Business cultures are notoriously hard to change. If it's a good culture, it's likely to stay good, unless there is some external pressure like a shrinking market or the company habitually misses profit or sales targets. If the culture is bad, expect it to stay bad without a significant change in leadership. The culture starts at the top and the management of a crappy workplace usually needs only a mirror to find the responsible party. It's become popular to write corporate mission statements and values these days. The test of a strong business culture is whether the words on those pages actually have any meaning and whether people are actually held accountable for them. Early at Scient, I sat around a table with ten other people trying to agree on the values statement. Our CEO said "I think we ought to have seven values, because I don't think I can remember any more." I replied "I don't think the Scient values ought to be dictated by how many our CEO can remember." To his everlasting credit, he thought that was hilarious and we agreed to come up with a set of values that was meaningful and important to the organization. I think we did end up with seven, but they defined how we interacted with each other and our clients and vendors, creating the strongest organizational culture I have ever worked in.
