Overview

Business experts everywhere have been finding that corporations run not only on numbers, but on culture. In this revised and updated 2000 edition of Corporate Cultures , organization consultants Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy probe the conference rooms and corridors of corporate America to discover the key to business excellence. They find that the health of the bottom line is not ultimately guaranteed by attention to the rational aspects of managing-financial planning, personnel policies, cost controls, and the like. What's more important to long-term prosperity is the company's culture-the inner values, rites, rituals, and heroes-that strongly influence its success, from top management to the secretarial pool.For junior and senior managers alike, Deal and Kennedy offer explicit guidelines for diagnosing the state of one's own corporate culture and for using the power of culture to wield significant influence on how business gets done.

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9780738203300

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Reviews

Reflecting the swing away from rational, analytical approaches to management, and toward humanistic modes of approach, Harvard education professor Deal and management consultant Kennedy hypothesize that the most successful American companies - from IBM and Procter & Gamble to Mary Leu Cosmetics - generate a strong internal culture that gives employees and management a distinct identity, mutual values and goals, and so on, all reinforced by rituals and heroes. ( Managers like Harold Geneen are captured by an ethic of survival. . . . Heroes, by contrast, are driven by an ethic of creation. ) Four major cultural tribes are identified: the tough-guy, or macho (individualists who take high risks, with quick feedback, like those in the entertainment or publishing business); the work hard/play hard types (action is the byword, and risks are minimal); the bet-your-company cultures (high stakes, slow feedback, like the oil industries); and the process cultures (government bureaucracies, banks, etc.) - where the emphasis is on how things are done, because very little is actually risked and feedback is hard to come by. A company's cultural style can be diagnosed, the authors aver, through such tools as slogans (IBM's slogan pertains to service, and that places it squarely in the work hard/play hard culture, where values center on customers and their needs.) In the future, they foresee atomized (decentralized) business organization, where culture will be an even stronger determinant of success. (Some signs: franchising, divestiture, spin-offs.) Deal and Kennedy are skilled at charting the course of cultural development within a variety of corporate climes, and their documentation from their personal consultancies is impressive The public record also suggests that there's a good deal to what they say - which, in any case, makes fascinating, provocative reading. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Allan Kennedy is president of Selkirk Associates, Inc., a microcomputer software company in Boston. Prior to holding this position he was a consultant for twelve years with McKinsey and Company. Terrence Deal is a professor at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, where he specializes in the study of organization cultures. He has recently taught at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Allan A. Kennedy is a Boston- and London-based management consultant and writer. He is co-author with Terrence Deal of Corporate Cultures and The New Corporate Cultures. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

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