Corporate cultures, culturing corporates, By Uddin Ifeanyi
Of the 30 years in which I worked in the private sector in Nigeria, the nonstop debates around culture tickled me the most. Organisations took the matter seriously. There was a clear sense amongst most management teams and their key staff that the way an organisation was set up would impact its profitability. For this reason, managements organised quadrennial culture refresh events and annual management retreats, where interminably long sessions debated how the interaction between front office personnel and the public impacted repeat sales. How back-office functions were central to this process. And why, because the cosier jobs were at the head office, senior positions migrated, and sinecures were created there – and the tail continued furiously to wag the dog.
What to do with the resulting lengthy processes, endless box-ticking, and form filling (back-office requirements) that had no bearing on front office personnel’s understanding of consumers’ needs? Were there customer relationship management (CRM) applications that could improve both the intensive and extensive marginal productivity of the front office? And which enterprise resource planning (ERP) software could work similar wonders in the back office? Within the context of the acknowledgement of the fact that culture would have strategy for breakfast all the time, these were hours well spent. Assuredly, you could not build a strategy around shortened time-to-market business responses on a culture that favoured hierarchies and sustaining tenured senior executives, and the order built around these.
Even so, something was always askew in the conversations about culture that I was privileged to have been privy to. Nearly always, a spectre haunted the breakout sessions where these conversations took place. The one question that was rarely asked, nor followed through with, was what the conventions were around which current corporate cultural practices were built. Symptoms were easy to denounce, as most religious communities in medieval Europe did to women accused of witchcraft. The pathology? As with evidence in those medieval trials by ordeal, this was rarely ever invoked.
My epiphany came some twenty years ago. On a whim ignited by Fabien Alain Barthez’s capricious goalkeeping antics, I decided to keep a beard like his. The industry’s response was far quicker than it was decisive. My bearded look was not “Corporate”! That adjective, as open to manifold interpretation as ever, resolved every dispute on culture in the workplace. From bankers’ insistence (in a tropic environment) that a “true banker” (whatever this means) must wear starched white shirt fronts (then you had to wear vests in order that droplets of perspiration did not trap starch in your skin), and impeccably tailored suits, to lawyers’ demanding that the wig is essential to advocacy in court.
It did not matter that in the 1970s, (with its Afro hairs, bell-bottomed trousers, platform-heeled shoes, etc.) bearded bankers were fashionable. No. The custodians of culture in Nigeria’s private sector do not understand it as an evolving concept. Nor that because culture changes – like it or not it will change – the challenge for businesses is to predict the next points of cultural inflection, in order to be at the defining edge of whatever businesses they are in. This was what Apple did in 1984 when the graphical user interfaces on the Mac laptop changed the face of computing forever – it repeated the feat again with the iPhone a few years after.
It was, therefore, interesting, following the covid-19 lockdowns to see most adult males return to work with full faces of hair, and to watch the custodians of culture roll over and play dead. I was told that “Humanity had survived a threat too existential for hirsute adornments to matter anymore”. The point is that facial hair in the workplace (barring hospitals, food kitchens, and research establishments where loose hair pose questions of a different magnitude) never mattered – whether in the debate over how front office personnel attend to customers, how the decisions made by back-office staff facilitate work in the front office, or in the current discussions about whether and how artificial intelligence (AI) agents will blur the line between traditional ERP and CRM capabilities.
Yet, the local private sector’s weltanschauung keeps good company. To dismiss a concept, process, event, thing, or even person because it is not consistent with traditional practices is a very Nigerian way of interacting with everything. Although the familiar might reassure, by sparing us the expense of having to think rigorously (especially from first principles) about every new experience, it is a poor prescription for progress.
What then to make of the consensus that culture eats strategy for breakfast all the time? A corporate culture whose focal points and the conventions that arise on the back of these are ossified, is dead. It may remind its advocates of a time when, thus situated, our colonial overlords conducted themselves after this fashion. But that is about all the value it has – nostalgia. For example, as the world warms, and Africa does so faster than most, we would be forced to confront the circular logic of building windowless houses, because we need air-conditioning to keep our besuited workforce cool.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.