The idea of organizational DNA centers on the proposition that all organizations are guided by deep, underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ways of working that their members faithfully replicate and pass on to other generations. Often, this organizational DNA reflects the original founders' predilections, and the business and environmental challenges that the organization faced early on in its history. Over time, these core instincts become deeply embedded, guiding just about everything that goes on – including the organization's response to new challenges.
In addition, we have developed a clear and somewhat radical view on just where this organizational DNA resides. Rather than sitting mainly in organizational structures or processes, it actually resides within the employees themselves and their way of looking at the world. The nature of the business that an organization engages in determines the kind of people they need to recruit and the organizational culture required. Over many years, members of the organization undergo a process not too different from natural selection. Only certain types of individuals are attracted to an organization in the first place. They lay the foundation for the culture and attract similar sorts of people to it – reinforced by the natural inclination to recruit in one's image. Those who do not fit the culture, but nevertheless make it past these filters, frequently end up being “tissue rejected” unless they adapt. One way or another, the organization's processes, structure and decision-making instincts come to mirror the predilections of its dominant core of people. Efforts at change that go with the grain of the DNA can typically work, but anything that requires a significant alteration of people's underlying instincts is hard going, to put it mildly. Organizational DNA is a combination of the underlying psychological instincts of a company's people as well as the systems, processes, and ways of doing things that those people have developed and to which others joining the system are acculturated over time.
The genesis to thinking about this book was the question: If this can happen for organizations, could not the same process also be true for nations? As we shall see, most major global cultures have actually arisen from very small founding groups of people who originally migrated into that part of the world. Once there, the early migrants encountered very different environmental challenges and created societies focused on solving different problems. These factors helped shape different psychological instincts that eventually came to represent the cultural norms for that society. Those who did not conform either self-selected out through migration or did not succeed in the culture. In organizational terms, this is akin to somebody hitting a glass ceiling at a relatively low level because they did not fit. I would argue that the same processes that led to the rise of organizational DNA have, albeit at very different time scales, operated to shape national cultures. By DNA, we are referring predominantly to the fundamental psychological building blocks that eventually formed the cultural norms of different societies. In Richard Dawkins' terms, memes rather than genes.
The application of this type of DNA analysis to eight of the world's significant cultures raises some obvious questions. The first is that one cannot just aggregate into one entity the myriad subgroups, states, and nations that exist in many of these regions. In fact, there is considerable evidence that just as nation states within broad regions have distinctive psychological and cultural attributes, so do regions or even individual cities. Research shows that cities develop clear characteristics over time through the processes of acculturation and self-selection. However, a lot depends on your level of analysis. At one level, France and Germany are very different, as is the northern Indian state of Punjab from, let's say, Kerala in the south. However, when you really start looking at all four together, you quickly realize that the two European countries share a lot in common and are different from the two Indian states.
This is exactly what the World Values Survey found when data collected across almost 100 countries was analysed. Overall, nine distinct regional clusters were revealed – the eight above minus Australia, plus Europe split into Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox (Russia/Eastern Europe) areas.11 The Globe survey of 62 countries also found broadly similar clusters.12 Geography and, to a lesser extent, religion define these clusters. Not a single country in the world sits on its own or in a cluster that is radically different from where it is geographically located or where most of its people come from. At one level, this is not surprising; but at another level, these findings point to a deeper truth. If a country's culture is purely dependent upon the vagaries of its unique history, specific rulers, or the institutions that people there created in isolation from their environment, one might not expect such tight geographical clusters to arise. This pattern can only arise if ecology, climate, and the movement of ideas and people from one place to another are the fundamental drivers of cultural DNA. The exceptions to this power of locality simply prove the rule. For example, the Anglo-Saxon countries cluster together. Australia and New Zealand are outliers from others in their broader region. If you want to understand the culture of these countries, you are much better off looking at the UK – where the bulk of the people originated – than to neighboring Papua New Guinea or Indonesia.
Some of the analysis below will, despite the above point, cover differences within the regions, as in the case of the Eurozone countries that have succumbed or not to the currency crisis discussed earlier. These differences fit neatly into the European clusters defined by the WVS. In many of the regions, there are often one or two significant cultural divisions – for example, in India between the north and the south or in the United States between the northern and southern states. In all these cases, I will argue there are powerful migratory or ecological reasons for the existence of these differences that lie deep in the past when the relevant regions were being settled.
A Word About the Evidence
Three broad sources of evidence are used to build the case for what constitutes the DNA of different cultures: primary data, secondary sources of information, and explanatory research.
Most of the primary data centers around the evidence accumulated over 25 years of working as CEO for the psychological consultancy YSC, which has 20 offices globally covering all the regions analyzed in the book. Our core work involves getting under the skin of both people and organizational culture – which we have been doing globally across the world for decades. As a consequence, our different offices have developed finely tuned instincts for what really makes people and organizations tick in different parts of the world. We have also systematically assessed 30,000 people working in a range of organizations across the world, which gives us a deep source of data and information to draw upon when forming hypotheses about cultural differences. In addition, a core feature of the data that the conclusions presented are based upon is a painstaking analysis of over 1,700 in-depth reports, approximately 200 from each region, which contain the strengths and development themes identified for executives in each culture. This gives us sound insights into the positive qualities, as well as issues, that leaders from each culture need to be mindful of as they negotiate the ecology of the fast-changing global business environment.
I have also accessed the considerable research conducted on cultural differences over the past few decades, employing a variety of methodologies such as value surveys, behavioral experiments, and personality instruments. Following the seminal work by Geert Hofstede and his colleagues, there have been several detailed and extremely comprehensive surveys of values across the world's key cultures.13 The Globe study of 62 countries involving over 900 organizations, mentioned earlier, is one of the most important. The World Values Survey, mentioned earlier, is also an important source of data. The work of Michael Minkov, which extends the Hofstede constructs,14 and Shalom Schwartz are also accessed.15
However, values are only one part of the story. Such inquiry can only touch the surface of differences in how people think. I have also drawn substantially on behavioral experiments and observations conducted by researchers across different cultures. Surprisingly, for a psychologist, I have been much less persuaded by evidence using standard personality instruments, as these frequently produce nonsensical results when it
R. Inglehart and C. Weizel,
Robert J. House, Paul J. Hanges, Mansour Javidan, Peter W. Dorfman, and Vipin Gupta,
G. Hofstede, G. J. Hofstede, and M. Minkov,
Michael Minkov,
S. H. Schwartz, and W. Bilsky, “Toward a Theory of the Universal Content and Structure of Values,”
