Rob Goffee is an internationally respected authority on organizational transformation. A professor of organizational behavior and subject chair at London Business School, Goffee has published six books and more than forty articles in scholarly and managerial journals, most recently the Harvard Business Review. Prior to joining London Business School, he held a number of academic positions and more recently has held a visiting appointment at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines and has appeared as a guest on many radio and television programs on business issues. In addition, he consults with a number of large corporations in the area of organizational change, corporate culture, and management development.
Gareth Jones is the BT Professor of Organizational Development at Henley Management College and visiting professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France. He has held a number of academic appointments, but immediately prior to joining Henley he was senior vice president, human resources, at Polygram International, one of the world's largest recorded music companies and Europe's biggest filmmaker. His areas of expertise are cultural analysis, creativity, and leadership, and with Goffee he coauthored the widely acclaimed Harvard Business Review article "What Holds the Modern Company Together?"
Together, Goffee and Jones are founders of the London-based consulting firm Creative Management Associates (CMA). For the past decade, CMA has instituted large-scale cultural change initiatives at many leading international organizations. Over recent years they have worked with Johnson & Johnson, Glaxo-Wellcome, Shell, Unilever, Apple, Honeywell, Booz Allen, and Coopers & Lybrand.
Rob Goffee is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School where he also serves as the subject area chair. He is the coauthor of five books including, most recently, with Richard Scase, Corporate Realities. In addition, he consults with a number of large corporations in the area of organizational change, corporate culture, and management development.
Gareth Jones is the BT Professor of Organizational Development at Henley Management College and visiting Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD. He is the author of books and articles dealing with organizational change, gender at work, and organizational culture. He is, with Rob Goffee, a founding partner of Creative Management Associates and works with a number of organizations who see creativity as a source of competitive advantage.
The Character of a Corporation was born of a widely acclaimed Harvard Business Review article, "What Holds the Modern Company Together?"
Jacket design by Rick Pracher >acket phonograph © 1998 by Malcolm Piers/
Image Bank
Author photograph of Rob Goffee © 1998 by Tom Bulatovic. Author photograph of Gareth Jones © 1998 by Tim Burt
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“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."
—Gary Hamel, coauthor of Competing for the Future, and chairman, Strategos
"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."
—Dr. Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
"In their celebrated Harvard Business Review article, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones 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-tos for managers to understand, evaluate, and reshape the cultures of their organizations." — Sumantra Ghoshal, Professor, London Business School, coauthor
of Managing Across Borders and The Individualized Corporation
