Students of corporate culture should turn their eyes to Washington. We are about to see whether a gigantic effort to re-engineer a deeply flawed culture can actually succeed.
I speak of the Veterans Administration, where discussion of poor culture could occupy us for days. On Friday the White House released a blistering diagnosis of what has gone wrong at the agency, and it cited a sclerotic, self-serving culture as the prime reason why so many veterans were forced to wait so long for medical care. That report was only the latest in a long line of other reports, investigations, hearings, and complaints this spring that the VA fell into a terrible state, with bureaucrats at the top gaming the system to hide poor care to those at the bottom.
