These readings make me wonder about a few issues. The reading suggests that “culture is powerfully shaped by incentives.” After reading this, this reminded me of capitalism, and the issue that the system of intense capitalism can sometimes lead to greed and abuse of power. This raised the issue for me that a culture of incentives can lead to a culture in an organization of greed. A culture of a greed is an issue to a business for example, because this culture will promote individuals under the organization to work towards their own selfish goals rather than work towards the agenda of the organization. I would be interested in exploring further the question of deciding whether or not the culture of incentive is the best option that an organization has. Although, capitalism and working towards and incentive is flawed its the system that we use, because we decided the capitalism is better than socialism or communism. I would be interested in exploring whether a culture of incentives or capitalism is better than a culture of socialism.
2. When reading “culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations,” I am reminded of many of my own personal connections that relate. Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do.” The first connection that comes to my mind is the mentality of my high school basketball team. We had a strong culture, and that was a culture of winning. We very rarely lost a game, and a lot of this stemmed from the mentality that we had of never giving up and our culture of winning. Another connection that I made after reading was that my family has its own culture as well. My family is small, but it can still serve as an organization. My family had a culture of togetherness and love. If one of us was having an issue, then we were all having an issue. On the other hand, if one of us was thriving we were all thriving. My family exhibits consistent, observable patterns of organization, which defines it as a culture.