In IGNITE CULTURE, Margaret Graziano, founder and CEO of the management consultancy company KeenAlignment, outlines the various strategies she uses to change companies’ culture. She argues that, contrary to the quick fixes offered by most consultants, changing a company’s culture typically requires long-term involvement that may take 18 to 36 months. KeenAlignment’s mission statement is “Forever liberate the human spirit at work.” The book is divided into three sections, titled “The Leader,” “The Leadership Team,” and “The Organization.”
“The inner work on self is what leaders need most,” writes Graziano. “If they learn to address their own internal issues, they can learn the authentic human skills needed to lead others and create healthy, high-performance organizational cultures.” IGNITE CULTURE provides a comprehensive outline of how to accomplish this. Graziano and her team aim to inculcate the following features in faltering companies: trust, alignment, accountability, “and the interconnectivity and momentum created by “Liberating Structures”—i.e., small shifts in the way employees meet, plan, make decisions, and interact with one another. Her process starts with situational and personal awareness, deep alignment (with company’s goals and competencies), developing a compelling vision for the future, and ends with C-suite and staff learning to communicate effectively. However a lot of this is couched in corporate-speak—e.g., “Entrenched and habituated counterproductive behaviors, systemic distrust, and entanglement between people are departments cause expensive reoccurring and systemic problems.”
There are a few other red flags. Graziano quotes from a wide range of sources, including the Harvard Business Review and Deepak Chopra. So, much of what she draws on seems calculated to persuade rather than to understand. She has many stories of how KeenAlignment’s approach has helped improve companies’ morale and profits, but not one instance of failure (even where this might have been due to the company’s leadership not following her advice). This is an improbable success rate. The end of every chapter also has a “brain hack”—simple techniques that supposedly change one’s outlook and ability. These are included to seem scientific, but this is mere pop science—people are not so easily changed. Graziano claims that diversity increases productivity, citing a discredited McKinsey survey, and, citing no study at all, that organizational transformation can be achieved once a critical mass of 10 percent of employees commits to it.
While there are many useful guidelines for executives in IGNITE CULTURE, most of them are non-specific meaning that, even if author Margaret Graziano’s methods work, a company can only apply them by commissioning KeenAlignment.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader