INTRODUCTION
1. The sociological literature on these two concepts is extensive. Those wishing to trace their origin could begin with, T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis (London: Heinemann, 1979).
2. Recent interest dates back to the early 1980s with Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper and Row, 1982). A flood of publications followed. For a scholarly treatment see Ed Schein, Organization , Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1985); for a recent treatment that links corporate culture and performance see James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
CHAPTER 1
1. Two recent books provide good overviews of the strategy literature—and, at the same time, develop a position of their own: Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995); John Kay, Foundations of Corporate Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
2. Joanne Martin provides a concise and scholarly overview of the literature and competing definitions of organizational culture in her contribution to N. Nicholson, ed.. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Organizational Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).
3. For an overview of trends and implications for the future see J. Naisbett, Global Paradox (New York: Morrow, 1994).
4. Private interview.
5. An outline of what we may expect in new careers is provided in Michael Arthur and Denise Rouseau, eds.. The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
6. For a sensitive treatment of what may be lost as a result of recent changes in employment relationships, see Charles Heckscher, White Collar Blues (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
7. John Kay—an economist—provides a powerful and eloquent case for the significance of social architecture in Foundations of Corporate Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
CHAPTER 2
1. An excellent historical overview is provided by Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1967).
2. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Eabour in Society (New York: Free Press, 1966).
3. For a persuasive academic treatment of the fundamentally sociable aspects of human life see, Alan Page Fiske, 'The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality/' Psychological Review 99, no 4 (1992), pp. 689-723.
4. Very influential for us in understanding the power of these ideas was the work of the late Derek Allcorn. He discussed his thoughts with us on many occasions while were were graduate students.
5. A classic and influential review of the research literature is in George C. Homans, The Human Group (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). Sociability in different societies is also dealt with in Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).
6. Conditions for creativity are explored by Theresa Amabile, Creativity in Context (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996).
7. Sociological treatments of solidarity are discussed extensively in R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought , vols. 1 and 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970).
8. To maneuver successfully between cultures requires more than
technical or academic ability as Daniel Coleman has shown in Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
9. Much of the prescriptive managerial literature celebrates the features of the communal form as the only corporate culture that can deliver long term competitive success. This repeats the error of an earlier literature (scientific management) that claimed there was "one best way" to organize and manage. Business is not that simple; although companies that achieve long-term success may share certain features, it is a mistake to elevate this to "cultural" similarity.
.10. The tension between sociability and solidarity may explain, at least in part, the subsequent poor performance and cultural "disintegration" of many of those companies identified by Peters and Waterman as "excellent."
11. For a comparison between Unilever and Procter & Gamble see Chris Bartlett and Sumantra Goshal, Managing across Borders: The Transnational Solution (Harvard Business School Press, 1989).
CHAPTER 4
1. A common error is to see all small firms as dominated by harmonious social relationships with little or no conflict. This is a mistake; for a review see R. Goffee and R. Scase, Corporate Realities (New York: Routledge, 1995).
2. Much of the recent research has focused on the role of tacit knowledge in explaining failure in technology transfer. The pioneering work is M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1958) and The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). More recent work comes from Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1995).
3. There is a massive and growing literature on anxiety and stress in the workplace. Clearly, not all stress is experienced as "negative"; eustress is the term used for "positive" stress. Much turns on personality differences, work orientations, and the "fit" between a person and their job. Recent evidence is presented in J. Quick et al, eds. Work and Well-being: Assessments and Interventions for Occupational Health (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992).
4. The seminal work is Alvin W. Gouldner's "The Norm of Reciprocity," American Sociological Review 25 (1960), pp. 161-178. These in-
sights were developed in Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964).
5. Differences in the ways that rules emerge and are applied in work organizations are explored brilliantly in a sociological classic, Alvin Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
6. This issue is discussed in T. Davenport and L. Prusak, Working Knowledge: How Organisations Manage What They Know (Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
7. Many of the characteristic features of negatively networked bureaucracies—and their innovation constraining implications—are described in two books by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters (London: Unwin, 1985); and When Giants Learn to Dance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
8. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
9. The popular literature on leadership sometimes forgets that it involves a relationship—between leaders and followers; the nature of that relationship varies in different organizational contexts.
