Three part discussion
Part 1 (175 words min)
answer one of the following:
As we focus on strategy implementation, reflect on your own experiences with organizational design and corporate governance, or your understanding or assumptions about those topics from well-known firms.
Do you agree that organizational culture can be difficult to change once defined? Have you ever seen an organization overhaul its culture (or structure), and how so?
ESG (environmental, social, governance) as investing strategy and as corporate transparency has garnered significant media and political attention in the past few years, though many of its fundamental ideas reflect long-established debates around corporate social responsibility and negative externalities. What are your thoughts on ESG as a social movement or responsibility of business? What aspects of the discussion over corporate attention to ESG strike you as most impactful – or how do you see ESG shaping business in the near future?
Part 2 – (75 words min)
Reply to below post-
It would appear in casual conversation organization culture is usually associated with being a buzz word that describes in general terms, if people are taken care of their jobs or not. Although that can be accurate in context, I learned that there is much more behind the structure that influences the actual culture.
My personal experience has been in organization structure that have been considered flat, and people have general knowledge of how things are ran, with fewer managers leading larger teams. This has also lead to most if not all decisions come from the top down. As mentioned in the lecture, slower response times and less customer satisfaction.
I think the structure of an organization is probably more blindly adopted than strategically thought through because “that’s just how it’s supposed to be.” What if more factories, had a more specialized approach by adding additional teams and limiting the responsibilities of each? Do you think the organization structure would improve an employees perspective if they had a specialized job task and not have a wider range of responsibilities and be overwhelmed?
Part 3 – (75 words min)
Reply to below post-
From my experience, I believe organizational culture can be a hard thing to change once defined.
I’ve had the opportunity to work for one of the companies highlighted in our text (Merck & Co.) and many of the themes highlighted in the readings resonate with me. My company maintains a pretty unique company culture that corresponds to founder imprinting. Merck & Co.’s founder, George Merck, has a famous quote that drives my organization:
“We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.”
The mission statement of my company aligns to this vision and this quote is typically displayed at most of our sites around the world. I think about how my company would change this culture and I think it would be very difficult to change since it is ingrained through our company.
That being said, there have been recent examples of companies that have had a complete cultural shift. X (Twitter) is a clear example with Elon Musk’s leveraged buyout and making large disruptive changes to the organization. Of course, it seems that this type of shift does come at a cost, as seen through X’s valuation and employee turnover.
