Reading the Culture

Cultural Compatibility EquiPro recently worked with the newly formed senior management steering committee of an alliance team comprised of members from a big pharma and a small pharma. Their charter was to ensure the success of a new drug by providing strategic direction; challenging and approving the brand plans and key business decisions; and creating winning external/ internal conditions across both organizations.

As part of the "team jump-start" process (an off-site meeting to align their goals), we suggested that team members examine each other's culture to anticipate areas of potential compatibility and conflict. We used the Leadership Culture Questionnaire, a validated survey developed by the Management Research Group (MRG). The survey measures 22 specific cultural practices within five leadership functions—creating a vision, developing fellowship, implementation, follow-through, and team-playing. The survey results indicated which cultural practices were strongest in each company. These practices were assumed to reflect the leadership values and behaviors of the senior management of each alliance partner.

On the surface, these allies appeared strikingly different—the small pharma a fast-moving, entrepreneurial organization, the big pharma more conservative and accustomed to layers of decision-making. Surprisingly, the profiles generated using the culture survey proved strikingly similar (See "A Tale of Two Cultures,"). The team saw this similarity as a potential asset in some areas—and a potential liability in others. For example, the two organizations shared high scores on innovative problem solving, a positive factor in fostering new ways to approach their mutual objectives. Interestingly, especially with regard to big pharma team members, the new partners also shared a trait of not being very process-oriented, indicating a need for the joint team to develop systematic ways to make decisions and determine strategy.

This illustrates the advantage of providing alliance teams with solid information about cultural style differences and similarities. It creates an opportunity to implement structures, processes, and norms that anticipate and help mitigate potential risks, threats, or incompatibilities inherent between the two allied partners. In turn, an effective, high-performing alliance can generate a stronger bottom-line outcome.

Why Can't You Be More Like Us? Consider another case—one of cultures colliding: a small biotech with a promising new pipeline drug approaches a big pharma company with established marketing channels and deep pockets.

In this case, the issue of culture was never raised, even while the companies' differences in size and geographic locations raised immediate, implicit assumptions about cultural differences. For example, though entrepreneurial in nature, the small biotech was risk-averse, academically oriented, and had a definite bent toward filling its ranks—in particular, its upper echelon leaders—with experienced people. Conversely, the big pharma had a broad enough talent pool to afford a few calculated risks and adhered to more of a "sink or swim" philosophy of indoctrinating managers. These distinct cultural characteristics showed up immediately on one of the team's first important tasks: agreeing on who should be on the team. Both kept to their usual practices—the small biotech tapping veteran talent, expecting them to roll up their sleeves and be productive team members, and the big pharma giving less experienced people stretch assignments for development, relying on senior management to provide hands-on coaching.