As originally published by Denise Lee Yohn on Linkedin.

A couple of people have recently posed to me the question, “Who owns culture in an organization?”

On the one hand, it seems that everyone owns the culture – meaning, everyone plays a role in manifesting it. But on the other hand, the adage “if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible” applies, because someone(s) need to be accountable for the culture.

The way I’ve come to think and talk about it goes like this: The leaders of an organization are responsible for identifying the desired culture and everyone in the organization is responsible for cultivating it. The leaders must determine the kind of culture the company needs to achieve its goals, since they are in the best position to develop that vision and understand what it will take to get there. And then they must cultivate that culture through communication and role-modeling, as well as the design and management of the organization. Everyone else in the organization must align their attitudes and actions with the desired culture, nurturing and reinforcing it in their scope of work.

But that is not to say that people within an organization shouldn’t influence the definition or understanding of the desire culture. I’ve heard from many people in non-leadership roles who have far more enlightened perspectives not only on the current state of the culture at their companies, but also how it needs to change and how to achieve the changes. Plus a couple of pieces I’ve come across recently shed light on the role of employees in driving culture.

First, a paper recently published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review observes, “Employees often know a great deal about how to navigate their organization’s culture and are very savvy at using aspects of it to introduce new issues or to generate fundamental change.” The paper, “Organizational Culture as a Tool for Change” (subscription required), goes on to reframe culture, saying that, “In an effort to acknowledge culture’s pervasiveness and fluidity, management and organizational scholars are now regarding organizational culture as composed of an open, varied, and malleable ‘toolkit’ of resources” (emphasis mine).

The authors describe one example of how the employees at an athletic-apparel company with a culture strongly oriented toward innovation for athletic performance initiated an effort to make sustainability an organizational priority. By demonstrating the potential for sustainability criteria to connect with the company’s commitment to innovation, employees “successfully instigated a significant internal shift.”

The paper argues that culture is less an “internal code” that is established and entrenched by organizational leaders and is more something persists through the distributed actions of all people in the organization. Employees draw from the cultural toolkit as they see fit, and in doing so, can shift the culture either intentionally or inadvertently. The authors conclude, “Culture is expressed and reified through practice; it is not merely established by proclamation.”

The second piece that caught my attention recently is an article by Andrew Hill from the Financial Times, “How remote staff will build a new corporate culture.” The article observes that, given how many employees are working remotely because of the pandemic, “Keeping even long-serving staff aligned with the corporate mission will become harder, the longer they spend away from the workplace.”

It reports that remote working has loosened the physical connections between employee and employer, and staff now has the license to make connections at their own discretion. The article describes how employees at McKinsey organized a sing-a-long (yes, at McKinsey) and how university professors, in a departure from the hard-nosed competitive cultures that usually exist between academic institutions, spontaneously shared wisdom about online teaching to aid their peers in adjusting to remote classroom settings.

Hill writes, “Organisations that were always good at shaping the way their employees work and behave — McKinsey, AB InBev, and others — will probably find that the shift to hybrid work helps them to reinforce their strong cultures.” Other companies with weaker cultures may find that #WFH causes them to fall apart. And, he concludes, “All companies are likely to discover, that often it will be the staff who set the norms of the new working culture, rather than the CEO.”

So, perhaps “who owns culture” is not the right question to begin with. Ownership implies possession and, if culture is malleable and fluid as these pieces suggest, it doesn’t seem like anyone can own it. But accountability may be a more appropriate emphasis. Accountability can be both given and taken – and when it comes to organizational culture, it should given and taken by different people in different roles in different ways.

What do you think? I expect many of you have a point of view on this topic, so I’m looking forward to hearing your comments.

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More resources from Denise on brand + culture:

• FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies — my latest book
• Should Company Culture Be Like a Cult? – a post from this Brand + Culture Series
• How To Cultivate a Successful Culture – an article of mine from The Art Of

As originally published by David Sable on Linkedin. Subscribe to the newsletter!

How do I know that disruption is dead? Check Google Trends.

On a global all-categories basis, the word “Ingenuity” is more searched than the word “Disruption.” But that’s not the story.

