Corporate Culture: more myth than reality? While business success and failure are often laid to "culture," the term is elusive and frequently misused. Experts in organization behavior say it's difficult to alter a company's culture, and when it does shift, it's often the result of successful business performance changes.

Culture seems harder to ignore than ever. When a company makes news because of high achievement or high crimes, "corporate culture" often receives the credit or the blame. Apparently, many CEOs and CFOs want a culture that gets results, because every major consulting firm seems to sell a recipe for the right corporate culture--the one that drives performance--and advice on how to change the wrong ones. In fact, a Google search for "corporate culture change" brings close to 50 million hits.

Yet, some of the most eminent researchers about organizations suggest that, like an inflated currency, the idea of corporate culture change is over-circulated and doesn't have solid backing. They point out that that attempts to change culture may be counterproductive, sometimes taking management attention away from key business issues, and, at worst, lead to disastrous missteps.

Costly mistakes happen repeatedly because executives don't understand how intractable culture is. Managers routinely make major business commitments--for example, mergers or outsourcing deals--implicitly assuming that they'll be able to change corporate culture if they have to.

The problem is, they usually can't, and it's often a mistake to try. Edgar Schein, a founder of the field of organizational psychology and author of the classic, Organizational Culture and Leadership, says flatly, "Culture is damn near impossible to change."

John Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School, also suggests that much talk of culture change is nonsense. "People talk about how 'we changed our culture last year' and, no, you didn't. Culture doesn't change that fast," he says. "What they've done is use some mechanism like a boss to change the way people sometimes act on some dimension, but if the boss disappeared, boom! It would go, too." That kind of change is too shallow to be cultural.

In the hoary shorthand definition, culture is "the way we do things around here." Corporate culture describes the whole collection of assumptions, practices and norms that people in an organization adopt over time. That means that employees have to buy into them, eventually getting to the point where they take them for granted and pass them on to new hires.