People make up organizations, business needs people to succeed if they are to succeed. The focus for change is how the individual relates to intentional change needed.
Do organizations have a culture? Yes. Organizations have a set of qualities, as do departments and business units. Culture can also reveal competing values in battle for success and failure.
So what?
Well, when you get a view of culture through communication style, archetype, and symbols about “the way things are done”, levers for change are more clear.
I read about Start-Up Nation in a recent Wall Street Journal end-of-year reading list.
In Hungary I worked on foreign direct investment and technology transfer. I had moved from two years in China and in my company worked with Israeli citizens.
Start-up Notion
Israel has unique characteristics that help it excel in the field of high technology, as the book posits. If start-up companies have unique culture from other, bigger, more mature companies, a start-up nation must lend an overwhelming culture.
Some of the building bricks to the “way things are done” in Israel include:
- Religious blend,
- Proximity,
- Circumstance,
- Conscription,
- Volunteerism,
- Geography, and
- Language
All Israelis are not the same, but if each of the seven, qualities each have a normal distribution from fanatic, off to one extreme of the normal distribution, to indifferent, off at the other extreme, they combine to create a general disposition.
Is conscription a competitive advantage?
No, not by itself, but I am intrigued by the book.
Read More Books
See a more current set of books on my reading list heavy rotation page.
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