Social Operating Systems Limited is a company started by Don Eckenfelder with the assistance of a small team of people who have come to share his vision. This team has provided software, legal, editorial, commercial design, and marketing & sales support. Through several years of effort we have defined the metrics that make cultural change possible, developing a methodology that can help organizations precisely engineer their culture towards quantifiable improvements.

The result has been the production of a “cookbook” to apply the methodology and a client list that includes Shell, GE, ITT, Pratt & Whitney, Merck, Wyeth, Oklahoma City, Offshore Energy Services, Inc., Launceston in Tasmania, HATCH, the Sydney Water Company, and the Department of Conservation in New Zealand; and, all this in less than a year.

For years (maybe millennia) people have been writing about the importance of character and culture. In the 80s the subject started to heat up with Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence. Since then, many books have been written focusing on the importance of organization culture and character. With Enron and WorldCom and even Martha Stewart, the subject is really heating up. But no one has come up with a way to measure and manage culture and character. As Peter Drucker said; "If you can’t measure, you can’t manage."

Social Operating Systems has spent years developing a metric for the measurement of cultural factors.

The February 13, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek has articles on “dashboards” intitled “Giving the Boss The Big Picture” and “The New Ethics Enforcers.” The articles cry out for culture measurement and management but lack the answers imbedded in our work.

We have labored over that problem and have the solution. We can measure and manage culture; it can be applied to different disciplines and to organizations in general. Now you don’t just need to talk about it: You can do something about it! Why not try?