Chapter 2
Don't Let the Culture Embarrass You
Power to the People
The collective public consciousness (aka, the culture) is the entity that ultimately decides whether a given venture will succeed or fail. As a group, these people determine whether a music CD is a hit; they decide whether a book becomes a best seller; and they dictate which motion pictures become box office smash hits.
The public, the culture, the collective thinking of a lot of people also decide whether the goods and services you sell will become popular. If what you sell is popular, it is in demand. It becomes relevant and important to them. Your company will grow when they rush out and tell their friends.
Organizations that strive to remain relevant to their clients, suppliers, customers, and employees will always weather an economic crisis better than those that disregard the world around them. Being relevant means you matter to them. If you don't matter, you can go out of business and nobody will care—or possibly even notice.
I wrote a lot about this bullheaded phenomenon in my book Are You Relevant? It is incomprehensible to me that a number of once successful (and really smart) companies go profit-blind by refusing to change. Profit-blindness is a term I assign to an organization that has made a lot of money doing something one way (usually the original way) but that is so stupidly complacent in its success that it ignores the obvious culture changes that can put it out of business. Our culture is constantly ...
