The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces That Drive Your Organization's Success

by Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry, Greg Urban

Corporate culture is critical to any organizational change effort. This book offers a proven model for identifying and leveraging the essential elements of any culture.


In a world that changes at a dizzying pace, what can leaders do to build flexible and adaptive workplaces that inspire people to achieve extraordinary results? According to the authors, the answer lies in recognizing and aligning the elusive forces—or the “puzzling” pieces—that shape an organization’s culture.

With a combined seventy-five years’ worth of research, teaching, and consulting experience, Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry, and Greg Urban bring a wealth of knowledge to creating nimble organizations. Globally recognized business anthropologists and management experts, they explain how to access the full power of your culture by harnessing the Four Forces that drive

Embrace a common purpose that illuminates shared aspirations and plans.
Foster a deep commitment to authentic relationships and your organization’s future.
Establish routines and rituals that reinforce “the way we do things around here.”
Promote the constant tinkering that produces surprising new solutions to old problems.

Filled with case studies, personal anecdotes, and solid, practical advice, this book includes a four-part Evaluator to help you build resilient organizations and teams. The Culture Puzzle offers the definitive playbook for thriving amid constant transformation.

Genres: Leadership, Business, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

Published June 22, 2021

Reviews

[thethousanderclub · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my current professional role, I live, breath, and drink culture. I think about it; I worry about it; I design interventions to improve it. It's a constant concern for me. Unfortunately, culture is a terribly difficult thing to design. On the other hand, ignoring it entirely, opting to believe that it can't designed at all, often leads to terrible outcomes for most everyone within an organization. So how is it to be done—the design and nurturing of organizational culture? The Culture Puzzle sets out to outline what they call the "laws of cultural motion" to provide professionals like myself a replicative recipe of cultural development and refinement. The book only partly succeeds.

First, let's look at the "laws" the authors detail. They write, "Just as heavenly bodies follow the laws of physics, organizations follow the laws of cultural motion, propelled by forces that influence how we fulfill our needs and get things done together." I think the statement overstates the comparison between the "laws" of culture and those of physics. I see them very differently. I think culture, being influenced by numerous active agents, doesn't follow clear Newtonian laws, at least not in a way that's altogether discernible by us. Sometimes we may tease out effective strategies from other organizations or even in our own experience, but those strategies might be insufficient in other contexts or teams.

The authors do admit these types of difficulties: "Every anthropologist knows that, in the real world of real people solving real problems, one plus one often equals less than zero." This statement resonates more with me than the prior one about immutable physical laws. The authors do admit a constant attention being needed to maintain desired cultural attributes. I did enjoy and connect with their analogy of culture as a garden. The plants needs just the right amount of water—not too much, not too little—as well as sunlight, fertilizer, etc. Persistent, focused cultivation is required for a successful garden. The same could be said about an organizational culture. People are fascinating but intolerably complex, and their complexity is inseparably linked with the complexity of culture.

I enjoyed The Culture Puzzle because it's one of the few books I have read that was entirely devoted to the idea of organizational culture. I think the analogy of a garden is useful. A few examples shared in the book lacked application. Overall, though, I think this is a worthwhile book to at least kick off a discussion with engaged colleagues and leaders. Getting organizational culture right—and perpetuating it—is a terribly and wonderfully complicated task. We need reminders from time to time of that fact. The Culture Puzzle does succeed in that regard.

https://thethousanderclub.blogspot.com/

[Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The metaphor of leader as a gardener is particularly compelling in this text. "Gardener-style leaders...create a shared vision of …their organization, to listen to others’ interests..., to reflect on ways to create habits and rituals..., and to experiment with innovations that promote continual growth and transformation."

The Gardener’s Creed
I will design my garden to enable all plants to flourish (Vision).
I will provide the water that supports life (Interests).
I will till the soil to nourish healthy roots (Habits).
I will ensure access to ample sunlight (Innovation).

[Henry Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some useful parts of this, but a lot of the book was repetitive with many of the other culture and management books I've read recently. Many of the examples are ones that have been covered extensively in my MBA courses, so I didn't find a ton new here. Overall however the principles in the book seem to be sound, just not as original as I would have wanted.

[Kent Winward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthropology meets the workplace . . . almost like an infomercial on why to hire anthropologists as business consultants when the academic gig doesn't pan out.