How people actually go about their works, how decisions are made, who gets promoted, how employees interact with one another, what motivates them - these are the things that really count. What makes things especially tricky, especially for an outsider, is that as with real cultures of any type - from corporations to schools, towns, and even nations - most of the really important rules are not written down.

The place to start assessing a culture is to listen, really listen, to how employees describe a place. We believe that within most generalizations there lies an inner core of truth.

Even though it’s crucial for a new leader to show that he or she fits into the culture and “gets” it, the paradox is that you don’t want to settle in too comfortably if the culture needs modification. But of course, changing a culture is never as simple as ordering it to be so, especially if the organization is very proud of its traditions. And what organization isn’t?

When you go through that degree of structural change,” Lacy adds, “in hindsight it turned out to be more of an opportunity for cultural change than I thought. We disoriented people so much that we couldn’t go back; things were so different that people lost most of their reference points, so they couldn’t regress to the old ways because there was nothing remaining to regress to. In fact, we could accelerate the pace of change and make the change stick better.

The bottom line is that in order to minimize your risk, you need to really familiarize yourself with the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of the culture, understand the power bases, recognize that a mandate from above may not automatically ensure a mandate from below, and not try to change the world in your first hundred days. Patience is often an essential virtue when it comes to cultural transformation at a large scale.

Just remember that too much change can break the culture - or more likely destroy the change-maker. You have to pace yourself and continually assess the tolerance of the organization.