Management and company culture

I recently had the opportunity to take an interim turnaround role at WebTrends and learn from the mistakes of the previous executive team (had there been no major mistakes, there also would have been no turnaround team!). The most powerful lesson I took away was how profound a role the corporate culture can play in the success of a company, and at the same time, how quickly that culture can diverge from whatever controlled messaging comes from the top. Culture is a productivity multiplier for every employee – and a bad culture sets a fractional multiplier that makes the entire company less productive. At the old WebTrends, management attempted to control internal messaging more than any group I’d ever seen. Several man months of preparation for every board meeting (despite being a private company with no outsiders on the board), countless iterations of non-customer-facing slide decks and emails, and lots of rehearsal time for the smallest internal meetings. Inte...