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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

I am just curious, what must happen to change pathological culture to a better one. New leader on top will fight against entrenched middle level managers backed by buddies of these in upper layers. Anybody bellow will be put in uncomfortable position and leave sooner or later. I would say, pathological culture is here to stay and eventually can be changed only by replacing large chunk of organization.

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It's the same general pattern that whether the change is good or bad: a new leader comes in who starts changing the organizational structure and communication pathways, and who removes/replaces individuals not on board with the new direction. It's just that most of the time the net result is negative.

Fixing problems requires knowing what is actually wrong with the organization. If the problem is that your organization is overcome with bureaucracy, then the solution start with enabling a subdivision sufficient autonomy to pursue objectives without being disrupted by meddlers and busy-bodies.

If you adopt this article's three-category system (or any system with a finite number of ordered categories), then I think in the long run the number of positive and negative changes have to converge toward equality.

If we hear more stories of negative changes, then maybe the negative ones are more memorable, or people are more likely to comment on them.

Look at what Satya did - he directed a broad effort at the entire organization (a book, etc), and simultaneously pushed the ELT to get in line, firing them one by one when they or their directs didn't comply. They're all in line now, as are their directs.

The broader culture change takes more time, but the ship is definitely moving.

I guess its about creating incentives of one form of behavior over the other. If it pays off to hide information and knowledge rather than sharing it then that's what you get as predominant culture by means of selection (Now guess which strategy is more likely to get you a career in the average setting)

That's what organisational transformations are for

Big company cultures seems to converge over time to a bureaucratic style so to me it seems like organisational transformations mostly just moves it in the conventional direction.

For example, Google wanted to transforms its organisation to be more friendly to business contracts. Seems like a good idea, but said transformation is destroying the generative culture and makes it more bureaucratic like Oracle or Microsoft.

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