greg began to ask another question, Knowing One interrupted by pointing at the rafters. There perched a brand-new pair of prized Adidas sneakers that Greg had carefully stored away for use on special occasions. Knowing One remarked that Greg owned two pairs of shoes. Greg nodded. Then the venerable elder added, I have none.

Greg realized that Knowing One had just issued a polite request that a tribe member would naturally honor. I’m not sure the shoes would fit, Greg replied.

Well, let’s see, proposed the elder.

Greg retrieved the sneakers. They fit perfectly. At that moment, Greg saw that he had given away his prized possession in exchange for something far more valuable: a relationship that would last for many, many years. As time went by, Knowing One helped Greg complete his research, introducing him to others in the tribe and explaining habits that were completely alien to a social scientist raised in New Lenox, Illinois (population 1,000). Greg’s research, in turn, benefited the entire village, gaining the attention of government officials who provided sorely needed medical resources and other support.

This encounter taught Greg one of the most important lessons he has ever learned about culture. As he puts it, It’s all about giving and getting. That distinctively human exchange opens the door to a whole world of needs, meanings, and aspirations.

Years later, working as a business consultant back in the United States, Greg began to appreciate that lesson even more as he saw how the most astute managers operate much like anthropologists performing fieldwork in the Amazonian jungle. They pay attention to subtle cues that reveal the deep motivations that people across civilizations have expressed in wondrously diverse ways: a longing to be part of a group, a desire to receive recognition for being special, and the drive to do good work. You will never find the solution to your culture puzzle without knowing how to connect these vital social and emotional needs to the other pieces of your organization.

Whether you are trying to execute a bold new strategy, make your business more agile and creative, or pull off a major acquisition, culture will make or break your efforts. But culture, like the trickiest brainteaser, often baffles us. Just ask the former CEOs of Uber, Barclays, Wells Fargo, and any number of other organizations where dysfunctional cultures disrupted multi-billion-dollar enterprises. Something went terribly wrong at these companies because executives failed to get a handle on the way culture really works.

Culture puzzles even the smartest leaders. All too often, they assume it will take care of itself. Or they treat it as an unsolvable problem. It’s a puzzle, to be sure, but it is solvable. Yet it never solves itself. You can make all the hard, practical decisions about running your operation (reporting lines, incentives, investments, and so on), but they will never resolve the hardest people issues.

As we write this introduction to our book, we find ourselves facing one of the biggest culture puzzles in history. How will we and our organizations endure and rebuild after the global COVID-19 pandemic? What will the new normal look like for businesses? Who do we include and exclude from our communities? How should we make the crucial decisions that will affect our livelihoods and our health? What’s fair? What’s just? What’s important? At every turn, we confront these inescapable questions. To our minds, culture has become Job One. If we fail to take it on, we will all suffer decline, apathy, disengagement, and fragmentation. But we can choose to tackle it wisely and unleash a new era of creativity, productivity, civility, and prosperity.

Drawing from our combined 75 years of experience as anthropologists and business consultants, we show you how to harness the forces that shape your culture and align it with your strategy, goals, and values. Many business experts will tell you that culture starts at the top, where members of the C-suite hold the keys to success. But any anthropologist worth their salt will tell you that culture is everywhere. Everybody holds the keys in their hands: middle managers, the front-line people who do the hard, everyday work to bring products and services to market, all the way down to the folks who wax the floors and swab every surface with disinfectant. It’s a collective power that’s always circulating, shaping every conversation, meeting, and decision. In the pages ahead, we will show you how to harness that power and make it work for your organization.

The great baseball player, amateur social scientist, and cracker-barrel philosopher Yogi Berra once said, You can observe a lot just by watching. His wry comment implied that most of the time we aren’t watching. That’s why we offer one simple rule for beginning your journey toward understanding and managing culture: Pay attention! Don’t let busyness distract you from the issues that matter most. When you slow down, take a good look, and listen carefully, you begin to notice the subtle and not-so-subtle pieces of the culture puzzle. But sometimes we need help interpreting what we see. As another philosopher, the Nobel Prize–winning Henri Bergson, said, We may perhaps see very well, but we do not know what we are looking at. Not to worry. We will teach you how to interpret valuable clues to your culture that you might not otherwise notice.

