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Corporate Culture and Performance
by: John P. Kotter

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780029184677
ISBN: 0029184673
Label: Free Press
Manufacturer: Free Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: April 07, 1992
Publisher: Free Press
Sales Rank: 308692
Studio: Free Press

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Product Description:

Going far beyond previous empirical work, John Kotter and James Heskett provide the first comprehensive critical analysis of how the 'culture' of a corporation powerfully influences its economic performance, for better or for worse. Through painstaking research at such firms as Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, ICI, Nissan, and First Chicago, as well as a quantitative study of the relationship between culture and performance in more than 200 companies, the authors describe how shared values and unwritten rules can profoundly enhance economic success or, conversely, lead to failure to adapt to changing markets and environments.

With penetrating insight, Kotter and Heskett trace the roots of both healthy and unhealthy cultures, demonstrating how easily the latter emerge, especially in firms which have experienced much past success. Challenging the widely held belief that 'strong' corporate cultures create excellent business performance, Kotter and Heskett show that while many shared values and institutionalized practices can promote good performances in some instances, those cultures can also be characterized by arrogance, inward focus, and bureaucracy -- features that undermine an organization's ability to adapt to change. They also show that even 'contextually or strategically appropriate' cultures -- ones that fit a firm's strategy and business context -- will not promote excellent performance over long periods of time unless they facilitate the adoption of strategies and practices that continuously respond to changing markets and new competitive environments.

Fundamental to the process of reversing unhealthy cultures and making them more adaptive, the authors assert, is effective leadership. At the heart of this groundbreaking book, Kotter and Heskett describe how executives in ten corporations established new visions, aligned and motivated their managers to provide leadership to serve their customers, employees, and stockholders, and thus created more externally focused and responsive cultures.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Great for connecting the dots...
This book is a staple for anyone looking to connect the dots between tangible shareholder value and intangible assets. In our work at ThinkShed we often see companies struggling to make the connection between culture (as a metaphor and measure of their operating model) and the direct impact it can have on shareholder value.

We work with companies to help them align their culture(s) to their stated strategy or two help them effectively merge cultures and we will often refer skeptical executives to this book. They read it and they get it! (We then help move them from "getting it" to "getting it done")

This book is a breath of fresh air in a sector that could well do with less rhetoric and more practical steps!

Rating:

- important research on company performance
If you buy into the argument that the only responsibility of a business is to its stockholders and that paying attention to areas outside of this will result in a lesser-performing company, the research of two Harvard Business School professors suggests just the opposite. John Kotter and James Heskett studied the performance of 207 large firms over an 11-year period. They wrote of their findings:

"Corporate culture can have a significant impact on a firm's long-term economic performance. We found that firms with cultures that emphasized all the key managerial constituencies (customers, stockholders, and employees) and leadership from managers at all levels outperformed firms that did not have those cultural traits by a huge margin. Over an eleven-year period, the former increased revenues by an average of 682 percent versus 166 percent for the latter, expanded their work forces by 282 percent versus 36 ... Read More

Rating:

- Intellectual, Informative Book on Corporate Culture
This book, though it reads like a textbook or reference, provides good information about this topic and once getting past the writing style, is one that businesspeople could learn from.

Practical and insightful.

Read The Management Masters Series first book Corporate Culture...A must read of this topic, highly recommended.

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