Every business culture, like every human personality, is unique. Even so, it’s possible to identify four broad categories that can help us to understand the culture of our own business, create a vision of where we want to be, and take steps to get there:
- Business Excellence
- Command and Control
- Cosy
- Chaotic
These four types of culture differ in two key dimensions: the level of focus on performance and the degree of engagement:
- Business Excellence cultures offer the best prospects for sustainable high performance and benefits for all stakeholders in the context of 21st-century conditions, opportunities and threats.The aim is sustainable long-term success, achieved by a relentless commitment to quality, continuous improvement and colleague engagement. Business Excellence cultures focus on creating more of what customers value and systematically looking for ways to enhance quality and productivity by identifying and removing the causes of errors, waste and inefficiency. This creates the potential for an upward spiral of sustained and continuously improving high performance, and the agility to adapt to changing markets.
- Command and Control cultures have a heavy emphasis on cost and performance management, and are usually focused on short-term financial results rather than on building long-term capacity, customer loyalty or employee commitment. Few Command and Control cultures have optimised quality, customer experience, employee engagement or financial performance, and they are less agile than Excellence cultures.
- Cosy organisations tend to enjoy guaranteed business and lack focus, rigour and discipline in their approach to management and improvement. As a result, their performance is mediocre. In a Cosy culture, people may work in their own way, at their own pace, with a belief that things will always be like this – an attitude that can all too easily lead to overconfidence and complacency.
- Chaotic organisations are characterised by a sense of inconsistency, disorganisation, regular conflict, and minimal concern with how staff and customers experience the business. In a Chaotic culture, people are reacting to a constant stream of problems and may make snap decisions with little apparent logic, let alone a connection to an underlying strategy or plan.
Business Excellence cultures focus on creating more of what customers value and systematically looking for ways to enhance quality and productivity by identifying and removing the causes of errors, waste and inefficiency
Choose your culture wisely
The management consultant and author Peter Drucker wrote that ‘the only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance’. In other words, it’s all too easy to drift into a culture that restricts the level of performance you can achieve.
Chaotic and Cosy cultures can easily become self-limiting, dysfunctional and change-resistant, problems that can then become deep-rooted and long-lasting.
Cultures built on 20th-century Command and Control thinking and practice will struggle in today’s fast-changing, competitive markets. And struggle to change.
Business Excellence, in contrast, offers a way of thinking, and a set of concepts, tools and techniques, that is better suited to the needs of businesses in the dynamic markets of the mid-21st century.
So, what are your ambitions for your career and business?
This is an excerpt taken from Chapter One of the book ‘Toward Excellence’, which was published in September 2025.
