As I’ve described earlier, West Point and the Army made deliberate decisions to move from a culture of compliance to a culture of commitment, from measuring who could survive to investing in who could lead.

That is a culture turnaround. It is one of the most transparent examples I know of what large-scale culture change requires, because the institution kept records, the stakes were clear, and the evidence of transformation is verifiable across generations.

The Decision to Change

The change did not happen quickly, and it did not happen because someone wrote a new mission statement. It happened because a series of leaders, each in their time, made the decision to hold the institutions to a different standard and then made the smaller decisions, day after day, that reinforced the new direction.

This is the part that most leaders miss when they think about culture turnarounds. They focus on the public announcement, the new list of values, and the offsite where the new direction gets introduced. All of this has a place, perhaps, but none of it is in any way sufficient. Culture does not change because it is declared to have changed. It changes because enough people in positions of influence make consistent decisions over a long enough period that the effect of the decisions becomes the new normal.

Sustained Leadership Over Time

The West Point transformation held because each superintendent and commandant who inherited the institution understood that the direction was not theirs to reverse. They could shape it, develop it, apply it in new circumstances, but the commitment to a culture of development rather than a culture of compliance was the organizing principle they were expected to uphold. Culture change does not stick when individual leaders treat it as someone else’s responsibility. It sticks when every leader in the organization understands that their daily decisions are actively shaping it.

A Clear Azimuth for the Institution

The second element that made the transformation durable was clarity of direction. The end state was a defined, shared commitment: West Point and the Army will produce leaders worth following. Not just leaders who survived the experience, but leaders who had been genuinely developed for what leadership demands in the culture of commitment. Every policy, every practice, every norm was eventually measured to that azimuth. Those that fit were reinforced. Those that did not were changed.

This is what Set the Azimuth means in practice at the institutional level.

The azimuth is not a slogan. It is a reference set of directional boundaries that adaptive leaders use to evaluate decisions. When you have this understanding of “True North”, the question of what to do in ambiguous situations becomes much less ambiguous, because you can determine whether a decision supports the mission and moves the organization toward the end state or away from it. And you apply the test to every decision, every day.

Honest Assessment as a Prerequisite

You cannot change what you will not measure, and you cannot measure what you will not look at honestly. The Army and West Point’s transformation required the institutions to confront questions that its existing culture had previously made it easier to avoid. For example, if in the summer of 1970, four in ten of the cadets admitted to the Academy were not going to make it, either the institution was selecting the wrong people or its development process was wrong.

Choosing to examine the second possibility seriously is an act of institutional courage that is rarer than it should be. Most organizations, when confronted with evidence that something is not working, look for an external explanation before they look for an internal one. West Point’s willingness to ask whether the failure rate reflected a failure of development rather than a failure of the individuals being developed was the beginning of everything else that followed.

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Enjoy the journey!