An architecture of enterprise-culture

[A collection of notes that I made somewhen around May 2010 that I don’t seem to have published before, and seem to be relevant now as I explore my own business-model. (Not an April-Fool joke, by the way. 🙂 ) ]

A culture [enterprise-culture] is a set of prioritised values and goals – usually ill-expressed, conflicting, a muddled-mixtures of tacit and explicit. (Can be revealed by POSIWID – ‘the purpose of the system is what it does’.)

An enterprise begins with a vision.

A vision is a single emotive idea (a ‘parti‘, in architectural terms).

Values are used to identify what is and is not aligned to the vision.

The vision is the heart of a story; the enterprise is that story.

The organisation does not define the story – the enterprise does.

The organisation can choose which story to serve, and its role in serving that story.

The values of the enterprise provide a means to identify [and measure] alignment to the story.

The organisation can change its choice of enterprise to serve; yet doing so may (will) disrupt the values and prioritisation of values on which the organisation at present depends.

The story is the journey itself – there is no ‘final destination. (If there is a goal, the story will end, and likewise the reason for the organisation’s existence; so if there is a goal, plan from the start as to what will happen when the story ends.)

The structures and strictures of the organisation are a means to serve the story.

If you change the choice of story, you’re asking every person in the organisation whether they want to be [remain] in the organisation – to reconsider their ‘reason to be’, in relation to the enterprise and organisation. Not a trivial change!

Every person is ‘in’ multiple enterprises – prioritises which story (or stories) they serve.

To be successful, an organisation provides a clear prioritisation of stories.

The enterprise determines quality – what quality is. The vision is the ultimate anchor of quality (as per ISO-9000).

In the market-model, markets are:

• transactions (physical)
• conversations (virtual)
• relationships (relational)
• purposeful (aspirational)

Markets are all of these things, all together. (There’s a crosslink to here to effectiveness: for example “cheap, easy, gets all the shopping done in one go” etc.)

Market-sequence or market-cycle:

• reputation (also crosslink to vision); trust and respect (relational dimension)
• brand is ‘pre-packed reputation’
• attention and conversation (shift to virtual dimension)
• is often the preferred starting-point in the cycle (hence advertising, pre-brand)
• transaction (physical dimension), profit as ‘extracted value’
• transaction-only is (overly-simplistic) machine-model of the market
• needs full completions – customer, market, shared-enterprise – to complete the cycle and (re)affirm reputation

Hence ‘cost’, ‘profit’ etc are multi-layered – determined by the values of the enterprise.

[A possibly-useful item from the archives – hope it’s of some value to someone, anyways.]