Hi, I'm Mark Clemente. And thank you so much for your interest in this course on managing and optimizing corporate culture for competitive advantage. This is a course that's based on a research study that I had written several years ago, at a time when I was doing extensive work in organizational communication. And typically in the context of mergers and acquisitions and joint venture planning. And in every situation, it became clear that corporate culture was a critical determinant of success in making those large scale corporate initiatives work. The challenge has always been managing corporate culture and understanding it.

And that's what this course is all about. corporate culture is critically important, but it's also a very difficult thing to analyze and manage. Now, we're coming up in mission of culture it has been well as how we do things around here. But to me, the practical question was always well, what are those things? And that's what my research focused on, I wanted to identify the specific traits that appear in just about every organization, whether it's a for profit company or nonprofit company, a large company or small one. Every organization has key traits to find his culture.

And my research was focused on identifying what those traits were, with the goal of identifying those traits, and then being able to manage them for corporate gain. So if you are an HR leader, or a senior executive who's charged with improving your culture and enhancing it for competitive advantage, here's what you'll gain from this course. Through this course, you will identify the most significant cultural traits that are present and which define your organization. You'll understand the nature and importance of those traits in order to enhance organizational effectiveness and competitive advantage. And you'll learn how to apply a series of diagnostic tools to analyze and manage your culture, or that of another company, such as when you're engaging in a merger or acquisition, forming a strategic alliance or a joint venture. The goal of my research was to ultimately develop a usable practical tool for analyzing and managing culture.

Let me tell you a little bit about how the research was conducted. First, extensive content analysis research was done, in which I reviewed over 300 articles from business publications, academic journals and websites that spoke about corporate culture, the idea being to identify the traits, the defining characteristics that kept appearing over and over again, all the things that typically characterize and give an organizational culture. Second, I conducted panel research with HR leaders from around the world, where I sought their input on the defining traits of culture and the ones that they felt were most important From the standpoint of effecting competitive advantage through culture, my research ultimately led to the identification of 30 specific cultural traits or artifacts that tend to appear in just about every organization. identifying those 30 cultural traits then led to the development of a methodology for use in managing and analyzing corporate culture.

That methodology is called organizational archaeology. Here's what organizational archaeology is all about. Organizational archaeology is a simple framework for identifying key cultural traits in your organization. Secondly, it's a methodology to assess the strategic significance, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of those traits. Organizational archaeology is also a comparative gauge of the similarity or dissimilarity of cultural traits for use in corporate combinations. As mentioned, when you were forming them merger or acquisition or a joint venture or strategic alliance.

I've structured this course to present usable concepts and usable techniques for analyzing and managing corporate culture, both for day to day management, as well as specific strategic business situations. Here's how the course is set up. First, I'll provide an introduction to the organizational archaeology methodology for enhancing corporate culture. Next, we'll identify the key cultural traits in your company, what we call your social material, and ideological artifacts. Last we'll learn how to apply organizational archaeology in either general management scenarios or in special strategic initiatives. Through this course, you'll immediately begin to understand your culture in a way that you can actively manage it and enhance it for competitive advantage.

So please sign on it. Let's get started.