Week 3, Chapter 5, Post 1: Organizational Culture

Week 3, Chapter 5, Post 1: Organizational Culture

Organizational Culture (page 127), "stands for the actions, ways of thinking, practices, stories, and artifacts that characterize a particular organization."

There were several things that came to mind while I was reading Chapter 5. The first being a series of commercials about meetings. (I can't remember the name of the company behind the commercials at the moment.) In the commercials, people strategize around a high-pressure, time sensitive situation about what steps need to be taken and in what order. Basically, the commercials make fun of companies that have incessant, needless meetings. One commercial in particular shows a man slowly sinking into quicksand. The man's colleagues stand around him and begin an assessment of the situation, talking about meetings and what to talk about in the meetings and a meeting to schedule the meeting, all the while, this man is sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand.

These commericals always make me chuckle because I could relate to them. The last company I worked for had a culture of meetings. Everything that revolved around anything was first discussed in meetings and sometimes these meetings would evolve into more and more meetings. Often times, what was said in the meetings was a rehash of an email or conference call and sometimes the meetings were just to discuss what would be talked about in a series of meetings that would take place over the course of a project. There were so many meetings that at one point, the VP of our team asked me to do some research on meeting management and efficiency. The irony is that we later had a meeting with the team to discuss ways of having more productive meetings. Nothing really came from this meeting about meetings as meetings were the way things functioned at this company. (Say THAT three times fast!) No projects were ever started without a meeting. No projects ever progressed without a meeting. And no projects were ever completed without a meeting.