Bible MBASample

Culture Doesn't Just Happen 

You shall whet and sharpen them so as to make them penetrate, and teach and impress them diligently upon the [minds and] hearts of your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.  Deuteronomy 6:7 AMPC

Establishing culture requires more than just describing it in company documents and teaching it to staff as part of the on-boarding process. For culture to really catch on and take root, it requires more deliberate, and diligent communication of what the company is about. 

As Paul, the Apostle wrote to the Galatians, “I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you, ..." (Galatians 4:19 KJV)

Anyone who has tried to change themselves and will be honest enough to admit their own failures will realize that changing people is not a walk in the park. Yet, this is exactly the aim in developing corporate culture: you want to change people. 

Culture building is not merely a means to get people to effectively crank out results that grow the bottom line: taking that approach means you are simply using your people. For a Christian businessperson, the real goal behind corporate culture is to ultimately change people. 

Whether you like it or not, continuously immersing yourself and other people in a way of doing things for a reasonable length of time will not merely impact results, it will also transform everyone, for good or for evil. A culture that promotes cut-throat competition, for instance, can make people turn vicious and heartless. 

Every once in a while, a huge corporate scandal blows open to reveal how a corporation has been lying to regulators and shareholders alike. Typically, this happens when corporate culture values results above everything else. Once a leader signals that all that matters is results, a culture of lying starts to take root, and “a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” (Galatians 5:9 NKJV)

What sort of culture are you actively or passively building today? Ponder this.