Corporate Culture is a CEO's Responsibility and should be on the CEO Agenda

Why is it that few CEO's accept responsibility for the corporate culture, and defer to HR and OD?

That attitude is a dereliction of duty. 

Yet CEO's routinely talk about their leadership.  It is apparent to me that there is a gross misalignment of the western business model, and that the OD, HR, and leadership pundants do not understand.  Perhaps Jack Welch of the former very successful GE understood, but most who wrote about his stile did not.

Jack orchestrated cultural change through modifying the environment.  For example:

1- "Fire the bottom 10%" requires objective measures to identify them.  So both employees and managers get metrics to measure their performance, which means that job expectations are communicated and feedback is routine. This does more for getting managers and HR to do their jobs than getting rid of the bad apples, but both are accomplished.  

2- "Serial CEO Initiatives" are require to keep it fresh. GE we through a series of initiatives that involved the whole company.  Work out, Total Quality, Six sigma, Web, all have a common theme in that the provide a perspective to look at the same thing, operations. Each new perspective has low hanging fruit, but after a while it is harder to show good results so motivation wanes.  Time for a new CEO Initiative. The usual cycle is 2 to 3 years.

3- "Ego control" some times called "team player" is a drum beat of collaboration and team work is a principle employed to control the natural tendencies of management and staffers to show there dominance or intellectual superiority over the rank and file.  Which is left unchecked will surely kill motivation.  Note: this is the problem with "Six Sigma Black Belts" in that is a badge of superiority that often feeds ego.  Jack's Serial Initiatives changes the game plan thereby limiting the build up of these business culture plaques.  

4- "Earned respect" is what motivation and leadership is all about.  A Machinists Union Leader and Organizer, Mike Day, openly stated "is management ever realized that it is all about respect, then there would never be another union".  Jack may have understood this, as all initiative were total company, where every employee had a chance to participate, and was recognized for their contributions.  In effect there was a vehicle to pay respect and as important it was earned by employee actions.  

5- "Incremental Innovation" is most often over looked, but well over 85% of all innovations is incremental.  It is those small continuous improvements or kaizen, which deliver most of the results. Yet most managers look a innovation as big disruptive change such as a new system or new product or technology.  Most often big change is done with out understanding where we are. e.g. new systems most often automate the wrong things and new product have features that are not needed.  Where as cost justified incremental change clarifies understanding, acquires know how, and capitalized core business strengths and counters weaknesses. All of Jack's initiative were the structure for "Incremental Innovation".  Also note that a mediocre idea from the rank and file can be implemented easily and quickly, where as a great idea from the top down often fails because of inertia in getting buyin.

6- "Corporate Culture" and "Leadership" require thoughtful orchestration (structure, organization, and business process), but must have a duel mission: a- Business Results, and b- Delivery of "Earned Respect to each employee"

Note: a variant of this which grew out of the Roper Industries turnaround, melded with Toyota productivity improvement models and was applied to California State Funded; Employee Training programs which had audited results of 3805% ROI over 23 companies.  http://www.bertain.com/page.asp?ID=123