With war in Ukraine rocking the business world, attending to bank culture might seem like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet a firm’s culture is essentially a form of institutional behavioural memory applied to the present. It represents the accumulated collective wisdom of those within the firm, or lack of it, about how to navigate reality successfully. The calamitous reality now pressing itself on firms therefore underscores the continued importance of sound culture.
At one level, a firm’s success is defined by its goals– what outcomes the firm values. But success can only be realised within the firm’s wider reality, the ultimate test of the value of the outcomes it pursues. Success, then, also depends on that wider reality and cannot be defined and achieved in a vacuum. Those who pursue goals that ignore social and natural reality eventually fail; repeatedly mistreat friends and they will desert you, step off the canyon’s edge and disaster will ensue.
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