Customer Reviews

New Corporate Culture Pb (Business Essentials)

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"In 1982 we published Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. We were motivated to write the book because of a nagging feeling that something was missing in our ability to understand organizations. This missing link was obviously very subtle-but also extremely powerful. Along with other pioneers (Organizational Culture and Leadership - E.Schein, Corporate Culture and Performance - J. Kotter / J. Heskett, Built to Last - J. Collins / J. Porras), we ventured an idea about what lay underneath the rational-technical veneer of business. We tagged the phantom force 'corporate culture.'... In this, our new book, we plan"Deal and Kennedy write, "to chronicle changes that have occured-where they came from, why they happened, and their effect on business cultures. We also offer suggestions for how corporations can be revitalized in the wake of the grueling assaults since the early 1980s. Our hope is that modern managers can use our book to find a balance between the management actions needed to stay competitive and the human needs of workers to belong to meaningful institutions."

In this context, with their words, Deal and Kennedy basically :

* summarize the evidence that has emerged since they first wrote about the importance of culture to superior performance over the long haul.

* chronicle, one by one, the forces that have chipped away at the culture of companies since the early 1980s.

* discuss the shareholder value movement and the impact it has had on corporate decisionmaking.

* focus on downsizing, which has cut the soul out of many corporations.

* show how outsourcing has emerged as the new tool of cost cutters just when conventional cost-reduction approaches have begun to run out of steam.

* explore how merger mania has forced the most unlikely of combinations on workforces still reeling from the waves of cost cutting that decimated them in the early 1990s.

* look at how computerization, potentially a tool for liberating workers from drudgery, has instead isolated workers from one another and made them servants to machines.

* discuss how the combination of these factors has decimated traditional corporate cultures, replacing joy, commitment, and loyalty with fear, alienation, and self-interest.

I highly recommend this study to all executives.

The last twenty years have seen two major trends: increasing study of corporate cultures, and increasing reason to rue the cultures' progress. Since 1982, when Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy published Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, the havoc wrought by corporate upheaval has been measured as much by the spillage of ink as by the ruin of employee life. Short-term management, outsourcing, downsizing, reengineering, mergers, and the ever-popular leveraged buy-outs have taken their toll on once-strong corporate cultures. Today, when authors and analysts detect fear, cynicism, and anomie among corporations' employees, their blame is laid unhesitatingly at the door of senior executives. Look on thy works, ye mighty, and despair.

Now Deal and Kennedy are back with a sequel, The New Corporate Cultures, and they shall not fail or falter in condemning what they find. They devote the first half of the volume to a trenchant economic history of the last two decades, exposing the roots of these negative cultures with remarkable clarity and precision. Drawing largely from key books and articles in the field, Deal and Kennedy describe a Bizarro, anti-Rockwell world - culture of want, culture of fear, culture of denial - that makes you want to weep into your beer. Gone are the corporate cultures of yesteryear, supplanted by "negative influences that threaten the ability of businesses to thrive and compete."

This is a distinctly diffident claim, and rightly so. While few would argue that weak cultures are a good thing, even fewer have come close to proving that they impact the bottom line. John Kotter and James Heskett gave it a shot in their Corporate Culture and Performance (1992); as Deal and Kennedy admit, "in [Kotter and Heskett's] analyses, cultural strength itself did not seem to correlate significantly with financial performance." (Not that this stops Deal and Kennedy from deliberately skewing those data and presenting the results as revelatory proof, accompanied by a jab at Harvard academics.) Even if we presume that the strength of a corporate culture can be measured - for which Deal and Kennedy give neither formula nor method - we still don't know that a culture affects performance or ROI, rather than the other way around. Emboldened by proselytizing zeal, the authors have fallen victim to logical fallacy. True, Southwest Airlines is profitable, therefore it does not downsize. But it's bad logic to conclude that Southwest does not downsize, therefore it is profitable.

Deal and Kennedy are offering antagonism over answers, and their petulance is ultimately as dispiriting as their findings. Although their attacks on reengineering and overpaid CEOs may be trite, at least they're supported by facts. But they reserve a particular vitriol for the young ("young money managers", "consultants, most of them young", "newly trained MBAs not eager to spend their time on factory floors", etc.) that is unseemly in a professor and a management consultant. And when it comes time for solutions, Deal and Kennedy submit five chapters of vague recommendations unsupported by suggestions for implementation. They propose, for example, that companies should create and publish fair criteria for deciding which jobs and people are retained. That's all very well - no one wants to feel his company's retention decisions are made by the Giant Claw from Toy Story, which chooses who will go and who will stay - but who decides what is fair, whether the criteria are met, and how ever-present performance metrics can be prevented from sapping workers' souls?

Unable to prove or retaliate, The New Corporate Cultures falls back on finger-pointing and name-calling. It's a pity, really, because the authors have much to offer. Their combination of cultural anthropology, secondary research, and intelligent prose is rare and welcome among the shelves of business literature, and their book is worth reading simply for its chronicle of the American corporation in the 1980s and 1990s. As diagnosis and prescription, however, The New Corporate Cultures needs a taste of its own medicine. If you're going to pour your readers a bitter cup, be certain that the suffering is justified by the cure.

Corporate leaders need to re-visit corporate values to keep on track. Allan Kennedy and Terence Deal have put a message for corporations in their book. Corporations depend on their people - and people need to feel positive about their work and work situation to make the company fly. The book gets into outsourcing, downsizing, mergers, globalization, shareholder value, and cultural leadership. A wake-up book, written in clear, simple terms, a worthwhile read.

The other reviewers have summed up the best points about this book. Anyone studying organisational behaviour will be well advised to read this book. It brings you up-to-date in developments on the subject of corporate cultures in the 1990s. The book has global application. The notes at the end of the book are a useful reference to locate related articles and content.(My comments refer to the paperback edition.)

I was forced to read this book for a class. The information is a little dated but it still very relevant today. I ended up really liking the books view on corporate mergers and how the CEO's stuck it to the working class.

Regarding the publication "The New Corporate Cultures" I am not that familiar with the corporate world, however I found this publication very interesting. I highly suggest reading this book for those individuals that are contemplating going into busimess and who have been in business for many years. The information on revitalizing the workplace is very explicit and guidelines on downsizing, mergers and reengineering is a must for growing and stablizing the corporate world. The illustrative graphs are easy to understand and to the point. I highly recommend this publication for individuals in the corporate enviroment. Marlecelee "Fashion's By Lee & For The Home"