anticipated to make the changes he thought necessary.
He did several things to create a new organizational culture. He himself emphasized three basic things, including rebuilding the strategy and direction of the businesses. He emphasized moving managers across units in order to build more of a sense of unity. He also focused on creating a culture that emphasized performance and rewarded performance above all other things. According to the people who are quoted here, he succeeded in creating a culture in which performance was rewarded and which encouraged entrepreneurial and creative behavior. In particular, Beth, Terri, and Jerry indicated that they were encouraged to come up with ideas, allowed to pursue those ideas with little constraint, and rewarded for success by being given even more leeway. Communication, according to each of them, was surprisingly open in the company and they had access to all levels of workers and management. At least at the time the case was written, American Express seemed to have many entrepreneurial elements built in to its structure as an established organization.
As Kao (1989) noted, the problem for an established organization is to build enough flexibility into the organization to allow for creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit. This is the task that the American Express Company faced and that Lou Gerstner sought to address in his balancing of the traditional and entrepreneurial cultures. He sought to in
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