@rlombreglia @enfascination
You hypothesize that “the ‘secret sauce’ metaphor might be holding us back, giving culture a little too much mystique for our own good,” and yet your project description starts with the very convincing assertion (unless I’m missing an irony somewhere) that “Culture is the secret sauce of organizations: the half that you can’t just fork.”
I personally have never been a fun of the concept of “organizational culture”. Research on organizational culture dates back at least as far as the late 1970s. A search in ABI/INFORM on the term organizational (or ‘corporate’) culture in the abstract yields more than 5,300 results of peer- reviewed papers published in scholarly journals, spanning a period of five decades. Although references to organizational culture are found in both popular management books and the academic literature, there does not seem to be a sharp, accepted definition of the concept. In fact, despite the large number of academic publications, there is no clear consensus of what ‘organizational culture’ entails.
One of the most widely used definitions is provided by Edgar Schein (2004), who describes organizational culture as
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by an organization as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
The fact that Steve Jobs is quoted in this conversation is spot on, albeit I would take off the mysterious and the magical to talk about the real.
@rlombreglia
I’m not so sure about secret sauce being an expendable part of the equation. I think it’s a mysterious and real thing. In fact, when I read your project summary I couldn’t help but think of Steve Jobs, whom I realize is a cliché today, as well as a reputedly Bad Man who should be cancelled. But I think he understood the subject you’re researching very well. Whatever people may say to dismiss him, Jobs built a great (or at least once-great, while he was alive) tech company precisely by not turning his back on fine art, fine design, fine manufacturing standards, etc., but rather by embracing and insisting on those things.
Jobs understood early on in his career most of the principles of scientific management from the father of the quality movement Joseph Juran. He talks about it extensively in the interview Steve Jobs on Joseph Juran and Quality. Apple’s success perhaps is nothing more than the application of the science of management dressed with the taste of beauty (this one borrowed from Adriano Olivetti).
@rlombreglia
I think Apple’s culture in its heyday was a once-in-a-hundred-years phenomenon, driven by the weird, vital, willed, personality-based magic that lies at the heart of the “secret sauce” metaphor. The fact that such companies can’t continue unchanged after the departures or deaths of their founders seems to testify to that.
So I won’t go into the mystical, great man theory when explaining the incredible Apple’s culture. This conclusion in fact reminds me of fallacies extensively discussed by Phil Rosenzweig in The Halo Effect: And the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. Instead, Apple’s pattern of shared basic assumptions perhaps simply involved the understanding that repetitive processes + objective observation + decomposition and optimization and its application to the business at 360 degree is the secret sauce of success. Which then is not secret anymore.
After all, what Jo Juran proposed is nothing else than a mechanism mimicking nature’s Principle of Least Action for which everything moves saving the maximum amount of energy (= efficiency). So in my opinion yes, culture’s secret sauce metaphor is definitely holding us back. We should look back to nature instead and mimic its real, tangible genius.