It is striking to see how many chief executives see their most important responsibility as being the leader of the company’s culture. According to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, “Culture is your company’s number one asset.” Her counterpart at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has said, “Everything I do is a reinforcement or not of what we want to have happen culturally.” In another typical remark from the C-suite, Starbucks Corporation CEO Howard Schultz has written that “so much of what Starbucks achieved was because of (its employees) and the culture they fostered.” Researchers such as former Harvard Business School professors John Kotter and James Heskett have also found consistent correlation between robust, engaged cultures and high-performance business results (as described in their book, Corporate Culture and Performance (Free Press, 1992)). But most business leaders don’t need that evidence; they’ve seen plenty of correlation in their own workplace every day.
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