94) suggested that a most powerful culture exercise is to get the senior managers of an organisation and create a culture audit. A culture audit would allow them to see how the management looks like within their business, and how it will become in the short term (ibid). One could assess the service company’s marketing culture along each dimension through the culture audit (Webster, 1992, p. 60). Nevertheless, significantly, a manager needs to use the cultural web as a convenient device for a culture audit; the cultural web allows managers to identify their firm’s nature in cultural terms (Johnson, 1992, p. 30). This case study shown by Faulkner and Johnson (1992, p. 209) demonstrates how the culture audit informs strategy development and implementation; a regional newspaper company was facing increased competitor pressure from free newspapers. The managers had to figure out a new competitive strategy which would allow them to estimate the business’s direction in the future. Even though the competitors had caused stress to the managers, the culture audit revealed that the particular newspaper would be able to remain in the business since the community somehow needed them (ibid). Hence, the culture audit had promoted strategic thinking, and younger managers proposed to create an effective advertising which would reduce the competitor …show more content…
590). Pauchant and Mitroff (1992, p. 15) defined crisis by quoting that ‘crisis is a disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, its existential core.’ To simplify, the authors mean that a crisis can occur when a condition changes and is uncontrolled, and it negatively influences a system. As Ritchie (2004, p. 679) wrote, Kolb’s (1984) and Richardson’s (1994) educational theory which supports the mental models known as ‘single and double loop learning’ may provide some insight of the nature of organisational learning through a crisis; the results of a chaotic experience during a crisis can produce emerge knowledge. This means that a learning company that have faced crisis can use its mistakes to plan and take actions, so as to prevent potential future issues that may cause similar chaos again. Ritchie (2002, p. 680) used a case mentioned by Britton (2003), describing the unique crisis that affected American Airlines on the 11th of September 2001; consequently, they had to rebuilt their image and they leant from that. One could criticise that unlike the Culture school, the Learning school is not useful during crisis as individuals learn from it after it has