The worst-performing cultures of those found below the line are what I call dead cultures. Now before I go on to explain what I mean by dead cultures, I want to be clear that this description has nothing to do with zombies. Stupidity, yes. Zombies, no.

A dead culture is one that does not exist anymore. It is a business culture that is already ripe for archaeological digs to go back in time and discover ‘Who were these people?’ or ‘What went wrong here?’ Dead cultures were once alive and kicking, but then got so toxic that the culture became like quicksand. A quicksand-like culture will quickly suck enough people down to the lowest levels of moral conduct and human behaviour. When this occurs the sheer intensity of these people’s behaviours and choices begins to signal to others that it is okay to join them and behave as they are doing. Not everyone does of course. Many will quit their jobs as the cultural currency slowly destroys their soul. Others, the very bravest, will speak out or blow the whistle on the corruption or racism or sexism or bigotry that has emerged as a norm of the culture.

To understand what a dead culture is like we need look no further than the infamous case of Enron. I am sure you have heard of Enron, but if you haven’t here is a short description of what happened. Enron employed nearly 20  000 staff worldwide and was one of the world’s major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper companies. With revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000, Enron was named the US’s most innovative company by Fortune magazine for six consecutive years. However, its success and fame went to the organisation’s head. Gradually the leadership team became increasingly arrogant in their dealings with customers as they sought to meet their own bullish revenue targets. The acceptable standards of decision making and behaviours in the culture began to decline rapidly, resulting in increasing levels of corruption, including falsifying their financial reports with the assistance of their accountants at the Arthur Andersen accounting company.

What has the demise of Enron got to do with dead culture? Well, obviously the organisation doesn’t exist anymore and so neither does the culture. But the more important reason here is that Enron was not put out of business by its competitors, and it was not put out of business because other organisations were undercutting their prices or stealing customers. Competitors were not delivering a higher level of customer service to the extent that Enron began losing clients. Enron was not providing inferior product in terms of the electricity or gas it provided. What brought Enron down was its culture! The fact that the organisation knowingly and institutionally behaved in the way it did over a long period of time shows us that the chosen behaviour and decision-making style and belief of the people within Enron, to think that it was acceptable to act in a illegal manner, set up a culture of dishonesty, complacency, superiority and arrogance. Not everyone bought into it: Sherron Watkins, the vice president of corporate development at Enron, blew the whistle on the whole affair. Until then, there was enough compliance and awareness within the culture to either look the other way or play along.

After the Enron scandal, boards of directors across the world began demanding that the chief executive officers and chief financial officers provide some indication of the nature and state of their organisation’s culture, as they suddenly woke up to the fact that the company culture was powerful enough to bring their organisation down. I became very busy for a few years working specifically with clients who, after the Enron saga, wanted to get to grips with the nature of the culture they had generated in their organisations (often by default) and assess the impact of the culture on their business. In other words, culture had suddenly become to be seen by boards and then senior leadership teams as a risk factor, which many of them had never given much thought to at all prior to Enron’s collapse!

The best thing we can learn from a dead culture is what not to do and who not to be. By becoming familiar with the traits of below the line cultures, we can begin to prepare ourselves to look for the signs that indicate that, if we do not turn things around quickly enough, the culture will die. Irish political philosopher and politician Edmund Burke once said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ I would paraphrase his words in relation to culture and say ‘The only thing necessary for a culture to die is for good people to do nothing.’

Organisations can be put out of business for all sorts of reasons. These could include a global financial crisis, better competition, fires, floods, wars or a shift in market trends and needs. Organisations’ cultures only die when good people allow themselves or others to be anything less than their best selves.

Figure 5.1 shows us where the dead culture sits in the above and below the line cultures framework.

Figure 5.1 dead culture’s position