No shortcuts

Good post by Om Malik this week about the difficulty of change, particularly that of corporate DNA.

His main point:

"Large companies are somewhat like me — once they get used to a certain behavior, they develop a certain culture and a set of procedures, processes and a work environment that defines them and their future. These define their corporate DNA. It is hard to change. You can’t buy new DNA, and companies can’t acquire their way into new corporate cultures. Furthermore, companies that lack that self-awareness of their DNA and behaviors, in the end, find themselves extinct."

We wrote about corporate DNA last year in a piece entitled, "The System is the message", and talked about creating the right environment to implement new ideas in an existing organization.

As a general rule, we have found that acquisitions of smaller companies by larger ones with lots of value added capabilities --  General Electric and Johnson&Johnson, for instance -- can produce happy and prosperous marriages.  Mergers of "equals" -- Daimler-Chrysler, AOL Time Warner, and such -- have to spend so much time figuring out where their center of gravity is that they never get deep-down organizational improvements, and, even worse, they fall behind in the marketplace. These mergers are, sad to say, genetic disasters.