Overview
Discussion: The goal of this discussion is to explore the interaction between leadership and culture in an organization
Edgar Schein is renowned as the father of organizational cultural studies. Peter Schein is a Silicon Valley innovator with 30 years of business experience at large and small technology companies, including Apple, SGI, and Sun Microsystems in corporate development and M&A. Together they have written and lectured extensively on the topic of organizational culture and leadership.
The original book, Organizational Culture and Leadership, published in 2016, was divided into four sections.
- Defining the Structure of Culture
- What leaders need to know about macro cultures
- Culture and leadership through stages of organizational growth
- Assessing Culture and Leading Planned Change
Access the table of contents of the original bookLinks to an external site.. Scan through the topics for each chapter and make note of a few that may interest you. Then, go to the Summary of Edgar H. Schein & Peter Schein's Organizational Culture and Leadership and review the excerpts and highlights to find a topic that interests you. For our discussion, select one or more of the highlights and speak to how they impact leadership and culture in your organization, or how they would impact your organization if adopted.
Assignment: The goal of this assignment is for you to analyze the impact of strategic choices on innovation and the ongoing health of an organization.
Read the original 2019 case, Netflix - A Creative Approach to Culture and Agility (located in your Harvard Coursepack) as well as the updated supplement, Netflix: A Creative Approach to Culture and Agility (B), (also located in your Harvard Courespack).
Using the information in the cases as well as the information from the other Netflix readings for this week, answer the following questions in a 3-page paper:
- What is most impressive about the Netflix story?
- What is it about the culture at Netflix that enabled it to grow and innovate?
- How do culture and strategy align to support each other at Netflix?
- What lessons did Netflix learn from the failure of Blockbuster?
- What are the key enablers that allowed Netflix to be so successful?
- What do you see as the biggest challenges to Netflix going forward?