Longtime organizational behavior researcher and business consultant Daniel R. Denison Ph.D., defines workplace culture as:

“Organizational culture is the underlying values, beliefs and principles that serve as a foundation for an organization’s management system, as well as the practices and behaviors that both exemplify and reinforce those basic principles.” 4

A number of authors and researchers have studied the traits of successful businesses. In their book, Built to Last, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras describe companies with consistently strong and adaptive cultures. Called “visionary” because of their ability to sustain success over time, these companies include 3M, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, Merck, Motorola, Nordstrom, Proctor & Gamble, and Sony.

These companies combine strong, well-defined, customer-oriented cultures with excellent products and a passion for staying current with changes in the marketplace. Their conscious decision to do what is necessary to adapt to change has consistently rewarded their balance sheets, their associates and their investors.

It’s a given that many of the firms that regularly appear on the Fortune Magazine “100 Best Companies to Work For” list perform extraordinarily well financially.

In contrast, witness the phenomenon of the dot-coms. Many of these startups were flush with cash before they even had a culture, much less a viable product. Now, their ability to adapt to a fiercely competitive Internet market is being severely tested.

Certainly, some of the dot-coms are building strong, adaptive cultures and may one day challenge Microsoft and the other high-tech gorillas that influence the Internet and computer markets. But most won’t survive, because they were founded on a seemingly saleable idea, greed and ego -- jumping into an undefined market to make a quick buck and then get out -- without a viable business premise.

The Microsofts, Ciscos and the other companies with larger resources and established cultures will buy up many of the dot-coms that have a viable idea or product. More effective competitors will flatten others, as if hit by a speeding truck.

History suggests that a similar fate befell the railroad companies, which failed to adapt to changes in their environment and were knocked aside by the competition. Did you ever wonder why the railroads never made the transition to operate other modern modes of transportation, such as airlines?

When you study the people who ran the railroads, you find that these titans of industry restricted their focus to the railroad businesses. In their opportunistic desire for short-term profits, they failed to place themselves within the larger context of being in the transportation business. As a result, the airlines grew up around them and in short order displaced them as the main choice for long-distance passenger travel.

Though the railroad companies dominated their market, they failed to see where the future of transportation was headed, and they didn’t adapt. Had their cultures been different, they could perhaps have remained dominant in the “transportation” industry. We might have been flying Santa-Fe.