13. August 13
Kultur und Strategie: „Hard is soft. Soft is hard.“ (Tom Peters)
Welche Rolle spielt eigentlich die Kultur des Unternehmens für die Strategie? Auf diese Frage habe ich beim Lesen eines – wie immer – lesenswerten Textes von Tom Peters mit dem Titel „Systems Have Their Place: Second Place“ einige Antworten gefunden.
In dem Text von Peters geht es allerdings nicht um soziale Systeme, wie man hier zunächst vermuten könnte, sondern in erster Linie um formale Systeme, wie Auditierungssysteme, Controllingsysteme, Managementsysteme etc. Trotzdem hatte ich beim Lesen des Textes den Eindruck, dass Tom Peters einen Text von Niklas Luhmann gelesen haben muss! Denn Luhmann beschreibt die Kultur einer Organisation als nicht entscheidbare Entscheidungsprämisse und genau hier setzt Tom Peters an, wenn er sagt: „Hard is soft. Soft is hard.“
Die Passage, die mich festgehalten hat, möchte ich gerne in voller Länge zitieren:
“I first met Lou Gerstner when I was at McKinsey & Co. in the late ‘70s. The phrase “tough as nails” was invented for the likes of Lou. Only GE’s Jack Welch, among CEOs I’ve met, including generals who ran their nation’s armed forces, is in the same league. Gerstner was also the quintessential McKinsey proponent of “Gimme the facts, period.” He was, in short, an analyst’s analyst—and a superb one at that. My work on organization effectiveness was in its infancy, and though mandated by the Firm’s managing director (de facto CEO), Gerstner thought it was, well, crap. Too “soft” by an order of magnitude! Time passed, I co-wrote a book about excellence with Bob Waterman (our motto, recall, was “Hard is soft. Soft is hard.”), and Gerstner after a couple of very successful stops-at-the-top, such as American Express, was called in as CEO to save (or dismantle) a staggering IBM. His success was mindboggling, and like so many CEOs in those days, he wrote about it after the fact; i.e., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance. No surprise, I was completely taken by a paragraph that appeared in the introduction: “If I could have chosen not to tackle the IBM culture head-on, I probably wouldn’t have. My bias coming in was toward strategy, analysis and measurement. In comparison, changing the attitude and behaviors of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard. [Yet] I came to see in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game —it is the game. (Lou Gerstner)”. (Tom Peters, 2013: „Systems Have Their Place: Second Place“).
Wie bringt man nun aber Strategie und Kultur zusammen? Wann ist der richtige Zeitpunkt im Strategieprozess, die Kultur ins Spiel zu bringen? Und wie bringt man etwas ins Spiel, das sich nicht ins Spiel bringen lässt?
