Best Tweets from "Organizational Culture and Leadership" (by Edgar H. Schein)

1. Culture is to a group what personality or character is to an individual (p. 8)
2. Culture helps to explain some of the more seemingly incomprehensible and irrational aspects of what goes on in organizations (p. 22)
3. Leadership creates and changes culture (p. 11)
4. The critical defining characteristic of a “group” is the fact that its members have a shared history (p. 11)
5. Culture is not only shared, but also stable. It provides meaning and predictability (p. 14)
6. Individuals and groups seek stability and meaning (p. 36)
7. Culture is the deepest, often unconscious part of a group and is, therefore, less tangible and less visible than other parts (p. 14)
8. Culture somehow implies that rituals, climate, values and behaviors tie together into a coherent whole (p. 15)
9. Culture formation is always a striving toward patterning and integration (p. 17)
10. To define culture one must go below the behavioral level (p. 22)
11. Much of what is at the heart of a culture will not be revealed in the rules of behavior taught to newcomers (p. 18)
12. There is always a teaching process going on, even though it may be quite implicit and unsystematic (p. 19)
13. Any group’s culture can be studied at these 3 levels: its artifacts, its espoused beliefs & values, & its basic assumptions (p. 36)
    
14. Cultural artifacts are easy to observe and very difficult to decipher (p. 26)
15. The espoused beliefs and values of a group may only reflect rationalizations or aspirations (p. 36)
16. To understand a group’s culture, one must attempt to get at its shared basic assumptions (p. 36)
17. Unless one digs down to the level of the basic assumptions one cannot really decipher the artifacts, values and norms (p. 59)
18. Organizational culture is a shared set of assumptions that is taken for granted (p. 200)
19. Cultural basic assumptions tend to be nonconfrontable and nondebatable, and hence are extremely difficult to change (p. 31)
20. Cultural change is difficult, time-consuming, and highly anxiety-provoking (p. 36)
21. Every group must solve the problems of member identity, common goals, mechanisms of influence, and how to manage both aggression and intimacy (p. 84)
22. It is impossible not to communicate. Everything that happens has potential meaning and consequences for the group (p. 67)
23. Some of the deepest and most potent shared experiences of a group occur within the first few hours of group life (p. 69)
24. There is a sense of joy in recognizing that everyone in the group has a role and can make a leadership contribution (p. 77)
25. The more we learn how to do things and to stabilize what we have learned, the more unable we become to adapt and grow into new patterns (p. 83)
26. Organizational culture is a learned set of responses (p. 83)
27. Responses to crisis provide huge opportunities for culture building (p. 108)
28. Responses to crisis reveal aspects of the culture that have already been built (p. 108)
29. The more the group has shared emotionally intense experiences, the stronger the culture will be (p. 83)
30. The inevitable dilemma for a group is how to avoid becoming so stable in its approach to its environment that it loses its ability to adapt, innovate, and grow (p. 84)
31. The group’s mission, goals, means, measurement of its performance, and remedial strategies all require consensus if the group is to perform effectively (p. 108)
32. One of the most central elements of any culture will be the assumptions the members share about their ultimate mission of functions (p. 93)
33. Goals formulation often reveals unresolved issues or lack of consensus around deeper issues (p. 93)
34. If members hold widely divergent concepts of what to look for and how to evaluate results, they cannot decide when and how to take remedial action (p. 101)
35. The methods and organization decides to use to measure its own accomplishments become central elements of its culture (p. 104)
36. The internal integration and external adaptation issues are interdependent (p. 134)
37. One of the most important bases for status in the group is to be entrusted with group secrets (p. 119)
38. A critical issue in any new group is how influence, power, and authority will be allocated (p. 120)
39. One of the most important dimensions of culture is the nature of how reality, truth, and information are defined (p. 149)
40. When people differ in their experience of time, tremendous communication and relationship problems typically emerge (p. 150)
41. Every culture makes assumptions about the nature of time and has a basic orientation toward the past, present or future (p. 152)
42. One of the most obvious ways that rank and status is symbolize in organizations is by the location and size of offices (p. 163)
43. At the core of every culture are assumptions on the proper to relate to each other in order to make the group safe, comfortable, and productive (p. 178)
44. Organizations & participation: (1) autocratic, (2) paternalistic (3) consultative (4) participative (5) delegative, and (6) abdicative (p. 192)
45. Leaders begin the culture creation process and must also manage and sometimes change culture (p. 223)
46. The impact of founders is by far the most important factor for cultural beginnings (p. 226)
47. Even in mature companies one can trace many of their assumptions to the beliefs and values of founders and early leaders (p. 242)
48. A set of assumptions that works under one set of circumstances may become dysfunctional under other sets of circumstances (p. 240)
49. If the original founders do not have proposals to solve the problems that make the group anxious, other strong members will step in (p. 243)
50. Leaders without charisma have many ways of getting their message across (p. 245)
