There is a large consensus that corporate culture is going to be a determining factor in a company’s success or failure in the next decade. Much has been made about the success of companies with strong cultures such as Toyota and Microsoft. Due to the present status of the global economy, many under performing companies are struggling to look for answers that can help them perform. One of the debates is the what the ‘right corporate culture’ is and this is laden with traps where pressurized executives can buckle and give into ‘business trends’ instead of a carefully thought about list of values that is thoroughly implemented in the corporate consciousness.

Humanity seeks foundations for stability; a set of timeless and changeless ideas of principles/values that can help guide decisions and become a guiding light for ideas. The unprecedented rate of change in the past few years have rendered companies with previously strong cultures obsolete due to the refusal of the ‘movers and shakers’ to move and shake to the changing world around them.

This is why any top performing company/organization should never take its company culture for granted. Previous successes and hefty praise and coverage might instill in organizations the belief that their culture is the right one now and forever and they ignore early warning signs to a shift in their environment that signals a need for change. Thus, each organization must not only ensure that the culture is viable and can be sold to their employees but it has a mechanism for dealing with change and adapting to the external environment (preferably proactively).

This is also why a strong set of unshakable values must drive the culture since when the culture changes, the employees have these values to fall back to in times of crisis. The selection of values is important and cultures should be built upon them. ‘Catering to the needs of the customer’ and ‘Becoming a learning organization’ are such values. The latter should facilitate a participative culture were employees can question values and suggest different assumptions to such. To summarize, managers and leaders should keep past history in focus while ensuring that learning and adaptation are taking place.

Robert Quinn’s competing values model was generated to address the paradoxes that arose as experts worked to nail down the factors that were crucial to organizational effectiveness. Quinn’s model sought to address this dilemma by providing a dynamic framework to resolve the paradoxes that emerged in organizational settings. The model consists of four quadrants with each quadrant being a major model in organization theory. They are (in clockwise order):

i. Human relations model

ii. Open Systems model

iii. Rational Goal Model

iv. Internal process mode

Each model seems to be a polar opposite of the other; Quinn argues that we want an organization that has enough of each as is appropriate to the company’s goals. The purpose of his model is to reiterate that the conflicting tones of each quadrant are made in our own minds and that their associated values can exist in tandem with each other.

When applied to an organization’s culture, Quinn argues that a corporation’s culture might reflect either one of the quadrants such as the distinction he made between Pepsi co and JC penny. Corporations that adopt a certainculture, as a means for effective performance, can cripple itself by mindlessly pursuing the culture’s norms to an extreme. Quinn describes ‘zones’ for organizational cultures ranging from positive to negative. He argues that when a criteria of effectiveness is pursued zealously and mindlessly, they turn into criteria’s for ineffectiveness