CHAPTER 5
1. In many respects the mercenary form is the most celebrated in the 1990s; much of the work on strategic intent promotes the focus, sense of purpose, and commitment of this cultural type. The contemporary literature on teamwork also has a distinctive high solidarity bias; see, for example, J. R. Katzenbach and D. K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994).
2. Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994).
3. For an insight into the competitive struggle between these two companies, see "Cola Wars Continue: Coke v Pepsi in the 1990s," Harvard Business School Case (9-794-055), revised May 1994.
4. Fortune , 14 December 1992, pp. 93-4.
5. For a descriptive history see D. Rogers, The Future of American Banking (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), chapter 5
6. See G. Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, op. cit.
7. For a review of key processes in the learning organization, see Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
8. For a discussion of useful behaviors in acquisitions, see J. Hunt and S. Downing, Acquisitions: The Management of Social Drama , forthcoming, Oxford University Press.
9. Fortune , 10 November 1997, p. 77.
CHAPTER 6
1. Of course, it is inconceivable to think of a human organization without a culture. Culture is a condition of being human.
2. Some organizations are, indeed, coordinated by output measures. See H. Mintzberg, Structures in Five (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983), for a discussion of organizational measures and structures.
3. We are drawing upon an established distinction between occupational and organizational careers. Many of the professions are characterized by occupational careers—organizational affiliations are secondary and, possibly, unimportant. The growth in knowledge workers suggests that occupational careers may be increasing.
4. For a highly illuminating discussion see Elliot Jacques, The Measurement of Responsibility (London: Tavistock, 1956).
5. We have drawn upon the 1997 London Business School MBA project by Nick Jones for much of this example.
6. For recent insights on the development of an innovation culture in the automotive sector see Jerry Hirshberg, The Creative Priority (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
7. For the alternative view—that a sense of community can be created and sustained electronically—see Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
CHAPTER 7
1. The communal culture is celebrated in much of the literature on high-performing, "strong" culture companies. Its appeal is obvious, but the empirical evidence does not support the view that it is always necessary for success, nor that it can easily be sustained over time.
2. For a discussion of this type of culture see C. Handy, The Gods of Management (London: Penguin, 1979), where he discusses the leader as Zeus.
3. The imagery of fighting can be misleading. It is not that communal organizations want to eliminate all competition; rather they are obsessed by the power of their own products and services. This point is made forcibly in Kay, op. cit., p. 364: "Success in business derives from adding value of your own, not diminishing that of your competitors, and it is based on distinctive capability not destructive capacity."
4. See E. Schein, op. cit.
5. This case is developed from research by Rose Trevelyan and we are grateful, in particular, for help from Chris Satterthwaite, a partner at HHCL.
6. This is a rather difficult notion. It means that when people interact with each other at work, they start from the assumption that they are both acting in the interests of the organization. This is a huge advantage compared with highly political organizations where each action has to be "read" and "decoded."
7. There can develop high levels of groupthink, which occurs when too great an emphasis is placed on the harmony and morale of the group. It becomes very difficult to challenge accepted beliefs.
8. How leaders do—or don't—develop other leaders is a critical but neglected topic recently picked up in Noel Tichy, The Leadership Engine (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
CHAPTER 8
1. There are many books on change; many are high on exhortation but low on practical help. For a clearly written, straightforward approach see John Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
2. The interpersonal trust relationships associated with high sociability often take years to develop; they can be undone very quickly. Rebuilding trust can be a slow process.
3. At one stage the pages of the British press were full of highly critical descriptions of the changes at the BBC. Hardly a week went by without some high-profile insider lamenting the impact of the new regime.
4. Standard training for selection interviewing urges individuals to reject "first impression" stereotyping; it is good advice.
5. It is our overwhelming experience that good team-builders make time for these small initiatives in their diary: Deliberately and incrementally they build the cohesion of the group.
6. This is a characteristic of the successful corporations identified by James C. Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last (New York: Harper- Collins, 1994).
7. Obsessed with the measurable and the present, too few managers spend time (together) imagining the future—a perspective well developed in Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future (Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1995).