How This Book Will Help You Solve the Culture Puzzle

Part One: The Pharaoh, the CEO, and the Gardener (Chapters One through Three) lays out all the pieces of the puzzle, explains how they fit together, and urges you to lead like a gardener as you mull over how to design a strong, sustainable culture for your tribe. We define culture as a process of learning and adaptation that begins when a tribe forms. Four timeless forces drive that process: vision, interests, habits, and innovation. We show how they function like the natural forces—soil, water, and sun—that both shape and satisfy our deepest social and emotional needs.

Part Two: The Four Forces of Culture (Chapters Four through Seven) plunges more deeply into each of the forces, offering practical guidance to leaders at all levels of an organization—from global CEOs to team leaders, managers, and supervisors, and even small business entrepreneurs—on creating a winning culture. Full of stories and examples, these chapters provide a step-by-step how-to guide to harnessing and managing the forces in your organization.

Part Three: The Dream of Sustainability (Chapter Eight and the Conclusion) shows how to keep your culture healthy and flourishing. Gardeners dream about the living, blooming profusion of colors that spring from the fertile earth and express their vision. Yet they know they cannot just sit back and wait for the harvest. They must cultivate and nurture every plant, pull a few weeds, and keep supplying the care and nutrients each plant needs in order to produce the best results.

Throughout this book you will read about athletes, social reformers, rogues, scientists, misfits, novelists, and business executives who illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to culture. From time to time, we will discuss events that are still unfolding in today’s news, such as COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Before we touch on the current state of affairs, however, let’s transport ourselves 3,000 years back to the sunbaked Egyptian desert.

PART ONE

THE PHARAOH, THE CEO, AND THE GARDENER

CHAPTER 1

The Pharaoh and the CEO

Seeing What’s Right in Front of Your Nose

He rode with his head held high into the vast luminous valley, gazing from a white-gold chariot at the surrounding cliffs. To his regal eyes, they formed a shape reminiscent of the symbol for horizon. Instantly, he knew. In a flash of divine inspiration, he decided to build a great city on that barren spot. He would call it The Place Where God Appears. Then and there, he celebrated the momentous occasion, kneeling before a makeshift altar with an offering of bread, beer, plants, fruit, and incense. As he rose to his feet, he ordered that stone slabs mark the boundaries of the metropolis from where he would rule the world.

His name was Pharaoh Akhenaten, and he governed Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C. During his reign, he introduced a dizzying array of cultural innovations, ranging from novel artistic and architectural styles, newly coined words and phrases that expressed his self-aggrandizing ideology, and a thorough overhaul of administrative structures. Most remarkable of all, he created a radically unorthodox set of religious beliefs that installed him at the center of the universe as the Sun God. Before Akhenaten, pharaohs acted as intermediaries between the people and hundreds of gods. But now the pharaoh was himself a god.

Had you lived under Akhenaten’s rule, would you have appreciated him as an innovative visionary, or would you have dismissed him as a megalomaniacal madman? Scholars have vigorously debated this question for nearly a century. Many have pointed out that his subjects must have admired his cultural innovations in art, politics, and philosophy, while others have insisted that few would have easily abandoned deeply ingrained religious beliefs.

Most of the pharaoh’s subjects, it turns out, did not embrace the big change. Widespread unrest, a collapsing economy, and Akhenaten’s death, a mere 17 years into his reign, ended the cult of the Sun God. Akhenaten’s successor, Tutankhamen, honoring the wishes of the people, reintroduced the cherished gods and restored their temples.

This tale of a prideful pharaoh who fails to change long-standing cultural beliefs remains keenly relevant today. Even if you occupy a position of supreme power—as a supervisor, a project manager, or a global CEO—you need to understand your organization’s culture. In an era of unprecedented change, thriving in the next normal will take humility and hard work. If you attempt to exert godlike control, you will end up watching your plans for a prosperous future join Akhenaten’s vision in the graveyard of failed projects.

Beginning to Assemble the Culture Puzzle

The history of events in Egypt some 4,000 years ago repeats itself every day in the world of sprawling corporate campuses when modern managers choose the path of Akhenaten. Obsessed with building their shining city, they mandate massive cultural changes, hoping an entirely new way of doing things will propel their organizations to global domination.

