Wiley & sas business Series

      The Cultural 
Imperative 
                                          T
here ’s an excellent passage in Pirsig 
’s book,  
Zen and the Art of 
Motorcycle Maintenance , where he talks of the relative value of a 
screw.  
 1  
 Screws are cheap. They ’re so cheap that they ’re practi-
cally inconspicuous. When they ’re working, they ’re invisible. It ’s only 
when they don ’t that we care. 
 An interest in quality can emerge anywhere, even in repairing a 
motorcycle. At some stage, everyone has stripped a screw. Normally, 
it ’s just irritating. When that screw holds the engine compartment 
shut, though, its relative importance changes. It may have once been a 
10-cent screw. Now, its value is roughly equivalent to the resale value 
of your bike; if you can ’t get that screw out, your bike is worthless. 
And with that epiphany, you ’ve probably suddenly become very inter-
ested in screws. 
 Culture ’s the same. When culture ’s supportive, it ’s invisible. It ’s 
only when it ’s an inhibitor that we notice it. Analytics is possible with-
out a supportive culture; every organization has largely disliked cow-
boys that it still values.  Business analytics , however, is a different game. 
Value only comes from getting people to work together. That ’s only 
possible when people agree on what it is they ’re chasing. 
Big Data, Big Innovation: Enabling Competitive Differentiation 
through Business Analytics by Evan Stubbs
Copyright © 2014 by SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

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B I G   D A T A ,   B I G   I N N O V A T I O N
 This chapter covers the  cultural imperative , as shown in Figure    3.1  . 
It describes the fi ve perspectives on how information supports innova-
tion and creates value. 
  Every organization exhibits one or more of these to varying degrees. 
At a minimum, effective organizations are comfortable with intuitive 
action and truth seeking. The most high-functioning organizations 
manage to balance all of these competing points of view into a cohe-
sive whole, creating dynamic value (covered in Chapter 8). The most 
dysfunctional organizations tend to coalesce around one point of view, 
becoming blind to opportunity in their dogmatic pursuit of a single goal. 
 Not everyone need be a disruptor. Everyone, however, needs to 
understand that the best results come from being comfortable with 
multiple points of view.