Tribal Leadership Revised Edition: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan & John King & Halee Fischer-Wright

Author:Dave Logan & John King & Halee Fischer-Wright [Logan, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

Part III

Owning Tribal Leadership: Stabilizing Stage Four

Chapter 9

Core Values and a Noble Cause

When we first spoke with Gordon Binder, the former CEO of Amgen, he asked the same question almost every other Stage Four Tribal Leader asked: “Why do you want to talk with me?” He added, “I didn’t do anything.”

We asked him for a few hours of time to tell us the Amgen story from his perspective, so other leaders could learn from it. That was enough to convince him to talk with us to chronicle the story of how Amgen owned Stage Four—a story we had seen from inside as consultants to this historic company in the mid-1990s.

Early in Binder’s tenure, many people realized that the Amgen culture, as he told us, was “really good, far better than other companies.” He adds, “People said, ‘It makes my life more fun, and it’s effective. It’s good for me, good for the company, good for everyone.’ ”

Most, though, expected its “specialness” to end as its size kept doubling. He continued: “People would sit around trying to figure out if it would change [as the company grew]. When we passed fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand employees, they worried that we would lose our special culture. It was a frequent topic of discussion.”

Our memory of the early Amgen culture was high energy, dedication to the cause of curing disease, and focus on collective success. We overheard custodians—right along with research scientists and marketing staff—saying that their work was helping to cure cancer. It is almost impossible for us to convey that their words rang of genuine passion for their affiliation with Amgen, but they did.

During this time, a middle manager decided, without any formal authority, to record the Amgen culture. Binder recalls: “We hadn’t thought about the difference between values, principles, and so on. He wanted to write down what Amgen’s values were. He started talking with a lot of people to see if he could figure it out. When I found out about his project, I decided that it was too great to let him do it alone. We should get the whole company involved and really do this right.

“By the time we were done, we had individual interviews with about four hundred people, focus groups, and so on. It literally turned out there were eight [core] values, absolutely not seven or nine. Along the way, I concluded everything grew out of the values; the culture was based on them. If we could start with the values, everything else would follow.”

Identifying Values

A key point for companies that want to attain Stage Four is to go for values now. One of the most common misconceptions we heard in our research is that values is a topic for organizations that have a lot of money, and that struggling organizations should focus on the day-to-day tactics of survival instead. Almost without exception, we found that wildly successful organizations talked about values when it appeared they could least afford to do so. IDEO,

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