If You Want Culture Change, Create New Stories

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many leaders realize they need to change their organization’s culture to save the business. But employees usually resist change and stick to past norms. Jay Barney, professor at the University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business, studied leaders who successfully led culture change and found one thing in common: they created and spread stories. He says it's not about making up stories but taking action — in authentic, yet theatrical and memorable ways. The new stories then emanate throughout the workforce and rewrite the old narrative. Barney explains the six rules of this practice that leaders need to follow. He’s a coauthor, with Manoel Amorim and Carlos Júlio, of The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization and the HBR article “Create Stories That Change Your Company’s Culture.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:14.0	I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:22.1	Many great companies set out to transform their businesses.
0:25.1	They come up with new strategies, they restructure, maybe even change industries,
0:29.9	go digital, but many times those well-thought-out efforts end up falling flat.
0:35.7	Why?
0:36.7	The company culture.
0:38.2	If it doesn't fit the new strategy, you're toast.
0:41.7	So the obvious thing to do is to change the culture, right?
0:44.5	Well, we know that's really hard.
0:47.2	It's bigger than a CEO.
0:48.4	It's not about what is written down on paper in HR documents.
0:52.0	It's not easy to define much less change.
0:55.8	Today's guest has studied leaders who were able to change their culture to fit a new strategy.
1:01.8	The takeaway is how they told stories to reinforce that shift.
1:06.7	Stories that circulated around the workplaces because a lot of what creates a culture is
1:12.2	the way that employees and managers talk to each other about each other and about the
1:17.4	company and what it does.
1:19.1	The stories they tell.
1:21.5	Jay Barney is here to tell us more.
1:23.6	He's a professor at the Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah by Alma Mater.
1:28.6	He's a co-author along with Manuel Amarim and Carlos Julio of the book The Secret of Culture
	...

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