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Getting Great People on Board 109

ask him what to do. But over the course of several months, as he repeat-
edly refused to make the decisions for them and kept pushing them to do
it themselves, the culture started to change. And as team members made
their own decisions and the culture began to shift, delivery times on the
projects dramatically improved.
Identifying cultural shifts or priorities is important at all levels of the
organization. At GE in the 1990s, Jack Welch saw that the company was
highly bureaucratic, slow moving, hierarchical, complex, and overly ana-
lytical. He and his leadership team emphasized “speed, simplicity, and self-
confidence” as three cultural characteristics that he wanted to encourage,
and that they saw as critical for GE’s success in the twenty-first century.
When Ken Frazier became the CEO of Merck, he did something simi-
lar. At the time, Merck was in the final stages of integrating its purchase of
Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals, and the combination of the two compa-
nies had created a very large but overly complex and slow-to-decide enter-
prise. To counter this, Frazier set cultural goals focused on the principles of
“prioritize” (focus on what’s important), “align” (collaborate with others to
get these important things done), and “simplify” (find the most direct and
least complex ways of doing them).

Shift the culture
Naturally, it’s not enough to just state some desired cultural shifts. You also
have to take action to move your organization toward them. While there
are powerful symbolic acts you can perform to model the culture (see the
box “Symbolic actions to model cultural behaviors”), the other elements of
managing people we describe in this chapter also constitute deeper ways
to set a culture shift in motion.

Build your leadership team
If you have some clear cultural shifts in mind, then you can look for people
who tend to work in those ways, just as Darren Walker actively recruited
new program managers with more digital savvy and who could work more
effectively in a digital world. If someone on your team does not exemplify
your cultural goals, you may need to let them go, as Welch did with the