CORPORATE CULTURES : The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life

Business experts everywhere have been finding that corporations run not only on numbers, but on culture. Organization consultants Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy probe the conference rooms and corridors of corporate America to discover the key to business excellence. They find that the health of the bottom line is not ultimately d by attention to the rational aspects of managing€”financial planning, personnel policies, cost controls, and the like. What€™s more important to long-term prosperity is the company€™s culture€”the inner values, rites, rituals, and heroes€”that strongly influence its success, from top management to the secretarial pool.For junior and senior managers alike, Deal and Kennedy offer explicit guidelines for diagnosing the state of one€™s own corporate culture and for using the power of culture to wield significant influence on how business gets done.

Allan Kennedy is president of Selkirk Associates, Inc., a microcomputer software company in Boston. Prior to holding this position he was a consultant for twelve years with McKinsey and Company.Terrence Deal is a professor at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, where he specializes in the study of organization cultures. He has recently taught at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.Allan A. Kennedy is a Boston- and London-based management consultant and writer. He is co-author with Terrence Deal of Corporate Cultures and The New Corporate Cultures. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.