General mills organizational culture

In order to properly implement a strategic plan, organizations use structure, various control systems (budgets, variance analysis, policies and procedures, company rules), and culture.

Let us revisit General Mills and determine the relative effectiveness of the company’s strategic controls. Choose two implementation controls, and discuss whether or not you believe the controls you've selected effectively support the company's strategic choices. Be sure to defend your answer (critical thinking is required)!

Be sure that you respond to the postings of your classmates.

Week 2:

Respond to the following:

As you’ve learned from the background readings, a key strategic control is that of organizational culture. Culture must fit with an organization's strategic choices. Poor alignment between culture and strategic choice is a sure-fire way to doom any strategic choice.

Of course, some organizational theorists would assert that an organization's culture cannot be "managed" in the truest sense of how one “manages" the processes and activities and things that exist within an organization. David Campbell (2000, p. 28) says that an organization

Is being constructed continuously on a daily, even momentary [italics added], basis through individual interactions with others. The organization never settles into an entity or a thing that can be labelled and described, because it is constantly changing, or reinventing itself, through the interactions going on within it. [At the same time, an organization] does have a certain character to it, such that, like driving on the motorway, not just anything goes (p. x).

Do you agree or disagree with the above? That is, can culture really be "managed"? What might this interpretation mean in the context of our current discussion related to “strategic controls”?