More on the team

"Helping companies capitalize on who they are and what they can do best is truly rewarding."

Some business leaders are frustrated by their organization’s culture because it is viewed as a barrier to their plans. But others – including IBM – view culture as a powerful asset that can propel them toward success. A culture's effect on results, productivity and employee morale is profound, and is a factor that, if neglected, can doom even the most carefully crafted business strategy.

One way that corporate culture can negatively affect an organization is the tendency among almost all companies to build complexity into their businesses. Often, these complexities are needless – in other words, they hinder productivity and add unnecessary costs and distractions to the work environment. Encouraging a functional and motivated workforce requires not only sensitivity to these universal challenges, but also to new ways of thinking about and addressing them.

At IBM's Almaden Research Laboratory, Sara Moulton Reger is working in partnership with IBM Global Business Services, focusing her expertise on developing innovative approaches toward improving corporate culture integration and eliminating needless complexity for IBM Global Business Services clients. Sara's tenure with IBM began in 1995 with IBM Global Business Services, where she built and led several consulting practices that provided change management, culture transformation, governance and leadership consulting. In 2002, Sara played a leading role in managing organizational change and cultural integration for IBM’s acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting – a $3.5B acquisition that required IBM to globally integrate 30,000 new partners and employees with an existing business unit that also contained 30,000 executives and employees. During this effort, the Change and Culture team developed a new approach to the cultural challenges they faced, and following the integration Sara then moved into Almaden Research to use knowledge she had gained from those experiences to develop the IBM Business Practices Alignment methodology – also known as Tangible Culture.

Corporate culture is especially challenging when a merger, acquisition, business alliance, major transformation or major restructuring is underway. Tangible Culture offers businesses new ways to deal with the old problem of "culture clash" and capitalize on a company's prime asset – its people. "The whole organizational/people arena is the most fascinating area of business to me," says Sara. "First, we don't know as much about it as other areas – and it is ever changing, yet holding true to many patterns. Also, I really believe that the people realm is the one remaining area of lasting competitive advantage: no one can truly replicate your people and how you do things. Helping companies capitalize on who they are and what they can do best is truly rewarding.

"Many people talk about culture clash, yet there is little out there to tell business leaders what to do when they experience it. And it shows up any time business objectives require people to work together with people they haven’t worked with before – like in mergers, partnerships and major reorganizations. Through our own experiences, we discovered the source of culture clash – something we call Right vs. Right – and we now have specific techniques to help address it – and even prevent it."

Sara notes that despite her efforts in this arena, finding a universal solution to all culture challenges is not likely to happen any time soon. "We simply have not cracked the nut when it comes to business culture. We have about 30 years of business research and experience, and much more academic background behind that – yet the problems persist according to study after study and the stories we hear. Doing what we've done historically is only going to be successful about 50 percent of the time if the patterns hold. In what other business area can companies get away with that kind of track record? We simply must come up with ways to address the issues or allow this area to continue to be the most common and most troublesome issue we haven't faced yet. I'm just not willing to concede on that. We are bringing some new approaches to the table with Business Practices Alignment – and we hope to continue learning and developing more."

In addressing the issue of needless complexity, Sara's research, along with colleague David Singer, has focused on three types: diffused, chosen and layered complexity. Diffused complexity tends to arise when a process that has been performed by specialists is pushed out to a broader group of workers, creating unnecessary complications for the non-specialist group, along with greater total costs and potential for missed opportunities for the organization. Chosen complexity occurs when a company seems to prefer complex solutions over simpler ones, often over-engineering answers to the point that their cost to perform greatly exceeds their benefit to the organization. And layered complexity targets middle level managers who get bogged down in red tape and paperwork – requirements from multiple processes – to the detriment of their customer duties and leadership functions.

Sara hopes her work with Almaden Research will enable IBM to help companies mired in needless complexity to break out of their habit of spending money on things for which the organization does not get a good return. "We have put titles and reasons on the sources of needless complexity – things that are frustrating to business people. Before these definitions, they were simply lumped together and thus harder to deal with. Now that we can identify the types of needless complexity, it's easier to identify where they came from – and more importantly, how to fix them and stop them from occurring in the first place."