2023 COMMENTS, CONTRIBUTIONS & CONCLUSIONS | “Changing Banking For Good”

Trends in management thinking tend to lag those in academic research. And trends in policymaking and regulation most often lag those in business thinking and practice. Not for nothing did Keynes argue that those in authority are typically enthralled by “some academic scribbler of a few years back.” In 1992, Harvard Business School professor and leadership studies guru John Kotter scribbled a short book with James Heskett, an HBS colleague and professor of logistics. Corporate Culture and Performance summarized their research into possible connections between a firm’s corporate culture and its economic performance.1 

Culture, the professors suggest, “is the product of a variety of social forces that are frequently subtle, bordering on invisible, through which people learn a group’s norms and values, are rewarded when they accept them, and are ostracized when they do not.” This operates at two levels, they argue. At the deeper and less visible level, “culture refers to values that are shared by the people in a group and that tend to persist over time even when group membership changes.” At the level of observed behavior, “culture represents the behavior patterns or style of an organization that new employees are automatically encouraged to follow by their fellow employees.” Considering culture at both levels, Kotter and Heskett’s studies demonstrated that: