How I Found Culture

March, 2024

GE HealthCare (Nasdaq: GEHC), between 1999 and 2009 grew from a $7 billion revenue company to $17 billion, mostly through acquisitions. During that time, I was the global deal lawyer at GEHC. We looked at hundreds of companies and made many acquisitions, some divestures, and several equity investments. Participating in this type of growth taught me a lot. My biggest lesson was that company cultures matter.

GE is a learning machine. It is filled with very smart people who are trained to constantly improve and learn from mistakes. I’ve never experienced more rigor around people being trained, given resources, and expected to execute on continual improvement, or “best practices” as we would say.

One of the issues needing improvement at GEHC during my time was that the acquired companies were not performing to the financial pre-acquisition predictions. Leaders stepped in with many process improvements along the way, applying Six Sigma, Lean Management, and other frameworks that helped us adopt common languages and lenses to address problems. The one most impactful on me was a simple and insightful process that tracked accountability for each of the acquired companies.

The faulty process was that the deal team handled all parts of crafting, nurturing and closing deals. However, at closing, the deal team disappeared and handed GEHC a new business to integrate.

One of the simpler improvements was a leader meeting held each month with both the deal and integration teams. This meeting was required for at least a year from the close date. The teams reported on predictions (deal team) versus reality (integration team). You learn a lot in a process like that.

Having watched this process over years I came to one conclusion – the biggest problem with the failure of the deals we did was a clash of cultures. GE, a process-oriented, 100+ year old system, was acquiring businesses, methods, and practices that were highly innovative, entrepreneurial, and creative. Those cultures clashed and the GE culture usually won.

I learned through several former owners and employees of the companies GEHC acquired that they referred to GE as “the Death Star”. It destroyed the life of successful, growing companies.

Since leaving GEHC I have dedicated my work to the science and art of culture management because -

• All cultures matter.

• Every culture produces results.

• Culture is as real as your finances.

• Everyone influences culture.

• Leaders have the biggest impact on their cultures.

We are in the early days of true culture management. Due to the proliferation of data, analytics, public research, artificial intelligence, and the resulting algorithms that recommend “what’s next?”, organizations can more efficiently, and effectively target enterprise-wide language, frameworks, and thereby their cultures that did not exist just a few years ago.

How we learn and what we should be learning in organizations to work better as people and teams is wide open, and as a result, overwhelming.

I am introducing through my company, Mercury Growth Partners, a simple way to answer the question “what’s next?” in the space of culture management. It isn’t expensive. In fact, all the new technologies have made it quite inexpensive. But how our systems need to change and the human behaviors that need to evolve require a strategy and consistent effort over time.

I work with leaders who want to manage their team and organizational cultures in a way that meets them where they are and helps evolve both the system and its people over time. The ability to better lead, manage, and collaborate in our virtual and non-virtual organizations is only going to get better. Simple changes to culture management now can have massive returns in the future. What those cultures are is up to the leader.

Here’s my overall guidance.

• Be purposeful in the cultures you influence.

• The experiences you create influence the beliefs people hold.

• The beliefs people hold determine their behaviors in your culture.

• And their behavior creates new experiences.

Good luck with your work. Let me know if I can help.

Bob