Culture
I find it really interesting when a word is used in two ways - let’s look at the word Culture.
From Wikipedia:
A Petri dish ... is a shallow transparent lidded dish that biologists use to hold growth medium in which cells can be cultured.
Penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered in 1929 when Alexander Fleming noticed that mold that had contaminated a bacterial culture in a Petri dish had killed the bacteria all around it.
The culture medium is often an agar plate, a layer a few mm thick ... containing whatever nutrients the organism requires ... and other desired ingredients.
... Petri dishes can be relatively expensive and labor-intensive.
Some observations:
Setting up a culture requires proactive care.
Good culture requires nourishment.
Nurturing culture is expensive.
Even if conditions are set up right your culture may be influenced or even destroyed by external circumstances.
Happy accidents in culture can bring about positive and far-reaching societal change.
You can set up the conditions but you can’t determine the patterns and structure in how the culture will grow.
Organisms and organisations aren’t really that different. Your organisational culture is every bit as fragile (or virulent) as the culture in a Petri dish.
Which brings up a question about change: once a culture takes hold, can it ever really become something else?
