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The success of Japanese industry, and its greater competitiveness as against US (and even more so European) industry led many theorists from the fifties onwards to look to Japanese strategic models. At the beginning of Japan’s post-war development, its technology was generally inferior to Western competitors, and its processes were arcane. However, its corporate culture was instantly identifiable as being superior. Employees took personal responsibility for productivity, and regarded failure or poor quality as a personal affront to their honour. What’s more, employees took positive responsibility for improving processes. This insight gave birth to the Cultural School of strategy, which saw the corporate culture as the prime determinant of performance. Numerous corporate programmes and philosophies, including Kaizen, Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, emerged to enable the organisation to change its culture. However, identifying strong and weak cultures proved to be vastly simpler than actually achieving cultural change.

A great deal of work has been done analysing corporate culture, but, now in minute six of the ten-minute process, you have just sixty seconds to sketch out what changes you would need to make, and how you would go about making them.

Fortunately, the answers are already present in the first five phases you have already covered. On the basis that the flow of culture is rooted in the way people think, your task is to instill the sense of situation, approach, purpose, new allies, and new tactics into your employees or co-workers.

It’s possible to agonise for ever about achieving cultural change, but unless your strategy involves a fundamental reorganisation, there are just three steps:

Get your people signed up to the strategy (you will have thought about this in the ‘Allies’ phase)

Get them to remember it

Give them the training they need to use it

There is one step which must precede this, and it is usually overlooked. You must understand the culture that you are seeking to influence. If you have been with the company a long time, and came up through the ranks, then chances are that you have a fairly clear understanding of what people would say, what they would do, how they would react. If you, or the strategy team, are new to the organisation, then you may at this point wish to add ‘an old hand’ to your list of necessary allies — someone who understands and can help you to achieve these three steps.

Cultural change is about what people have in their minds. Assuming that your people — be it an external partnership, or internal employees, or any other group — can be recruited as allies, then changing the culture is primarily about getting things at the front of people’s minds and enabling them to act in different ways.

Although cultures can change rapidly in response to major, unexepected events (the death of Princess Diana, 9/11), deliberate cultural change is best achieved gradually. Strategies which rely exclusively on cultural change — such as trying to make a multinational ‘world-class’ by implementing Total Quality Management and Just in Time working — invariably fail. In a Ten-Minute strategy, you should look for what you must do to nudge the culture enough for success, and your primary purpose in doing this is embedding the new strategy in the existing culture.

Back to the villagers and the Samurai. At this point the film is in part about the clash between two cultures — the villagers, timorous, unskilled in fighting, in parts cunning, with no tradition of honour or combat, trying to work with the Samurai, men of ancient lineage, skilled in every weapon and military tactic. The bridge between the two is the character Kikuchiyo, who is a farmer who has pretended to be a Samurai, although the other Samurai now accept him as one of them. Kikuchiyo is the ‘old hand’ who unlocks the villager culture to the Samurai. As trust builds between the allies, the villagers help to erect defences and learn to fight.

Interestingly, by contrast, in the Magnificent Seven version, the villagers abandon their gunfighters during the film, resulting in an initial defeat. However, the gunfighters later return to the save the undeserving villagers.