One conclusion it would be wrong to reach after our discussions of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaten, and the corporate CEO, Ron Johnson, is that theaters cannot change their team culture. In fact, of course they can. And there are many examples of successful change. But rather than going through those here, I want to get at the principle underlying the successful implementation of change. It's actually one I discussed in my book, entitled, Metacultures, some 15 years ago. Before we articulate the principle, let's just illustrate the resistance that Ron Johnson encountered at JC Penney by using the same diagram as in the Akhenaten case. I've used the bold arrow coming up from the JC Penney stakeholders in the middle to indicate the fact that Johnson's decrees, the statements of changes he wanted to make, were resisted. To be clear on this, he was able to begin to implement some of these changes. For example, he developed the concept of shops, or stores, inside of JC Penney store, such as the Levi Shop. And some of these were actually opened. And the concept maybe even today is catching on, who knows? With a new Hallmark mini-store opened last year, I think it was. But, as in Akhenaten's case, many of the changes were reversed. So, what is it about change and inertia that we really need to grasp in order to understand team culture? Let's think back to our earlier discussion of the movement of culture and the force of entropy. We were talking about cutting the end off the roast at the at point, but we can generalize the model to almost any element of culture. I tried to do that in this diagram. Here, culture flows from A to B, and then from B to C. What is flowing? I've labelled it here generically as Cultural Element e1. It could be brushing your teeth, as in my own experience going off to college and finding a different pattern than the one I was accustomed to. The point in this diagram though is that the replication of the element is not perfect. B learns the element from A but maybe produces it somewhere differently. Could be a story, for example, and the story changes slightly when B tells it. To indicate this change, I've labeled the element as replicated by B, cultural element e1 prime. That's what the apostrophe indicates. Let me give you a closeup on that so that you can see the apostrophe more clearly. It's like in mathematics where x prime means like x but changed in some way. For the motion of culture what is important is the recognizability of the element. So the cutting off of the end may be a little more or less, but is still recognizable as the same cultural practice. Now, what's important also is that you can talk about the two elements being the same even though they are different in some respect. Good team leaders know when to stress similarity or continuity. They usually do that when there is a pervasive feeling that too much change is creeping in. Conversely, they can declare two elements to be different even though they are very similar. Again, good team leaders have a sense of when to stress the differences despite the recognizable similarities. The talk is part of that second layer of cultural motion we've been discussing. Like the decrees or pronouncements of Akhenaten or Ron Johnson. Any careful analysis of culture or motion would have to keep this distinction in mind. You probably all experienced this. I notice this all the time in the pronouncements of automobile manufacturers each year. They refer to the new model. But when I look at it, it doesn't seem to be much different from the old model. I'll diagram the general model in this way and I'll label the propagator of the metaculture simply as the describer. Here you see that the describer characterizes the cultural element produced by B as different from the one by A. Where B in the diagram could be A but at a later date, as an automobile manufacturing and producing new cars. Of course the description does exert a kind of force. It is encourages you to think about the replication in a certain way. Therefore, also to reason about it in a certain way. In this case, in terms of differences between the element and its predecessor. The emphasis is on the difference. That's what you look for. We'll talked about another force that is operative here in the next lecture. It is the final one of the four classes I've been mentioning.
