Frequently there are competing interests within an organization that can create conflicts. Some of these are more significant than others such as safety or ethical breaches, while others may be quite benign, though still counter to the stated direction or goals of an organization.
When we think about these competing interests two of the quickest to come to mind are the potential for trading safety for speed and trading quality for throughput. These two conflicts when broken down are hard to justify as true conflicts in many of our modern western workplaces. It is hard to justify injuries and deaths as just numbers when compared to meeting a schedule in a manufacturing environment. It is just as difficult to justify lapses in quality due to pressure for completing work. These quality issues will most likely come up in a warranty clause, not saving any money from the shortcut taken and in extreme instances, quality issues for critical components can have life and death consequences in some products.
But how does performance come out in culture? Kris Dunn believes that culture is "less about free soda and ping pong tables and more about performance." Surely an organization must ultimately perform if it wishes to have continuity of operation, but virtually every organization must perform.
It seems that based on the inability to justify cutting corners or having ethical lapses, there must still be performance. There must still be something in the way that performance occurs that is in the culture secret sauce.
I will continue to investigate the underpinnings of culture moving forward as well as the very important question of how to build, develop, grow and share components of organizational culture, taking the new assumption that performance without ethical tradeoffs is a norm for a healthy or positive culture.
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