The Curse of Culture

“Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age. That is a central finding from McKinsey’s recent survey of global executives, which highlighted three digital-culture deficiencies: functional and departmental silos, a fear of taking risks, and difficulty forming and acting on a single view

For example, Schrage points out that Apple (and now also Google and Microsoft and Amazon) asks their “customers to become the sort of people who wouldn’t think twice about talking to their phone as a sentient servant.”

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• veryone sets out to do that, but they don’t create processes that result in that


• They rush things into the marketplace


• They don’t take the time


• They get impatient


• They don’t manage the creative community well


• No risk in new ideas that sound odd but could be great


• They don’t know how to process failure in creativity


• One of the things that Bob sees today i

Having a culture and people that will evolve in this way is critical because the world changes quickly and in ways that can’t possibly be anticipated. I’m sure you can think of a number of companies that failed to identify and address their problems on time and ended up in a terminal decline (see: BlackBerry and Palm) and a rare few that have consi