Approaches to Culture Management
In chapter 4 we will discuss more complex approaches to culture management. These are what Anne Khademian recalls as the ‘to-be-avoided’ approaches. This is the case of the practices implemented in the South African banking regulators and, especially, the Police Force. Apartheid created a huge divide between races and cultures in South Africa. The cultural management programs initiated after the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa aimed at bridging this gap and to integrate black people into structures of society that they had never been part before. Unfortunately, these approaches turned out to be highly complex and did not achieve the end results there were intended to achieve. This experience could be very useful to cultural management students who are in their first steps of studies or even new readers of the field.
Customer Satisfaction Management Theory
Recently, one of the daily newspapers published an interview with a career executive of the General Services Administration. The topic was about public management. During the interview the career executive showed his amazing on how a new approach to culture management led him to increase his annual revenues by 20%. The secret was that during the year he implemented a more customer-satisfaction focused philosophy. In order to achieve customer satisfaction the organization improved its quality of service. By doing thus it formed a positive customer perception of the organization which led to customer satisfaction.
In management theory, customer satisfaction is one of the premises a company should focus if it wants to increase its profits. What the executive recalled as ‘strange’ and amazing was that public cultural management, until lately, was not even considered to be part of conducting business from many companies. As Vice-president Al Gore once declared, the reinventing of government is mostly about cultural change within governmental agencies. This would ultimately result in….. (continues as you have it)
Key Points in the Study of Cultural Management
Anne Khademian concludes her work by summarizing the leadership lesson gained from the three cases mentioned in the book. According to the author there are three main points that every student of culture management should consider. Their implementation may seem to be hard and many managers may refrain to implement them but it is only through them, Khademian pretends, that real change could be achieved. In order to change significantly the organizational culture a manager has to change the link between the company and internal-external regulations. According to Khademian, an important change is that of the relations with the main constituent group of a company; its labor force and the ‘traditional’ way the work process have been pursued.