Power Of Corporate Culture
“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
Abraham Maslow
“When your feelings are screaming that you’ve had enough, and when you think you’re gonna break emotionally, you’ve gotta override that emotion with the concrete logic and willpower that says, ‘You know what?’ I. DON’T. STOP.”
Jocko Willink
I start my day with the same routine that I have followed for decades. I get up at 4AM, pour myself some caffeine and then read for 1–2 hours. In no particular order I read 4–6 newspapers and whatever I think is interesting that day. Sometimes I let my interests take me wherever they want and other times I’m focused on a topic. Throughout the course of the day, I never stop reading but I always start my day with acquiring new knowledge. After that I focus on my physical well-being and do a brutal workout for about an hour a day. Why do I do all of this before most are even out of bed? Because it gives me resiliency, mental acuity, increases my tolerance for risk and a million other benefits. When I am on my rowing machine pushing hard with my lungs and legs screaming all I can think about is quitting but I know it is making me stronger.
Why is it that corporations can’t operate this way? Why is it that organizations tend to lose sight of their mission? When it’s too late they are trying to cram new knowledge and train to run the proverbial marathon when they are already woefully out of shape. It is not innate in companies, or humans, to try and continually improve and accept the kind of pain which causes growth. Forcing oneself to accept pain as a path to growth is hard. When I am swinging those weights over my head at 5:30 AM it is not easy to tell myself that it is worth the pain when all I want to do is go back to bed. My brain and my body want to take the easy path and quit. Psychologically and biologically humans loathe uncertainty and pain, and the brain will do anything to stop them. Building resiliency is tough and requires the forceful application of pain upon oneself and constant introspection. If you want to get stronger you need to constantly ask if you are doing the right things right.
Every morning I read the Wall Street Journal and this morning I came across an article about Walgreens Boot Alliance and how their new CIO is planning to embark upon an extremely ambitious digital transformation project. He is not the first CIO to attempt to do this as his predecessor tried, and from reading between the lines, failed. I am sure there were successes along the way but like many hyper-ambitious leaders that are attempting to modify how the organization is doing business people will be the largest impediment. Paraphrasing the predecessors quotes — he went too hard too fast. Upon looking at his background you can see that there were certain personality traits that probably didn’t help him but that is the topic of a different article. The new CIO certainly has more corporate depth but even with that the odds are greatly stacked against him. Boards and CEOs want transformative and highly innovative change and they typically want it fast but these types of transformations in an organization such as Walgreens can take a decade. You are not only transforming technology but you are transforming culture and that is what is hard and Generative AI (Gen AI) has just made it significantly harder.
Reading further between the lines Walgreens has stagnated and become corporate. Layers of managers, product managers and business analysts that further insulate those responsible for implementing change. Not that some of these roles aren’t necessary but they serve as a very high corporate tax on progress. Good engineers understand, should want to understand, and can communicate with business leaders. Having an engineer sit in a room with corporate leaders will generally get you to a solution faster since they understand not just the want but the how.
Corporate technology was moving at a nice manageable pace but then Gen AI decided to become the bull in the china shop and alter every single previous strategic plan. Tear up the plans, go back to the planning cycle and start over! Virtually every business process will in some way be impacted and, of course, all platforms are now adding features built around Gen AI. And to top it off Gen AI will blow up cloud budgets.
Most companies tend to take the easy path forward without asking themselves if they are doing the right things right. They follow the standard approach of management by quarterly numbers. If the numbers are going up, management is optimistic they are managing well. But those numbers don’t tell the full story or even a small part of it. They may even hide deep rooted organizational and business problems and those problems will eventually arise at the worst possible moment. Management doesn’t realize that the organization is brittle until, usually, it’s too late. Then all the finger pointing starts and exogenous events take the organization in an unwanted direction and management no longer controls the narrative.
What does all this have to do with Gen AI, AI, Data and Machine Learning and why is it that so many organizations push back on the implementation of analytics. The CEO might give it lip service and start a small analytics group that does the minimal amount to satisfy investors but, what is it doing? Nothing. The culture of an organization determines the success or failure of analytics and digital transformation projects. A corporation embarking on a radical digital transformation project that will alter every aspect of their supply chain and internal processes without first having a deep understanding of their own culture is going to fail. If it is not innate in most organizations to be deeply introspective and constantly trying to refine their processes for the better, they don’t have the culture to take upon such changes. Most organizations simply don’t embrace a growth mindset. Of course, there are some highly sophisticated companies that embrace constant change, and they tend to be technology companies.
It’s not to say that you can’t have limited success when attempting a large transformation project, but it will be a rough road. Culture pushes back hard on change when it is not internally embraced. The pain of change and growth is not something that organizational structures inherently embrace. Humans don’t embrace it so why would an organization? Gen AI, LLMs, AI and ML are radically impactful on a company when they are properly implemented. Proposing tools that in many cases will alter or replace jobs is going to hit some strong headwinds. Humans inherently fear change. Advanced AI implementations can and will replace humans in many jobs and in many cases, AI can perform significantly better than a person, and AI doesn’t complain, it gets better with additional time and training, and it never asks for a raise.
The application of advanced technologies and the impact they will have on an organization is less about engineering and implementation. It is not hard to objectively look at a business process and come up with ways to automate and make it better and most engineers will in fact just do that. It’s moving data around but what they and many managers don’t fully consider is the impact on individuals. When trying to change something for the better you must first listen and seek to understand before you attempt to make yourself understood, and without doing that first your risk of failure increases. I am first and foremost and engineer and I’ve often succumbed to the we can do it better, faster, easier mentality without considering the human emotion aspect and it is those situations that I have had the most difficulty pushing through changes. I’d rather have partners than adversaries.
So, the moral of the story is this. In most organizations, unless it is deeply embedded in their DNA, the change that analytics, digital transformation, and AI will bring will not be embraced. Change will be slow and take time and the winning over of a lot of hearts and minds before it is fully accepted. It is never too late to start laying the groundwork organizationally and prepping the employees psychologically long before any big transformation is started. The CEO must start preparing employees to accept what will be inevitable.
Internally the DNA of the organization must first be altered and that just takes time, commitment, and new key thought leaders to start the process to alter hearts and minds. You never want to wake up one day and try to run a marathon when you can’t even walk up the stairs without breathing heavily.
Building organizational resiliency is a slow, hard process and the time to start is now.
