Keystone behaviours: How communications operators can turn their culture into a driver of digital transformation
Transforming into a digital business is the most pressing competitive and commercial imperative facing today’s communications operators—yet their organisational cultures are often perceived as barriers to radical change. However, PwC’s experience across industries including telecoms confirms that culture can be a powerful catalyst for transformational change, and may often be a prerequisite for making it happen. Changing a telco’s culture remains a major challenge, since it is likely to be deeply embedded at several levels—local, national, organisational—and it is rarely ‘changeable’ in any reasonable time frame. Even reshaping it demands alignment of rational and emotional forces. In the authors’ view, the way forward lies in a pragmatic approach, involving finding sources of emotional energy that already exist within the organisational culture; connecting these to a few ‘keystone behaviours’ that matter most; and then enlisting select groups of ‘authentic informal leaders’ to spread the emotional commitment virally across the business. Easier said than done.
