When Louis Gerstner took over a dying IBM in 1993, he told his leadership team the company's last problem was a missing vision. Every expert in the room thought he was wrong. He was not.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I argue that culture is made of exactly two ingredients: the stories people tell and the behaviors people repeat. Everything else, the values document, the posters, the offsite, is decoration around those two things.
I explore how culture forms, why it resists change so stubbornly, and what leaders, families, and teams can do to shift it for real. I walk through the concept of identity-protective cognition to explain why a new behavior can feel like a threat to someone's sense of self, and I share the story of a financial firm whose "speak up" policy quietly punished the very honesty it claimed to want. I close with how Gerstner actually turned IBM around, not with a new mission statement but by changing the stories and behaviors his leadership team reinforced every single day.
What you will discover:
Why culture lives in behavior and storytelling, not in mission statements
How to read the real culture of any group by asking one simple question
Why identity-protective cognition makes culture so hard to shift
The behavioral affordances that quietly sabotage well-meaning policies
The specific steps that move a culture from where it is to where you want it
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