[calinet6]

The answer to your pains, and how it relates to the article and its insights, is that culture is a system.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say culture is the root of the organizational tree. It's underground and most organizations sort of ignore it, or worse, treat it like it was a hypothetical illusory nuisance they have to lie about to attract rockstars. Ugh.

So culture is the root of the system. It defines how people work together, and how people and work are treated. Culture defines the unseen and unmeasurable motivations people rely upon, without which you get exactly the problems you describe: lack of common purpose, lack of knowledge of process, lack of improvement, infighting, game playing, reward seeking. These are all cultural problems.

I wholeheartedly agree that this is a sign of major problems in perspective in the US. The anti-pattern here is individualistic-dominated thinking, which doesn't accurately describe or solve the problems of an organization of more than one person. It's actually painful to watch corporate culture in this country if you have an understanding of systems design and process control, and especially if you apply it to the human systems of which we are all a part. Science has the answers, but no one cares. Painful.

Read up and spread the systems knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming