Management Application Exercise

Application Exercise 2:

Oganizational Culture: What Features Define the 100 Best Companies?

(& how might they fit your preferences?)

1. Background

Every year, Fortune magazine presents their annual “100 Best Companies to Work For.” The main

reason why these companies earn a place on this prestigious list is their organizational culture. As you will

learn from the readings and lecture, organizational culture is a complex combination of values, beliefs,

symbols, policies, stories, and more that are widely shared by employees. Research has shown that a lack

of fit between an employee and the culture is a big cause of turnover. As you know, turnover and other

effects can be expensive for a firm. And, it can also be expensive for the affected employee (perhaps

you!). So, it’s worth spending time to understand your culture preferences and to develop skills that help

you diagnose if a firm matches with your preferences. This is the subject of Application Exercise #2.

2. Specifics

Part I. This is the easiest part of the exercise (note: easy does not mean quick). I want you to do

some research on 3 companies that regularly appear on the Fortune list. The first goal here is to familiarize

you with some of the various elements of their cultures. This will help kick start the thinking I ask you to

do in Part II. A second goal is to determine if there are any common factors between each of these

companies and then to try to match your “cultural preferences” with those of a firm (Part II and III below).

With this in mind, please do the following:

o Fortune Magazine annually rates the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S. For example, one firm we looked at early in the term was SAS (a privately-held software firm in N.

Carolina). They were rated #8 in 2016, #4 in 2015, #2 in 2014, #3 in 2013, and #1 in both 2012

& ‘11. They’ve been doing a bunch of things right for a while now. Try to figure out what their

culture is all about (e.g., go to their web site, outside reference sources, read their mission,

what others say about them, etc.). What are the values expressed by SAS in your view? Be as

specific as possible. What exactly do they say and that supports their culture in your opinion?

Do you have evidence to support your position/view of their culture (e.g., don’t completely

trust a firms’ website – look also for other definitive features of the culture). What other

information do you have that provides insight into key cultural values at SAS? Finally, if you

don’t remember the brief video we saw on SAS early in the term it is posted here on Isidore.

But, definitely don’t rely on this video alone - in part b/c it’s important to keep these ratings in

perspective....after all, Enron was rated among the top 20 firms before it went under! Likewise,

Business Week’s analysis of Tyco and its CEO, Dennis Kozloski was very positive. Up until

the last months before the company blew up and Kozloski was indicted, BW was applauding

his great leadership & company.)

o Choose 2 more firms from the Fortune list to include in your comparison. Don’t choose another tech firm since you’re already looking at SAS. Among others on the list, you’ll

regularly see PwC, Marriott, Container Store, Stew Leonard’s’, Southwest, S. C. Johnson and

others. Choose from these others on the list and conduct the same analysis described for SAS to

characterize their culture (if you’re unsure, choose ones you’ve heard about or want to work

for). I’m eliminating several from your consideration: BCG, Nordstrom’s, Ed Jones, &

Google.

o For all three firms, be sure to detail and integrate in your company analysis the aspects/features of organizational culture discussed in the book & class. For example, you may

wish to provide some detail about the characteristics or artifacts of their culture (see

components such as language, norms, stories, etc.). And/or you may wish to categorize the

firms using the profiles of culture noted in our book. Don’t simply wax on about the specific

benefits they offer and etc. There are a lot of companies that offer a long list of great benefits,

yet their work cultures are very different. Consider that two organizations as varied as

Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Army both offer lots of benefits, but more importantly what do

those things signal about the underlying culture? This is not an assignment on how good

benefits/perks are – it’s one on identifying organizational culture. Draw conclusions about what

all the characteristics you noted mean about each culture.

Part II. In this second part, I want you to think about the company you’d love to join. (This Part II can be done first or in conjunction with Part I if you like) What would it look like? What

characteristics/features might it have? How would it be organized…how would people interact? For this

part of the module, I want you to provide a description of the preferred culture of your ideal organization.

