Business Insight Zone

There’s no special reason that a baseball game seems like the perfect thing for the Fourth of July . . . unless you’re one of the many millions of Americans (like me) for whom it is the perfect thing.

There nothing wrong with it, mind you, but it’s not logic — it’s culture.

Culture grows out of all sorts of things: religion, wars, landscape, historical trends, etc. But plenty of it is basically accidental. If things had been just a little different, for example, Americans might regard the Fourth of July as a perfect day for football or soccer or horse racing.

(For that matter, the Fourth of July was very nearly the Second of July, since that’s the day the delegates agreed on the Declaration of Independence. But they didn’t start signing it until two days later.)

The historical accident of cheap energy

Oil, just by coincidence, occurs naturally in abundant qualities in places like Pennsylvania, California, and Texas. It’s also a wonder-chemical when it comes to packing BTUs into a small amount of mass. Plus it’s easy to burn — in an oil lamp, a piston engine, or whatever.

If oil hadn’t occurred in abundance in the United States, or if it hadn’t been discovered until much later, or if it weren’t so easy to burn, Americans might have very different views about a lot of things: automobiles, the proper price of fuel, the Middle East, and so on.

Note that I don’t say which way would be better. Ultimately, it’s unknowable. I’m just observing that things surely would be different.

Japanese industrial cooperation

My friend James Governor, who’s a technology analyst with a focus on environmental issues, raises this issue with his latest blog post:

Collaboration On A Grand Scale: Japan and Carbon Capture

. . . Japan has a history of successfully retooling its economy to deal with economic challenges and scarcity . . . It’s a country with a particularly strong sense of duty and continuity.

Keep in mind that, in different settings, “collaboration” involving 24 power companies could be interpreted as “collusion” or “oligarchy” or something else. Keep in mind, also, that these interpretations would be culturally driven — because legal and commercial norms are parts of culture.

Getting back to oil for a minute, it might be worth noting here that the “Seven Sisters” of the 20th-century oil business were notorious for being brass-knuckle competitors, yet were also watched constantly for signs that they might be colluding to the detriment of consumers (or, later, oil-producing countries). So when, say, Exxon and Chevron pooled their resources into Aramco in 1948, they were careful to do it in a way that wouldn’t be construed as forming a trust by U.S. regulators.

Hospital patient charts

With a typically acid tongue, The Last Psychiatrist lays out

Six Quick Changes That Will Lead To Better or More Cost Effective Hospital Care

Since I’ve never been a doctor or a nurse, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the post’s suggestions. But the important thing to note is that TLP is suggesting changes that could be put into effect at any time by a change in rules, not a change in technology.

Rules are a piece of culture.

American hospitals have their own culture just like the international oil business or the Japanese energy business. TLP’s suggestions involve nothing more complex, in terms of logic, than using a pen and following some new guidelines. But TLP seems well aware that the suggestions would be resisted, in some cases tooth and nail, by doctors.

How to solve a big problem

Businesses are facing enormous challenges. Not just the forever-and-ever challenges of finding good workers, finding good customers, managing finances, and so on, but changes in the landscapes of whole industries. And many businesses — many whole industries — are figuring out that they must make huge changes of their own. But how to do it?

Unfolding the whole answer has already filled libraries. But one of the starting points to the answer is this:

Understand that you’re not just changing the reasons or the logic or the mechanics, but the CULTURE.

It’s the same for organizations as it is for individual people. Most folks don’t change their actions unless they change their whole way of looking at things. It’s true of heart patients trying to live longer. It’s true of people who want to fix what’s broken in their lives. And it’s true of organizations that want to embrace change.

Culture as a technical problem

We like to focus on technical challenges. If we can clarify specs, enumerate steps, compose a Gantt chart, we can often break down a big thing so that it seems manageable.

Culture? People issues? Not so much. Too sticky — and it’s hard to get people to change.

But in fact, steering the culture in a better direction is part of the technical challenge itself, because you can’t implement the world’s best technical solution if you don’t do it in a way that’s culturally doable.

The moral of this story: You can be as logical as you like, but until you get the culture right, you’re rowing against the tide.

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(Photo by jimcchou.)

Category: Energy,Green & Clean,History