51. In the formative stage of an organization, the culture tends to be a positive growth force, which needs to be elaborated, developed, and articulated (p. 317)
52. A crisis is what is perceived to be a crisis and what is defined as a crisis by founders and leaders (p. 255)
53. No better opportunity exists for leaders to send signals about their own assumptions about human nature and relationships than when themselves are challenged (p. 256)
54. The creation of budgets in an organization is another process that reveals leader assumptions and beliefs (p. 257)
55. Promotions, performance appraisals and discussions with the boss are ways to discover what the organization values and punishes (p. 259)
56. One of the most potent ways in which leader assumptions get embedded and perpetuated is the process of selecting new members (p. 261)
57. Leaders who have a clear philosophy and style often choose to embody that style in the visible manifestations of their organization (p. 267)
58. Design, structure, architecture, rituals, stories, and formal statements are cultural reinforces, not cultural creators (p. 262)
59. The culture of the organization that has been built on past success may become dysfunctional (p. 274)
60. Deciding which elements need to be changed or preserved becomes one of the tougher strategic issues that leaders face in midlife organizations (p. 317)
61. Organizational midlife phenomena produce new culture dynamics that require a very different kind of leadership behavior (p. 274)
62. Development involves diversification, growing complexity, higher levels of differentiation and integration (p. 294)
63. The strength of the midlife organization is in the diversity of its subcultures (p. 303)
64. Building an effective organization is ultimately a matter of meshing the different subcultures  (p. 289)
65. The salespeople develop part of their culture from their constant interaction with the customer  (p. 282)
66. The leader’s task is to find ways of coordinating, aligning, or integrating the different subcultures (p. 289)
67. Cultural alignment requires humility on the leader’s part and skills in bringing different subcultures together (p. 289)
68. Cultural alignment: the kind of dialogue among subcultures that will maintain mutual respect and create coordinate action (p. 289)
69. One of the most difficult aspects of leadership is to stay open to critical information and even encourage it (p. 312)
70. In the maturity and decline stage, the culture often becomes partly dysfunctional (p. 317)
71. In the maturity and decline stage, the culture can only be changed trough more drastic processes such as scandals and turnarounds (p. 317)
72. Culture change per se is not usually a valid goal. The change should initially be focused on the concrete problems to be fixed (p. 336)
73. The essence of psychological safety is that we can imagine a needed change without feeling a loss of integrity or identity (p. 323)
74. In a process of cultural change survival anxiety or guilt must be greater than learning anxiety (p. 331)
75. In a process of cultural change learning anxiety must be reduced rather than increasing survival anxiety (p. 331)
76. The change goal must be defined in terms of the specific problem you are trying to fix, not as “culture change” (p. 334)
77. A culture assessment is of little value unless it is tied to some organizational problem or issue (p. 362)
78. Culture change is always transformative and requires a period of unlearning that is psychologically painful (p. 335)
79. Culture is a stabilizer, a conservative force, a way of making things meaningful and predictable (p. 393)
80. “Strong” cultures are desirable as a basis for effective and lasting performance, but they are hard to change (p. 393)
81. The process of learning must ultimately be made part of the culture, not just a solution to any given problem (p. 395)
82. A learning culture must value reflection and experimentation, and must give its members the time and resources to do it (p. 393)
83. Culture is a stabilizer, a conservative force, a way of making things meaningful and predictable (p. 393)
84. “Strong” cultures are desirable as a basis for effective and lasting performance, but they are hard to change (p. 393)
85. The process of learning must ultimately be made part of the culture, not just a solution to any given problem (p. 396)
86. Two key elements of a learning culture: seeking and accepting feedback & displaying flexibility of response (p. 396)
87. A learning culture has the assumption that the environment can be dominated (p. 397)
88. A learning culture contain the assumption that solutions derive from a deep belief in inquiry and a pragmatic search for truth (p. 397)
89. In a learning organization one will have to learn how to learn (p. 398)
90. The optimal time orientation for learning appears to be somewhere between the far future and the near future (p. 399)
91. The learning culture must be built on the assumption that communication and information are central to organizational well-being (p. 400)
92. To optimize diversity requires some higher-order coordination mechanism and mutual cultural understanding (p. 401)
93. The learning culture must assume that human nature is basically good and in any case mutable (p. 405)
94. The learning culture must assume that the world is intrinsically a complex field of interconnected forces (p. 405)
95. Learning leaders must be careful to look inside themselves to locate their own mental models and assumptions before they leap into action (p. 406)
96. The leader of the future must be a perpetual learner (p. 418)
97. In the end, cultural understanding and cultural learning starts with self-insight (p. 418)

Edgar H. Schein

Organizational Culture and Leadership

Jossey-Bass, 3rd Edition

San Francisco 2004

437 pp.