he events that triggered transformation efforts at Sears, Shell, and the army were quite different. In all three organizations, however, the 800-pound gorilla that impaired performance and stifled change was culture. The trouble is, there are as many different definitions of culture as there are articles on change management, and none of them give us much help in telling us how, or even what, to fix. Nevertheless, in our study of what might loosely be called culture at Sears, Shell, and the army, we found four distinct indicators that are highly predictive of performance in both good times and bad. These four indicators can serve managers in much the same way that vital signs serve physicians in appraising the health of the human body.