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

Goffee, Robert; Jones, Gareth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 088730902X ISBN 13: 9780887309021

Publisher: Harperbusiness, 1998

Synopsis

A unique and insightful exploration of the importance of a corporation's "character," based on years of research and consultations with high-profile companies, shows how a positive corporate culture can powerfully affect long-term corporate success. Tour.

About this title

Review

Corporate culture is more than just a way to set the tone at work--it also affects the bottom line. That's why it's critical to understand your company's culture. Authors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones argue that managers need to know if their business's culture helps or hurts, and how to change it, if necessary. Goffee and Jones know their stuff. As founders of the London-based consulting firm Creative Management Associates, they have helped launch programmes to overhaul corporate cultures at such companies as Johnson & Johnson, Coopers and Lybrand and Hilton Hotels. They have identified four basic cultures, each of which can be good or bad: the networked culture; the mercenary culture; the fragmented culture; and the communal culture. For example, do employees gossip and form cliques? That's the networked culture at its worst, and it's probably creating an atmosphere of distrust and cynicism that can damage the company's future. But networking can also mean open and effective communication--and constructive friendships--that can lead to the sharing of good ideas, all to the company's benefit.

The book includes handy diagnostic tools, so you can describe your own corporate culture. It also suggests ways to bring about change and offers tips on surviving in whatever culture you find yourself. The Character of a Corporation is instructive reading for managers who want to improve performance and for anyone looking to survive and thrive in the workplace. --Dan Ring, Amazon.com

From the Back Cover

What sets successful companies apart? What explains the commitment of their people, their focus and their fervour? The answer is corporate culture.

'The Character of a Corporation' presents a powerful, practical methodology for assessing and transforming one's corporate culture – that elusive component of business which has the power to make or break a business's long-term success.

Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike and Hewlett Packard all have it: a positive corporate culture that powerful affects their bottom line. Yet corporate culture remains the most under-utilised weapon in business because most companies are intimidated by its intangibility, convinced of its secondary importance to the 'harder' components of their strategic plans, or simply don't know how to assess culture or fix it.

Drawing on fifteen years of research, and offering vivid examples and pragmatic solutions, world-renowned management experts Goffee and Jones explore how a company's 'character' can make the difference between short-term burnout and a sustainable long-term edge.

'The Character of a Corporation' is essential reading for anyone – from senior-level executive to middle manager – who wants to identify and thrive within their company's culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harperbusiness
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 088730902X
• ISBN 13: 9780887309021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 235