Character of a Corporation: How Your Company's Culture Can Make or Break Your Business

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Overview

Culture, like synergy or competence, is one of those words that is evocative yet ethereal. While culture is absolutely central to competitive success, few executives understand how to proactively shape the values, beliefs, and mental models that form the foundation of longterm success. In The Character of a Corporation, Goffee and Jones succeed where many others have failed: they manage to pin down the butterfly of corporate culture, making the elusive tangible. In so doing, they have produced an eminently practical guide for executives who know that success derives as much from a company's soul as from its products.

What People Are Saying

Stephen Covey

If you want to understand the amorphous concept and word culture, read this book. If you want to know what you can and can't do about culture, and why you can or can't, read this book. If you want to grasp what it takes, personally and ethically, to change culture, read this book. What Carl Rogers did with communication, what Blake and Mouton did with the management grid, Goffee and Jones are doint with culture.

Alan Gaynor

"If you are interested in how to assess your corporate culture and lead change to maximize competitive advantage, read this book. It takes you to the intellectual heart of matters'but in a practical way that can help generate action."

Dr. Stephen R. Covey

"If you want to understand the amorphous concept and word "culture", read this book. If you want to know what you can and can't do about "culture", and why you can or can't, read this book. If you want to grasp what it takes, personally and ethically, to change "culture", read this book. What Carl Rogers did with communication, what Blake and Mouton did with the management grid, Goffee and Jones are doing with culture."

Gary Hamel

""Culture," like "synergy" or "competence," is one of those words which is evocative yet ethereal. While culture is absolutely central to competitive success, few executives understand how to proactively shape the values, beliefs and mental models that form the foundation of long-term success. In The Character of a Corporation, Goffee and Jones succeed where many others have failed: they manage to pin down the butterfly of corporate culture, making the elusive tangible. In doing so, they have produced a eminently practical guide for executives who know that success derives as much from a company's soul, as from its products."

John Hunt

"Here is a book which provides subtle insights into how social relationships can shape corporate cultures. The authors combine classic social analysis with hands-on consulting experience. The result is a highly readable guide to the character of your corporation ' and how to change it."

Rick Dobbis

"The Character of a Corporation is a book about people--the one asset of a company that is talked about more and understood less than any other. With ease and clarity, Goffee and Jones present complex issues and offer useable, analytic tools for improving your company's chance at success. Read it before the competition does."

Sumantra Ghoshal

"In their celebrated Harvard Business Review article, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones had presented a very useful way to think about corporate cultures in terms of two dimensions: sociability and solidarity. In this book, they build on those ideas to provide some practical and well-illustrated "how to's" for managers to understand, evaluate and reshape the cultures of their organizations."

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Research has shown that a corporation's underlying culture is related to its bottom line. The positive corprate culture enjoyed by some companies, including Coca-Cola, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, and Nike, can boost both company performance and employees' quality of life. This business weapon is intangible, thought to be of secondary importance or too difficult to assess and/or "fix." Goffee and Jones, founders of the London consulting firm Creative Management Associates, define and explain corporate culture. Each corporation's culture has specific strengths and a balance of two crucial elements: sociability and solidarity. Using portraits of various businesses, from innovative start-ups to multinational conglomerates, they effectively demonstrate how a company's particular culture affects performance and how that culture can be changed. For all business collections.--Susan C. Awe, Univ. of New Mexico Lib., Albuquerque

Booknews

Presents a methodology for assessing and transforming an organization's corporate culture, using sociological concepts of sociability and solidarity to explore human dynamics within corporations. Distills the concept of culture into a diagnostic test that managers can use to identify which of four basic cultural forms prevail within a department, team, or organization. Explains how corporate culture affects a company's overall performance, and how to position each culture for greater competitive advantage. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780887309021
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 10/1/1998
Edition description: 1 ED
Edition number: 1
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.37 (w) x 9.58 (h) x 1.04 (d)

	Preface and Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	Organizational Culture: The Social Architecture of Success - or Failure	1
2	Sociability, Solidarity, and the Double S Cube	21
3	"What's My Culture?": Four Tests to Find Out	44
4	Between Friends: The Networked Culture	71
5	Get to Work on Sunday: The Mercenary Culture	97
6	All Together Alone: The Fragmented Culture	123
7	We Are Family: The Communal Culture	145
8	On Changing Culture	169
9	The Hidden Work of Work	199
10	Conclusion: Thinking like an Anthropologist	216
	Notes	222
	Index	229

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Character of a Corporation: How Your Company's Culture Can Make or Break Your Business

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