What’s fascinating to me, is that when looking at the “Business & Industrial” sector, “Disruption” far outpaces “Ingenuity.”

However, when you look at “People & Society,” “Ingenuity” is in the lead.

We are entering into an era where people and society might just take back the world…not in the faux purposeful jargon of financial markets way (Blackrock for example), but in a real, powerful and impactful way.

The challenges we face require more than the application of some singular end-goal piece of technology or app. Facebook, Amazon, Uber and faster pizza delivery are all great innovations (for some), but none of them solve for the X in society’s problems, particularly when the chips are down.

Think about the lack of ventilators during the early days of the COVID crisis. They were expensive and took a long time to manufacture. Ingenuity found ways to make cheaper ones that could be delivered quickly and efficiently. Same for the crisis of mask shortages. How about people locked up at home with their kids and the amazing projects they all concocted? It was all ingenuity. None of it disruptive.

Disruption is a word that is overused, misused…cliched, and frankly, in my opinion, boring.

My readers know that I have a long harbored the belief that we are so bedazzled by the very word, the sound of it (see Mel Brooks onomatopoetica), that unless it’s said multiple times in meetings, “we need disruption”…“we have to be disruptive”…“let’s disrupt the market”… “it’s not disruptive enough”…ad nauseam, we feel that we haven’t gotten our money’s worth.

The truth is, few ever get beyond the idiomatic exercise because they have no idea what to disrupt or are not sure what it really means. They want to be Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb rolled into one, but are so focused on these company’s so-called “disruption,” rather than their secret sauce—the real reason for their success—that most clients miss the forest for the trees.

I won’t go into a deep analysis as to what disruption actually means. That is for another day and another article entirely. But what I will say, is that the only disruption at play when applied to companies like Amazon and Uber has mostly been financial and regulatory. That is, these companies were not held accountable to the same quarterly earnings rigor their established competitors were anchored to, nor did they ever seem to worry about the rules, regulations and even laws that governed their respective industry categories.

Ask yourself—were buyers disrupted? How about riders? Vacationers? Maybe? Not a single one. Rather, their journey to purchase or service was made simpler. In other words, their achievement was not “disruption” but simplicity.

The way I articulate this phenomenon is as follows: disruption is companies talking about themselves—or investors talking about them—in order to increase their valuations…not about the company’s ability to solve any issues in a novel way.

Ingenuity is what we need more of. Amazon is not a company that is impressive because of its “disruption.” It’s a company that has excelled because of its ingenuity and should be studied for that alone. One current example demonstrating Amazon’s ingenuity is the company’s discussions with Simon Malls about buying their dead real estate, where Amazon would be able to build more fulfillment centers. Amazon has done this before, and so have others in the logistics business. It’s not a new idea, despite the hype, it’s just one makes sense and that further streamlines and simplifies their services. Here is my bet: Amazon will use the new spaces to build retail stores as well.

Amazon isn’t caught in some DIGIBABBLE time-warp that compels them to think in only digital terms (remember my motto, Digital is everything…but not everything is Digital). Amazon opens stores when others pontificate. They create products while others opine. They focus on customers while others abandon them.

Amazon wins through ingenuity in my book. Think about that next time you or your clients want to “disrupt” like them.

I could go on and on, and I have written about this in the past, citing the incredible ingenuity in developing countries, where the things we take for granted like lightning fast WIFI don’t exist. And yet, we can have an impact on disease control, for example, even without the kind of connectivity and smart phone infrastructure we have in the West.

Bottom line, while I sit here writing this, I’m seeing reports that Russia claims to have already created a vaccine for Coronavirus. And as I watch the global financial markets react upwards, I am concerned that we are truly losing our perspective and ability to focus on anything beyond politics and finance. But we can only focus on those concepts once we have a grasp on the fundamentals. And right now, we don’t.

I am a believer in people…nothing more, nothing less. The best VC’s will tell you that they invest in people not just their ideas. INGENUITY…Listen:

“Who indeed will set bounds to human ingenuity?” –Galileo

Who indeed?

Disrupt or solve problems? History, in my view, will be on the side of humanity. What do you think?