Culture Case

1. The Nature Imperative is one of the strategy-making imperatives outlined by Morgan, Levitt and Malik. This imperative deals with the very nature of the company and focuses on aligning the organization's strategy with its structure and culture. The three components of this imperative, as mentioned before, are strategy, structure and culture. The organization's strategy is the plan that will be implemented to achieve the goals that have been specified and the organization's structure refers to the hierarchy of the organization that will be used to achieve these goals. When defining the strategy and structure, it is essential to consider the existing organization culture. This culture is linked with the very identity of the organization and its members and so component is the most difficult to manipulate. Generally, for this imperative to be successful a strategy must be chosen to fit in with the existing culture or significant investments will need to be made to modify the existing one.

2. Culture is the most challenging aspect to the nature imperative and is difficult to change. Cultural change is enacted only on rare occasions when it is absolutely required. For the change to be successful, there are three conditions: (i) The leader should have the same cultural values that he/she is promoting. This 'personal authenticity' from the leader helps the employees accepts the change better. (ii) The employees must be convinced that the existing cultural values are misaligned with the companies goals and unless there is a change in their culture, the organization will fail and (iii) The leaders must invest in programs that will help reshape and realign the employees to the new cultural environment

Mark Hurd's efforts to reshape HP support these conditions. One of the first changes he implemented has to realign the organization back to its Invent tradition by terminating the sale of the HP-branded Apple iPod. Hurd's predecessor, Carly Fiorina had originally made this deal with Apple, to take advantage of HP's distribution network . HP, instead of innovating technology, was basically using the technology from another organization. Hurd believed that ending this deal, he has helping HP to move back towards what it stood for and hence was supported by the employees. He also invested a lot of time and money to implement this change and the others which led to a successful culture shift.

3. Matrix strength can be adjusted to fit a particular strategy or culture. In a weak matrix, the organization groups its workers primarily by function rather than by product/project. This type of matrix is more appropriate in situations where product leadership is the priority as it allows is less response to customers and the market. This matrix helps avoid standby time as the workers from a functional unit generally work on more than one project/product at a time. This allows for cost reductions