How do you know your preferences? There are several ways to determine this. For example, if

you’ve had a lot of work experience, you may already know what aligns well or poorly with your

preferences. Even then, however, research shows that people aren’t good at parsing out the specific

elements of their “fit” judgment. Consequently, I require that you to take a culture preference test and use it

as your comparison standard (see Resources below for several examples). Finally, your work in Part I

above will be helpful to you here and can be input for the characteristics you’d like [examples: how should

people be organized, what are their symbols & what do they stand for, how do they train people, what

about the physical location, office arrangements, and expected behavior?]. Note: I do not want your

innermost thoughts, wishes, and feelings for the future – I want an analysis of you via our course-related

concepts & materials.

Part III. Here in this last part, you’ll to put all your research into practice. For your 3 firms (from part I), analyze how well each might meet/fit your cultural “requirements” (from part II). More

specifically:

o Create a chart summarizing how well these companies meet your cultural criteria. You may not be able to complete all the cells of the chart, but if you can’t fill in several for any one company

you’ll want to jettison it for another where you can. I want you to directly compare all 3 firms

on the cultural criteria and draw conclusions about which you’d join. Explain your table in the

body of your paper.

o Initiate some kind of contact with one of the two firms you chose (again, I’m eliminating SAS as an option here). Describe the contact you had with the firm. What did you do/write and what

was their response? Did it confirm or contradict your view of their culture (obviously, you’ll

need to think about & ask culture-related questions)? Discuss this in your report. The purpose

of this contact is not to just go through the motions to satisfy this requirement, but instead to

get some useful info about culture. If your contact is half-effort/done late/last minute, you’re

unlikely to find out anything and will lose points. People have asked for some guidelines:

 Don’t use family members, friends or other professors; don’t use an earlier contact (you didn’t have the culture knowledge you do now & so weren’t able to ask detailed/insightful

questions). Don’t use a place you’ve worked at – I want you to find out something new.

 If your first contact is a dead end, then contact another company. Either way, document your contact in an appendix (I don’t want people bailing out here just because they started

late). Just declaring your contact is not documenting it.

 For your documentation, be sure to include identifiers: who, when, how (contact method: phone #, letter, original-mail & address; their reply; etc.), what you asked and learned via

responses, etc. Clearly, anybody could send a quick note at the last minute that asks “can

you tell me about your culture.” In fact, you could do that now here at the beginning of

the term – without ever having studied or read about culture. If you do, you won’t earn

any points. Ask specific questions that are based on your reading about the firm- questions

informed by the book & class material.

 I’m grading all this; points are lost here more frequently than I’d like. Frankly, you’re better off just fessing up and telling me you started late rather than have me searching

around trying to replicate/authenticate your poorly documented contact.

 Put all your documentation in an appendix (not counted in word limits).

3. Resources o Chapter 14 in our book (“Organizational Culture).

o Culture Preference Tests (choose 1 to complete)

 Culture Scale (posted on Isidore here – separate file). This is a quick test that will be scored online for you and you can print out the results to refer to. Also posted is a file with brief

background information on the test (called Culture Scale, background info).

 Here’s another culture preference test: http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/011/culture.html (Note: this one’s more complicated/detailed than the one above & moves around on this site a lot.)

4. Write Up o In summary, you’ll have 3 parts of your write up. First, you’ll present your look at the cultures

of 3 firms & contact one. Second, you’ll analyze your cultural preferences via a scale and

discuss what you discovered. Third, you’ll match up what you know about these firms with

your preferences.

o Don’t ‘wing it’ here. Support your write-up with data, cites, scale results, etc. This is not an exercise to know your inner dreams and hopes. Those are important, but not the subject of this

assignment. You’re doing a cultural audit of firms, then an analysis of yourself via course-

related materials, and then finally putting the two together.

o Keep your report to 1500 words or less (not including any title page or appendices you might wish to add). Please use double spacing.

o Your write up must be posted to Isidore by the start of class, Nov 30 th

.