It was fascinating to read of HP’s plan to acquire services and consulting giant EDS. In a lot of ways, the idea makes eminent sense. EDS has formidable strengths in the kind of stem-to-stern solutions that many of HP’s corporate customers crave. And HP itself offers a broad array of complementary products that allow for leverage, consistent delivery, and reduction of overall system costs.

I can’t help but thinking, however, that the two companies are going to be in for quite a lot of “huh?” moments when it comes to the taken-for-granted assumptions each carries with it from their respective cultures. A framework I quite like to use in understanding corporate cultures comes from the The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work by Bill Schneider since picked up by my good friend and colleague Geoffrey Moore in Living on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any Economy.

Corporate cultures, they suggest, can be understood in terms of the basic assumptions about the way the world works that are then reflected in behavior. They simplify things into two dimensions: one, the extent to which the cultures operate on the premise of collective, or group, interaction. The other, the extent to which a culture is driven by "hard" facts and data, or by more subjective interpretations of information and what the world means. This gives us a framework that can prove quite useful in anticipating and dealing with cultural disconnects.

Creation cultures (like most startups) depend on individual brilliance and favor acts of creation. The people in such cultures thrive on "living the dream."

Competence cultures, similarly, look to individual, brilliant drivers of outcomes, but the people in them are motivated by competition – within the company and also with external players.

Collaboration cultures take teamwork for granted, and indeed, can’t conceive of doing anything without a team or group sensibility. At their best, they thrive on collaboration with customers to produce useful outcomes. Loose, informal structures suit people in collaboration cultures just fine.

Control cultures, while similarly group oriented, tend to drive things from well-planned activity and rely on hierarchies to get things done. Making plan and being orderly are big values in such cultures.

Which brings me back to HP and EDS. I’ve had the good fortune to work with HP and to interact with HP people. They are unfailingly collaborative. Even when introducing themselves in class, if there is more than one of them they will unfailingly acknowledge the other, and verbally give respect to one another's point of view. EDS, different story. Equally great people, equally strong performers, but boy oh boy is that a control culture. At classic HP, people sort of work together to figure things out. At classic EDS, you look in the book. If the answer isn’t in the book, you ask your supervisor. If your supervisor doesn’t know, there’s some process to sort things out. So I think we can anticipate some pretty hilarious (at best) and potentially distressing (at worst) moments when parties from the two cultures, each operating with their own view of the way the world works, try to come together.

What would I do if I were involved (and I’m not currently working with either firm, to give full disclosure)?

I think the first thing is to make the different cultural assumptions explicit, so that people from either side don’t misinterpret what are fundamentally cultural assumptions.

Next, I’d figure out where it matters that the cultures come together (in executive decision-making, customer service or complex, large engagements, for example) and where it doesn’t (in standalone units without a lot of interdependence).

Then I’d probably have some kind of facilitated process of helping the two interact until the two organizations find a way of working together.

Moore and Schneider anticipate that most companies will eventually settle on a dominant overall culture, although there will always be sub-cultures within the organization. My bet would be on the HP culture eventually holding sway – it’s a natural in a flat, networked world with an emphasis on total solutions and customer care. Let’s see if that’s what happens.