The Cultural Corporation: A Model of Sustainable, Goal-Oriented Activity or Don't shit where you eat
‘The Cultural Corporation’ models an approach to commercial and other goal-oriented activity, such as profit generation, that balances the benefits of a proposed solution and strategy with the goals of the specific communities and cultures in which their activity is undertaken. Though such a model might sound naive at first, we believe that it holds the key to sustainable long-term growth that ultimately benefits everyone the commercial activity touches. Short-term profit tactics such as polluting, stealing, cheating, or exploiting have only been seen in the industrial economy because of the decentralized (but not distributed) nature of communication flow in which the end users (laborers, consumers, suppliers, etc.) could be unaware of what was happening in or to other places, communities, and cultures.
Today it is increasingly difficult to use tactics with a negative outcome at any point in the system without someone finding out: in a network economy, we are all living together in McLuhan’s global village and word of bad behavior travels fast. We live in a collective petri dish, where there is no escaping the negative outcomes of your own behavior. Bluntly, you can’t “shit where you eat.”
The usefulness of this perspective lies in the fact that we are transitioning out of the old industrial economy. In an agrarian economy, value lies in the earth. In an industrial economy, value lies in the factory. In a network economy, value lies in the relationship. Collectively, relationships form culture. Success in a network economy is positively correlated to the strength and health of the cultures where business is conducted. Therefore invest not in factories, but in people, and you will see your business thrive.
The Cultural Corporation model is a way of seeing this theory in action. In the cultural corporation, investment of information and resources in people is the backbone of business; internally to your associates, vendors, and executives; externally to your customers and society. This maps as four broad areas of business activity: training (internal investment of information); labor relations (internal investment of resources); marketing (external investment of information), and products and services (external investment of resources). By investing information and resources in these four areas, the quality of the relationships between the company and its customers and associates and thus society will be strong and healthy, leading to a compounding of positive network and commercial activity.
A company can then monitor itself and its actions by incorporating the four values of a cultural corporation into its best practices: non-hierarchy, transparency, accountability, and relevance. Each of these four cultural values should be measured to assess the integrity of every relationship.
The relationships that aggregately form culture(s) are sustained by a collectively held worldview that inspires and animates the culture. If your associates don’t share your worldview, they will leave–likewise your customers. It is through those two interlocking relationships that the company accesses society. By working with customers and associates to create a collectively formed, shared, and held cultural worldview, and by investing information and resources to help achieve that worldview, the cultural corporation becomes relevant–otherwise no company can long survive.
