[sberkun10]

We agree. I wrote:

"You have to do careful study to filter out which cultural values remained immutable over time, if any at all. Ask the first ten employees to leave a successful company why they left, and many will answer “the company changed.”

You have the benefit of retrospection with those companies - In year 1 or year 5 it was (likely) far less clear what the company would look like in 50 or 100 years.

It is also a matter of perspective - as an outsider to any organization the perceptions we have of culture are different than what it's actually like inside. 3M in particular has gone through many cultural changes, including the ones that led to peaks in innovation (see: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/3M-Company/Infor... on McKnight circa 1950s) and low points (see http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-06-10/at-3m-a-strug... McNerney, circa 2000s).

So we're talking about two sides of the same kinds of coins - yes some elements are stable, but it's hard to sort out what they are, and it depends heavily on whether you are an outsider looking for examples, or an insider actually trying to get something interesting done.