Peter Senge wrote the Fifth Discipline twenty years ago, but it's a book with amazing staying power. If you haven't read it, you should. The big lesson in the book, for which Senge is still known, is systems thinking (system thinking is the fifth discipline).

It's hard to sum up the concept, but here goes. We are all operating within systems, and too often when we try to figure out what's happening or what's not working, we don't see how the bigger-picture system dynamics are generating the results we don't want. We try to fix the parts of the system, but it never gets fixed because the system itself pushes in a certain direction. Tim Jackson illustrates this beautifully in his TED talk about an economic "reality check."

But it happens in smaller venues than "global capitalism." In organizations it often shows up around culture. 

The reason culture "eats" things like strategy or process, I think, connects to systems thinking. Culture is like the architecture of our systems, and we create strategies that make perfectly good sense, but run counter to the architecture, thus they don't work. The problem is, the architecture typically makes sense as well. It's good. It's what we want. It just creates an environment where, interestingly enough, we end up not getting what we want. 

A culture of customer service can unwittingly diminish the capacity to be proactive, because our collective focus is on responding and reacting. A culture of quality can unwittingly diminish the capacity to embrace diversity because consistency is so valued. It doesn't have to be this way–being proactive is obviously consistent with customer service–but you have to watch for it. You have to take that step back and see if our good intentions are contributing to not so good impact.