ABSTRACT
The whole area of change and change management has drawn a lot of attention over the last few decades as organizations have sought to extract more value for the effort and resources poured into this activity. However, too often, change initiatives have not been attached to business strategy and therefore have been entirely meaningless exercises that have done little more than agitate the organization for no real gain. Indeed, although the main levers for change have been known for some time, and more recently diagnostic tools have been available, one gets the impression that most change initiatives have been a somewhat ‘trial and error’ affair. The reason for this is that very few organizations have had a frame of reference to help them understand what they should be aspiring to. This and the fact that those same organizations have had little or no idea of their own existing cultural capability, means that they have been going through the motions of change, not knowing either the starting point or the end point! No wonder most change initiatives have delivered little more than frustration and a very agitated workforce. The time has come to end all that. We can now see into an organization and measure its ‘dominant culture’ and subsidiary sub-cultures, and we can do likewise in the marketplace to measure the dominant sub-cultures there too, otherwise called behavioral segments, which become the frame of reference for guiding the change referred to above.
