In the year 1532, Niccolo Machiavelli penned, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
More than 450 years later, our organization has found that this is still true.
Clinical Research Management Inc. has spent the last five years undergoing an organizational culture change and the experience has tested every facet of our organization.
As a company, we’ve gone where most people don’t want to go and plummeted into multiple depths of despair as we realized the chasm that existed between where we were and where we wanted to be.
When we understood the enormous amount of heartache, discipline, effort and energy that would be involved in turning the culture around, we came close to giving up. The entire mission seemed like a daunting task, but hope, determination and optimism have a funny way of turning daunting tasks into challenging opportunities.
So with optimism and intense determination, we moved forward with our mission to change our culture. Here’s how we did it:
Reality check
You can’t travel to a destination if you don’t know your current location. Understanding our current location was critical and we had to take a good look at ourselves. To do this, we solicited input and collected data from every level of our organization. We candidly asked our employees and customers about our culture. We also engaged outside consultants to speak with staff and customers about our culture. This information took approximately one year to collect and understand.
Create the future vision
During the same time frame, we took our management staff off-site for a few days and concentrated on where we wanted our culture to be in five years. We envisioned that a media article had been released about our company five years in the future. Our job was to fill in the contents of that article. We created a positive, exciting media article that we could all be proud of and translated the essence of the media article into a vision for our desired culture.
How big is the chasm?
We began to examine the gaps between our current and our desired culture. We recognized that there were great strengths within our current culture that we could leverage. These strengths became the solid foundation that we used to bridge the chasm as we built a five-year plan to move us from one culture to another.
Execute the plan
We understood that executing our plan would be a critical phase of our culture change process. We sought assistance from every level of the organization and developed several tactics to help drive toward the new vision. We integrated aspects of the new culture throughout every facet of the company’s activities.
Clinical Research Management is now entering the third year of our five-year plan and we’ll admit that changing our organizational culture is clearly the most prolonged and difficult business endeavor we’ve ever tackled.
It has also been an incredibly rewarding experience, and we would do it again because we believe that culture drives our company.
From a personal standpoint, continuing to build a sustainable, positive, nimble, innovative and fiscally sound culture will always be my top priority as CEO.
Machiavelli’s statements from 1532 ring true today. Changing your culture will be hard but not impossible. You’ve got to believe in your vision and keep an intense focus on where you want your culture to be.
It won’t happen in a day or even a month — but it will happen, and you’ll be positively transformed along the way.
Victoria Tifft is founder and CEO of Clinical Research Management, a full-service contract research organization that offers early to late-stage clinical research services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. She can be reached at