The following insights are from an article by our founder and CEO, Maril Gagen MacDonald, that was originally published on the Arthur W. Page "Page Turner" blog. It’s amazing how much management philosophy can change over just the course of a generation. With the exception of a few notable companies, 20 years ago corporate culture was an afterthought. While most executives focused on priorities such as strategy, finances, and operations—not-so-coincidentally, the subjects taught in business school—culture was a secondary concern relegated to HR (if anyone tended to it at all). It languished or grew in unruly ways. Either way, performance suffered and few understood why.My, how things have changed!Today, culture ranks as a top concern for CEOs and other corporate executives, and is increasingly seen as the pendulum on which results swing. To know how much executive mental real estate culture now occupies, look no further than recent covers of Harvard Business Review. Needless to say, it’s top of mind:
According to a recent survey of 2,000 individuals done by the Katzenbach Center at PwC, 80 percent of executives and employees believe their organizations’ cultures need to evolve over the next three to five years. That’s a 29-point increase over the course of just five years.In this era of disruption, the expanding focus on culture owes to many factors, especially:

- Shorter shelf life of strategies
- Imperative to drive innovation
- Need to empower employees closest to the customer
- Complexity of workforce demographics
- Risk that internal issues becomes reputational crises
- Do these principles and steps resonate?
- Are they the appropriate level of depth?
- Are there key concepts missing or a point of view that contradicts your experience?
- What can we add to make these most useful for you and your teams?
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/ Mar 20, 2019