Ignore Corporate Media at Your Own Risk
To really grasp the Fifties, you’d want to see the McCarthy hearings, Edward R. Murrow, Uncle Miltie and “Rebel Without a Cause”; you’d want to read “Lolita” and “Catcher in the Rye”; you’d want to hear the music of Elvis, Pat Boone and Chuck Berry.
The media may not define pop culture, but they certainly capture and reflect it. What’s true for pop culture also holds for organizational culture. A decade ago, you could grasp the essence of an organization by sitting in on a few meetings and rummaging through the interoffice memos. Starting in the mail room wasn’t all that crazy an idea.
Today, organizations are becoming far more media-intensive. It’s not just that they’re using computers and telecommunications networks to manage data; they’re packaging information in new ways. They’re making videotapes and creating internal television networks. They’re crafting “expert systems”--computer programs that embody the technical expertise of company old-timers--and using fax or electronic mail as the medium of instantaneous communication. The “old-boy” network has taken on a technological hue. Personal interactions are increasingly mediated, complemented and/or captured by an increasingly elaborate media mesh.
“There is a sense of much greater visibility,” observes Thomas W. Malone, director of MIT’s Center for Coordination Science. “We’re coming to live more and more in a sea of information; in principle, things that may have once been unknowable are now easy to find out.
“Some people have talked about the dawning of the age of electronic communications as being analogous to the dawn of history in the sense that there’s no written record of prehistoric times,” he adds. “As more communication is stored electronically, it makes it easier to analyze, reconstruct, capture and understand the communications of organizations. It’s much more difficult to reach back into ‘prehistoric’ times before there was such culture.”
What are the production values for a presentation? Will a transparency be enough or do people insist on 35-mm. color slides? Must financial projections be number-crunched through Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software? Are in-house training programs built around videocassettes, flip charts or multimedia-flavored personal computers?
These are the questions that managers will increasingly ask themselves to understand how the organization creates its internal models of reality. The answers to these questions reveal aspects of the organization’s culture that may have been previously hidden. These technologies have become cultural artifacts.
Many organizations are beginning to tape and transcribe meetings. In the few years, computer voice/text editors will index those sessions according to the desired key word. Want to know who said what at the meeting about “productivity”? Just ask the workstation. Some Silicon Valley companies and giant consumer goods firms now use camcorders to record sales presentations and technical reviews. These tapes don’t just preserve the data; they preserve the organization’s style. These technologies are becoming a new storehouse for the organization’s values, not just its information.
“There are a lot of people who are beginning to worry about this,” says Jeff Sturchio, the corporate archivist for Merck, the pharmaceutical firm. “Cultures are based very much on interpersonal relations, but as organizations get larger, in order to manage the organizations, they have to rely on some of the new media because there’s no other way to get the message out.”
In fact, says Sturchio, Merck currently produces and distributes a weekly three-minute news video for in-house consumption. The company is also putting together a multimedia presentation for its centennial next year. “That’s the kind of mirror of Merck culture that we will save,” Sturchio notes. By contrast, “the phenomenon of the electronic lab notebook troubles me because I’m not certain how to deal with it.”
But Sturchio freely acknowledges that the growth of these new media is transforming his job. He says it’s too early for him to comment on how these new media are transforming Merck’s culture.
“It’s media as the life of the mind of the organization,” asserts Mark Stefik, a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center who designs knowledge management systems. “Let me give you an example. If you experience a presentation that’s very persuasive, you might want to capture as much of it as you could. ‘I really need that set of slides or that chart or that figure that summarized a trend.’ When people find these compact cultural memes, they seize on them.”
New media technologies are where these new memes--compelling ideas--are developed and transmitted. “The technological content of corporate life is rising,” Stefik says. “We’ll have computer data, electronic blackboard inputs, audio recordings of meetings, etc.; multimedia technology will enable us to tie these things and retrieve them.”
This isn’t an issue for the sociologists and anthropologists; it’s an issue that will determine how organizations see and manage themselves in an increasingly competitive environment.
Twenty years ago, you couldn’t ignore the memo. Ten years ago, you couldn’t ignore the phone. Today, you can’t ignore the computer network and voice mail. Tomorrow’s managers shouldn’t be surprised if they spend as much time managing media as they do managing people. They will be immersed in a far denser, far richer, far more comprehensive regime of technologies than they are today. To understand the culture of the organization, they will have to be able to interpret its media. If they want to shape the values and direction of their organizations, they must learn how to manipulate those media.
“These technologies,” says MIT’s Malone, “are going to change the organizational balance of power in ways that we can’t yet anticipate.”