We’re going to cut out the expensive, boring stuff and just build the top.

Picture Sphynx, Inc., an underperforming multi-billion-dollar company whose CEO Lyle King experiences a flash of inspiration, a vision of a whole new set of beliefs and behaviors that will motivate the Sphynx employees to achieve greatness. Forget the stodgy old way we’ve done business in the past, King declares. The brand-new Sphynx will make Apple look like a lemonade stand.

CEO King dictates the desired changes and sits back to watch the magical transformation. Do people eagerly embrace the new way of conducting business? Maybe. Maybe not. They might pay lip service to the new values, while in their hearts they harbor a tight ball of resentment and resistance. If so, in subtle yet powerful ways, they will sabotage the culture change, and 12 months later, with Sphynx’s balance sheet bleeding red ink, the board will have to show the once godlike CEO the door.

In 2013, Harrison Weber, the editorial director for WeWork, a company that designs flexible workspaces for organizations and freelancers, listened to a stunning vision every bit as grand as Lyle King’s and Akhenaten’s. Late at night, not altogether sober, he was standing on the ledge at the top of the 57-story Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Next to him swayed two tipsy coworkers and a fellow named Adam Neumann, the six-foot-five charismatic founder of WeWork, who was sketching his grand vision of a brave new world where people worked in amazing new environments that would inspire them to achieve unparalleled results.

Weber vividly recalled the moment. I was up there with him on the top of the world, and he said, ‘Everything is going to be amazing.’ Neumann’s idea for what he called a physical social network would, he proclaimed, transform any business into a sleek new world-beater. As the New York Times reporter Amy Chozick described it, WeWork would create a space where work and play bled into one and would elevate the world’s consciousness. Weber put it more simply: "It was like, wait, you mean life. What you’re talking about is just regular life. Maybe so, yet there was nothing regular about the way investors responded to Neumann’s WeWork vision. The company quickly attained a $47 billion valuation. But then a series of failed projects rapidly eroded that sky-high number. By 2020, just seven years after that evening when Neumann and his three employees had gazed like kings down on the Manhattan cityscape, the company’s value had plummeted to roughly $9 billion. A failed IPO in late 2019 exposed Neumann’s vision as little more than cult-like hype. Masayoshi Son, head of the Japanese investment company Soft-Bank, bet a staggering $4.4 billion on WeWork. Asked to explain the regrettable decision, Son replied in his tentative English: Well, he had no business plan. But his eyes were very strong. Strong eyes, strong, shining eyes. I could tell."

Any powerful leader can command sweeping change. But commands alone do not get the job done. If you merely proselytize from a perch, as Neumann and Akhenaten did, bulldozing ahead with wildly ambitious initiatives, you will find yourself mired in a minefield of resistance and even sabotage. You must solve what we call the culture puzzle.

No other animal species rivals human beings in their ability to learn, adapt, and cooperate in the pursuit of basic needs and lofty aspirations. You can scarcely imagine the smartest gorillas, whales, or dolphins founding a religion or incorporating a global conglomerate. The ability of human beings to form a culture, adapting the way we think and act to cope with ever- changing conditions, has enabled us to accomplish astonishing feats. We have built cities and left footprints on the moon. And yet: toxic cultures have demolished an endless parade of organizations and societies. Just take a look at Akhenaten, Neumann, and thousands of other grand visionaries who have done more harm than good with their ambitious but arrogant plans for success.

What knowledge and skills do you need in order to build a strong, vibrant, agile, and adaptive culture, where people eagerly engage in the meaningful work that will achieve extraordinary results for the organization? We have written this book to answer that question. We bring a lot of experience to the undertaking. During a combined 75 years’ worth of research, teaching, consulting, and training, we have learned a few fundamental lessons about what makes a culture healthy and how you can make it grow to meet your goals.

Lesson #1: Success begins and ends with culture. Most culture- building mistakes occur when a leader views culture as an add-on component, a mere sideshow to the main concerns of running a successful enterprise. Too often, strategy, finance, and operational issues occupy the