New Tenet | OLD TENET | Charles Darwin

OLD TENET: A Manager's Beliefs and values are his or her business.
NEW TENET: A manager's beliefs and values are everyone's business.
A company's culture - its shared values and beliefs - develops internally for the most part. X-engineering demands that the company's beliefs and values be externalized. ... [N]o one is suggesting that networked companies stand-ardize or homogenize their cultural beliefs and values - such a move would hinder innovation and produce a boring and static business world. But ethics and behavioral standards must operate harmoniously across the linked organizations in the same way that processes do.

Simply put, managers must be sure that their company's beliefs and values will work well with those of their partners. ... Confronting reality - a prerequisite for X-engineering - requires you to learn all you can about any company and its managers that you are considering as a partner. You must know what they really stand for.

OLD TENET: Don't fix it if it ain't broke.
NEW TENET: Relish change.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive," wrote Charles Darwin, "nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

Darwin's theory of survival applies to the world of business as well as it does to the world of biology. Undoubtedly, a company's capacity to respond quickly and adroitly to change will surely determine its long-term success or failure; hence managers must anticipate transitions, sometimes provoke them, and always embrace them with open arms. ...

Yet most companies have not developed [an] appetite for transformation. If everything is going well, managers are content to maintain the status quo. ... Such an approach precludes X-engineering.