Posts Tagged ‘cultural adaptation’
A Western Pennsylvania Tradition Over the years, I’ve used a simple story about our over-the-top attitude towards the first day of deer season here in Western Pennsylvania to illustrate how culture is formed. If you aren’t familiar with it (the story), it unfolds a little like this. First, I usually separate the group into Western Pennsylvanians and non-Western Pennsylvanians. Then, I ask the second group this simple question: What is the holiday celebrated the first Monday after Thanksgiving? They usually hew and haw about it for a half a minute before someone from the first group blurts...
Date: 31 Jul, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Health Care | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
Assuming that all of us would answer that question differently and that we would most likely say that we are doing OK, but are not yet world class, we need next to consider the gap between our current condition and ideal and develop what I call the target condition. Let’s face it: we won’t become world class overnight. It takes time and a lot of hard work. We shouldn’t just shrug the shoulders and go back to business as usual, as comfortable as that may be. Rather, we need to develop a target condition, one that we develop while aiming at the ideal, world class. Before we do that, however,...
I attended an Alan Jackson concert last week at the Bryce Jordan Center in State College. At the final song, which I think was “Good Time” the producers made an attempt to get the crowd excited. Pictures of JoePa flashed on the screen followed by pictures of the Philadelphia Eagles. The crowd roared for PSU and was silent for the Eagles. The metaphor here is that in order for the same lean tools to stick from organization to organization the correct cultural adaptations must be made.
