Schein organizes the material within three Parts. Here’s a brief excerpt from The Dimensions of Culture. “If culture consists of shared basic assumptions, we still need to specify: assumptions about what? The concept of organizational or occupational cultures reflects the ultimate problems that every group faces: dealing with its external environment…Culture is pervasive and ultimately embraces everything that a group is concerned about and must deal with. Beyond these external and internal problems, cultural assumptions reflect deeper issues about the nature of truth, time, space, human nature, and human relationships.” (Page 85) Schein stresses the importance of determining with meticulous care what a given culture’s shared assumptions are, and then subjecting each to rigorous scrutiny. One of several reasons why so many organizations struggle (with mixed results) to deal with their external environment is the fact that their perspective is limited, if not myopic.

Whatever organizational development these organizations achieve is by nature internal only and therefore self-limiting. Henry Chesbrough has much of value to say about open business models, those that “create value by leveraging many more ideas, due to their inclusion of a variety of external concepts. Open models can also enable greater value capture, by using a key asset, resource, or position not only in the company's own business model but also in other companies businesses."