For 11 years, I found myself a great fit at a company that I was passionate about helping succeed. Nine months ago, that company—a privately held, $42-million, firm—was sold to a much larger competitor, $1.2-billion, 4,200-employee, global competitor. As I started thinking about the cultures of my company and how my personality fit it, I realized that I could not focus on just one company, but rather needed to assess the culture of three organizations: my former company, the buying company, and the old company as part of the new company. While companies are not people, I could see clear “personality” differences between the old company and the new one as well as changes in the old company as it began to be absorbed into the larger new company. So to gauge each, I formulated a theory: how would each organization score on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (see MBTI handout)? I decided to test the theory and marked the MBTI answers I perceived best reflected the culture of each entity . For example, Question No. 62 asks, “Can the new people you meet tell what you are interested in?” The old company could explain our value proposition to potential clients rather easily, in fact every employee, from the CEO down to the receptionist, had to go through training to learn the “elevator speech,” the ability to explain quickly how we help clients succeed. The new company, similarly, has been very adept at explaining its business to its core audience. Moreover, individual analysts and sales people in each company are also, generally, able to speak passionately and simply about each company. It’s a key requirement for either job. As such, I marked both companies’ answers to question No. 62 as “right away.” However, with the old company as part of the new company complaints are often heard among employees about how to position the companies combined. As such, the combined entity answers the question, “only after they really get to know you.”
With the MBTI results for each, I then assessed how my personality fit into each to better map how I need to adjust to the new reality. The results show my personality was very much aligned with the old company, which, as a small, private company, was very much defined by its people from the CEO down. The company prided itself on being personable internally and externally with high customer touch and flexibility to match changing market demands. In fact, one of the points the new company stressed when buying the old company was that the new company wanted to leverage the old company’s great relationship with clients throughout the entire new company, which has long had a reputation for being rather cold and impersonal. However, the old company’s flexibility also contributed to frequent internal reorganizations, seven times in 11 years. These changes took place so often, in part, because they didn’t take all parts of Tom Peters and Bob Waterman’s 7-S Model (“A Note on the 7-S Model,” Leonard Johnson, Boston University School of Management, 1997) into consideration. Changes were structural, shifting how we were organized internally in an effort to change our market strategy. But it often ignored many of the other parts of the 7-S Model, including skills, systems, and overall style. These changes were nearly all driven by factions within the company and not directly from the founder and CEO. But as Prof. Johnson points out in the 7-S Model note, “the style of the founder of a firm plays a central role in establishing the initial shared values (or culture) of an organization.” As a result, none of these reorganizations really worked because they didn’t align with the company values that had driven the company for so long. As such, the last reorganization before acquisition came when the CEO stepped in and returned to the original business model and structure he established upon founding the company. This, I felt, centered the company on the values that drove its growth in the first place. But it still wasn’t enough to grow the company at the level needed and, as such, the CEO made the final reorganization decision to sell the company to a larger, more resource rich competitor.
This sale has shaken up the culture of the old company, and to a lesser extent the new company, significantly. To scope out these culture changes, I used Edgar H. Schein’s work (“Organizational Culture,” American Psychologist, February 1990, pg. 111), to get an overview of the changes in artifacts, espoused values, and assumptions that occurred as a result of the acquisition. Much like how Sergio Nacach at Kimberly-Clark (“Kimberly-Clark Andean Region: Creating a Winning Culture,” Stanford Graduate School of Business Case Study) used employee perks to build team spirit and create a nurturing work environment, so did the old company. For instance, to help foster long-term loyalty it gave paid vacations on anniversaries. These perks ended when the new company took over, and understandably so; a public company the size of the new company could not maintain such luxuries. Instead, the new company offers generous paid time-off (maxing out at 35 days), individual performance-aligned bonuses (rather than the old company’s practice of aligning bonuses to overall company performance), and geographic freedom for many positions (many people work from home and collaborate virtually). The different espoused values also show differences in personality. But this doesn’t mean that the new company doesn’t share some of the old company’s values. The difference is the old company portrays those traits externally as part of its core identity, while the new company’s external identity is much more about what it can do, than who it is. Moving to the assumptive traits, you find two very different cultures. The old company, externally, strived to feel like an exclusive club, one in which clients felt privileged to be members. The new company, on the other hand, portrays itself as more of a service to, almost a utility for clients. Internally, the old company was very entrepreneurial. Much like IDEO from the Nightline documentary shown in class, the old company rewarded employee initiative and had an unsaid assumption of “ask forgiveness, not permission.” It was these types of company personality traits that I used to answer the MBTI questions for each company. Questions such as No. 59 (see the MBTI booklet), which asked, “When you start a big project that is due in a week, do you ….” The old company’s answer would have been “plunge in,” while the new company’s way is “to take the time to list the separate things to be done and the order of doing them.” While I am much more personally aligned with the old company’s method and often get frustrated by the confinement of the new company’s processes and hierarchy, I know my traits can align with the new company’s traits. For example, I am putting my action-oriented learning traits (Learning Tactics Inventory, Maxine Dalton, 1999) to use figuring out how I can take advantage of the new company’s many automated systems, tools, and supporting operational functions. I am also finding the highly structured nature of the new company freeing, since it allows me to focus on my job, letting the processes and technology take care of the details. As the old company’s head of content strategy, I struggled for years to implement defined processes and get employees to adhere to set deadlines, something the new company’s systems automate and enforce. The new company also gives me clearly defined measurements and accountabilities, which were always a bit fuzzy at the old company and never clearly defined. Even when the old company implemented Balance Scorecards, the goal setting was informal and quarterly reviews weren’t enforced.
In the old company product group within the new company, I am now seeing how the two companies’ different personalities are blending into something new. The new division continues to be a highly collaborative organization, which the new company supports by building in productivity measurements and incentives that reward collaboration. While companywide decision making is based less on an outside-in model—that is, one driven from the customer view inward—the new product group’s business model continues to be driven from the customer perspective. Work agendas are based on customer needs and with customer input. It’s these best practices that the new company is now trying to implement companywide. This is giving me an opportunity to apply the skills I developed at the old company to improve the new company, a job that is helping to ease my transition between the two cultures.
The personalities of the two companies, as shown above, are very different, and the resulting combined culture is still settling. I believe this exercise has given me useful tools for managing the continued transition: by understanding the differences between the two companies I can let go of the old company’s culture and better see where I need to adjust to the new company’s methods, while still finding a role in helping the new company leverage the old company’s best practices.
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