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Listen to The Closer, Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green-Carl. Today I'm back in the

studio with Amy Bernstein, editor of Harvard Business Review, and we are going to be

talking about the upcoming features in the April issue of the magazine Amy thank you for

talking with us always a pleasure let's start with the article we have this

month from J. Lorsch and Emily McDadeg on culture and how culture is not the thing you fix.

This is a really interesting idea to me, this idea that you wouldn't start by focusing on company

culture.

Yeah, it's a really interesting piece of thinking what the authors

contend is that don't start with culture. You start with the business when you

fix the business culture follows. So they looked at four cases, Ecolab, Delta, Ford, and Novartis and

they examined how those companies turn themselves around and fix their culture.

For example, just the case of Ford,

when Alan Malale was the CEO,

he really had to pull this manufacturing company

back from the brink and he had you know

internecine strife among all of the business units all the divisions of the

company what he did was he figured out the manufacturing part and what he got for that work is he took the whole

atmosphere from a kind of defensive, untrusting, very separated set of silos to a much more integrated whole where you know teamwork became

the order of the day. It is interesting especially at this time I feel like every day

across my desk I get a pitch for how important company culture is and

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