Culture and vision may not be top of the boardroom agenda in a looming recession, but organisation development specialist Myron Partnership believes they are the key to survival.
Culture and vision may not be top of the boardroom agenda in a looming recession, but organisation development specialist Myron Partnership believes they are the key to survival.
Myron is part of a network of 20 specialist business consultants under the umbrella of Grampian Highland Resources, which offers interim management services to small and middling enterprises needing extra support.
While the network can offer expertise in anything from strategy and finance to branding and logistics, Myron is a licensed practitioner in CTT, a US-originated system of business diagnosis offering "cultural transformation tools".
Andy Boddice, who set up Myron in early 2006 after leaving the Tayburn design agency, says the tougher the business climate, the more an organisation's core values will come into focus, as the banks have demonstrated.
"There is an awful lot of the financial services sector that is in a hell of a state, they are having to look at risk and compliance at all sorts of regulatory levels, and a lot of decisions are being made without a clear understanding of what the risk culture in the business is."
The CTT self-diagnosis helps identify the gaps between management's view of its values and the employees' views and aspirations.
"It is being delivered into organisations in the public, private and third sectors in over 30 countries," Boddice says. "CTT is used extensively in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, areas that Scotland actively and regularly compares its performance with."
He adds: "Who you are and what you stand for are becoming just as important as the quality of manufactured products and delivered services. Highly motivated people are vastly more productive than people who are not. Business returns from around the world - including those from Scotland - show that the best organisations to work for are also the best performing."
Myron is registered as a supplier to Ethical Corporation, Scotland Food and Drink, Medical Devices in Scotland, and the Life Sciences Network in Scotland and is a member of SCDI and the Fife Chamber of Commerce, as well as being affiliated to The Values Centre in North Carolina.
Boddice is also a director of the Agenda charity promoting social responsibility in Scotland. He admits: "In boardrooms when the subject of culture and values comes up, there are nods round the table, it is important - but that is far as it goes. It will only be on the radar when things have gone wrong. Management tends to fight the fires until they get absolutely burned out, or by some miracle it turns round."
But under current pressures, drilling down into the soft strata of a company as well as the hard bottom line is "more necessary rather than less", Boddice argues.
He says: "When senior executives are faced with accelerated growth or, as more likely in today's trading conditions, with having to look at performance, having a clear and measurable benchmark of the health and fitness' of their organisation is a necessity not a luxury. Most current checks and balances ignore the most important element within the organisation - the culture."
