embraced each other. The war may have devastated everything
around them, but NCR's hard driving, sales-oriented culture was
still intact.

This story may sound unbelievable, but there are hundreds
like it at NCR and every other company. Together they make up
the myths and legends of American business. What do they mean?
To us these stories mean that businesses are human institutions,
not plush buildings, bottom lines, strategic analysis, or five-year
plans. NCR was never just a factory to the three men who dug it
out of the rubble. Nor was it to others like them. Rather it was a
living organization. The company's real existence lay in the hearts
and minds of its employees. NCR was, and still is, a corporate cul-
ture, a cohesion of values, myths, heroes, and symbols that has
come to mean a great deal to the people who work there.

Culture, as Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines it, is
"the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought,
speech, action, and artifacts and depends on man's capacity for
learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations."
Marvin Bower, for years managing director of McKinsey & Com-
pany and author of The Will to Manage, offered a more informal
definition -- he described the informal cultural elements of a busi-
ness as "the way we do things around here."

Every business -- in fact every organization -- has a culture.
Sometimes it is fragmented and difficult to read from the outside --
some people are loyal to their bosses, others are loyal to the union,
still others care only about their colleagues who work in the sales
territories of the Northeast. If you ask employees why they work,
they will answer "because we need the money." On the other
hand, sometimes the culture of an organization is very strong and
cohesive; everyone knows the goals of the corporation, and they
are working for them. Whether weak or strong, culture has a pow-
erful influence throughout an organization; it affects practically
everything -- from who gets promoted and what decisions are
made, to how employees dress and what sports they play. Because
of this impact, we think that culture also has a major effect on the
success of the business.

Today, everyone seems to complain about the decline in Amer-
ican productivity. The examples of industries in trouble are
numerous and depressing. Books proclaim that Japanese manage-
ment practices are the solution to America's industrial malaise.

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