Keep your culture flexible
As a company built almost entirely on acquisitions, Shire’s
culture has more potential outside influences than a lot of companies, so Emmens and his management team have a full-time
job in deciding how they want to merge cultures with each
acquired company.
When introducing new aspects to your culture, Emmens says
it’s imperative to take a best-practices approach. It can be
counterproductive to simply throw the new company into a
prestamped mold. You could overlook a new perspective or a
new procedure that could lead to more efficiency.
As your company grows and develops more levels, it takes
more and more work to ensure that you can incorporate new
elements into your culture. Often, growing companies value a
stable organization above new ideas, and that can lead to culture stagnation.
Emmens says stability is good but not if it leads to stagnation.
He tries to combat that at Shire by keeping many acquired
companies under one business umbrella with regard to
finances and communication but giving each a high degree of
autonomy when it comes to operations. With that set-up,
Shire’s management is exposed to best practices that can be
implemented across the organization while still allowing each
business unit to operate in the way that made it an attractive
acquisition candidate in the first place.
“There is really no Shire way,” he says. “Culture is a constantly evolving thing. One of our recent acquisitions had a culture that was totally different from Shire, and we left it in
place. That flexibility gives us a competitive advantage. We
have the ability to develop specialized cultures, and I think
businesses need to do that more often.”
Don’t fall into the comfort zone of valuing the status quo
above all else. Emmens says the value of your organization lies
not in steadiness of your culture but in your employees’ ability
to create. He says your culture should never get in the way of
innovation and creativity.
“As your organization grows, you have a tendency to develop
these kinds of secret cultures where you have a slogan on the
wall, but everybody has a different idea of what it means,”
Emmens says. “That can be destructive.
“Size and creativity are often at odds with each other. When
you are a large organization, it often gives you comfort to know
how organized you are. But all value is ultimately created by
the people in your company, by their creative acts, and I think
creativity is squelched in organizations that have a lot of levels
and rules.
“You’re always trying to have a balancing act of the best of
both worlds, and one way to do that is through network of
smaller business units that are allowed to function as a more
nimble, creative unit.”