In my ten years working in strategy consulting, there was no concept that fascinated me more than “corporate culture.”Īs I explored the topic and related research my fascination shifted from the topic to the fact that almost every company talked about their culture but rarely employed a single person within the organization that understood what culture was, how it was formed and shaped, and how it related to the survival of the company.Įven as HR has been elevated to the C-Level, most “people leaders” remain relatively oblivious to powerful ideas about organizational culture formed in the 1980s.

3.1 A Weekly Newsletter about Work, Creativity & Unconventional Paths.2 How does organizational culture arise?.In the 1980s, Edgar Schein’s research expanded the scope of the world to modern organizations and the way we talk about companies has never been the same. That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of societyīy the 1950s there were over 100 definitions of the word and that was before organizations started using the term.

Sir Edward Tyler’s book Primitive Culture from 1870 is often marked as a shift toward the modern definition: It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that the word started to form into the modern form of the word, adopted by Anthropologists and other academics who were studying foreign cultures. Kant, for instance, like most of his contemporaries, still spells the word Cultur, but uses it repeatedly, always with the meaning of cultivating or being cultured In 1952, two Academics, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, completed a comprehensive review of the term and found that by then there were over 134 definitions.Īs Kroeber and Kluckhohn explored the history of the word, they found all roads pointing to Germany, where the word was emerging as “cultur”:

Boundless game clothing