The Character of a Corporation

A unique and insightful exploration of the importance of a corporation's "character," based on years of research and consultations with high-profile companies, shows how a positive corporate culture can powerfully affect long-term corporate success. Tour.

How does a company's corporate culture relate to its bottom line? Pretty directly, say the authors, who point to Disney, Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, and Nike as having achieved a healthy balance in both "company performance and employees' quality of life" that contributes to the well-being of their overall corporate cultures.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The idea of corporate culture was popularized more than 15 years ago in Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy's Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (1982). Since then, so much has been written about it that it has become trivialized into a form of pop psychology. Building on their widely noted article "What Holds the Modern Company Together," which appeared in the November 1996 issue of Harvard Business Review, Goffee and Jones raise the discussion of corporate culture to a new level. Ten years ago the pair founded Creative Management Associates, a London-based consulting firm. They make the point that in most organizations several different cultures can be in play at any one time and that cultures can change or evolve over time. Starting with the concepts of sociability and solidarity, they identify networked, communal, fragmented, and mercenary corporate cultures and show how each can take both positive and negative forms. David Rouse