Why Should Anyone Work Here?: What It Takes to Create an Authentic Organization

Imagine designing the best company on earth to work for . . .

What would that company be like? How would you build and sustain it? As a leader, you need to know. In the past, businesses made people conform to the organization’s needs. But the old paradigm has shifted. Now leaders must transform their organizations so that they attract the right people, keep them, and inspire them to do their best work. How do you create a culture people want to belong to?

In this powerful and necessary follow-up to the classic Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, leadership and organizational sages Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones identify and illuminate the six key organizational attributes to do just that. In separate chapters, they delve deeply into each one:

1. Let people be themselves
2. Practice radical honesty
3. Magnify people’s strengths
4. Stand for authenticity (more than shareholder value)
5. Make work meaningful
6. Make simple rules

With vivid stories and examples from global companies, the authors illustrate the kind of strong, attractive workplace culture that leads to sustained high performance. They also provide ways of assessing how your company is doing and describe the tensions and trade-offs that leaders must manage as they transform their organizations.

Why Should Anyone Work Here? is the question all contemporary organizational leaders must constantly ask themselves if they want to survive and thrive in the new world. This book will help them answer that question.

Rob Goffee is Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, where he teaches in the world-renowned Senior Executive Programme. Gareth Jones is a Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School and a visiting professor at Spain’s IE Business School in Madrid. Goffee and Jones consult to the boards of several global companies and are coauthors of Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? and Clever, both published by Harvard Business Review Press.