When I travel around the country and people ask where I'm from, I take great pride in telling them that I live in Minneapolis. If I'm in Chicago, chances are the person asking has been to Minneapolis and therefore has first hand knowledge of who we are and what makes this city so great. But when I'm a little further afield, most of the people asking the question have never been here and likely never will. But almost everyone knows Minneapolis. We're the home of Mary Tyler Moore, Jesse Ventura, the Vikings (although the "Love Boat" scandal took place in the suburb of Minnetonka), and the Geek Squad. The What Squad?

Before I go further, let me state that the Geek Squad is not a client of CollegeRecruiter.com. So the praise that you're about to read is from the heart, not the wallet. While there is nothing wrong with writing blog entries about clients, most readers understand that such entries are intended both to inform the reader and to flatter the client. With some blogs, the latter sometimes is more important than the former and that's unfortunate.

So what is the Geek Squad? Quite simply, it is a Minneapolis-based division of Best Buy Corporation. The Geek Squad's "mission is to alleviate the world's computer problems, educate people to fearlessly embrace technology and practice the art of human interaction." They take pride in being geeks. They wear white shirts, black belts, black slacks or skirts, black shoes, and, of course, the famous clip-on black ties. Quite simply, the culture of the organization is that they're geeks, they know they're geeks, they're proud to be geeks, and they make being a geek cool. And their customer service and flat rate pricing model is unparalleled.

If you're in need of assistance, you can take your computer into a Best Buy store or they'll come to your home or office. Emergency service is available, but my experience has been that they can usually come within one business day of the call, they fix the problem within an hour or two, you pay, they leave, you're again productive. And they look really sharp in those ties. Did I mention they clip-on?

Successful organizations like the Geek Squad understand that they have an identity and culture. They can attempt to pretend that they're something that they're not like a lot of organizations do, or they can embrace and even leverage that culture to help them land new business, recruit new employees, and retain their best employees. The Geek Squad employees are part of a team, a club, a group. That sense of belonging and shared identity makes them far less likely to leave to work for a competitor which is offering a bit more money.

Does your organization understand its culture? Embrace its culture? Leverage its culture? If not, perhaps you need to find some computers that need servicing so that you can call in the Geek Squad. While they're fixing your computers, pay attention to their brand and how they embrace and leverage their culture. Maybe, just maybe, you'll end up with computers that work better along with a better understanding of the importance of culture to all organizations.