The character of a corporation : how your company's culture can make or break your business

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■ oca-Cola, Disney, Nike, and Hewlett-Packard all have it: a positive corporate culture that powerfully affects their bottom line. Yet despite its ability to make or break a business, corporate culture remains the most underutilized resource in business today. Why? 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 change it.

In The Character of a Corporation, internationally renowned academics and consultants Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones draw on fifteen years of research and consulting with high-profile companies such as Unilever, Polygram, Heineken, and Johnson & Johnson to present a powerful methodology for assessing and transforming one's corporate culture. Utilizing two well-established sociological concepts—sociability and solidarity—to explore the yin and yang of human dynamics within corporations, Goffee and Jones have created a highly original, fully functional framework by which to better understand corporate culture. With unrivaled practicality, The Character of a Corporation successfully quantifies the notoriously amorphous concept of culture, distilling it into a diagnostic test that managers can use to identify which of four (networked, mercenary, fragmented, communal) basic cultural forms prevail within their department, team, or organization. The Character of a Corporation also reveals:

• how the ways in which members of an organization relate to one another affects the company's overall performance—as well as the individuals' quality of life •why most organizations are characterized by several cultures at once—and how to maximize their strengths • how to successfully operate within each culture—and how to find the kind of culture that suits you best • what to do if you want or need to change your organization from one form of culture to another • how to position your culture for greater competitive advantage

Offering substantive analysis, vivid examples, and pragmatic solutions, The Character of a Corporation explores how a company's character can make the difference between short-term burnout and a sustainable long-term edge.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

This book is dedicated to all those who strive to make organizations better places to work

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BRODART Cat No 23 233 Printed in U S A