Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life

by Terrence E. Deal, Allan A. Kennedy

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.

Genres: Business, Management, Leadership

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 1982

Reviews

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading older books (i.e. a few decades ago). Corporate Cultures is basic/ simple in its style (which is perhaps part of Addison Wesley's "culture"!) but it is still better most mass-market books found at BN today, which throw a little of everything in there and seem cluttered with random ideas that aren't actually cohesive. The best concept in this book is the framework for thinking about corporate cultures, which categorizes them into four types based on the level of risk experienced by marketplace in which the organization functions and the rate that the organization receives feedback about its decisions and products/ services. It's your typical x-y axis chart but it's useful. It also helped me see more clearly how clashes between the cultures of former workplaces and my personality/ own values made it difficult for me to succeed in those environments.

[Patricia]

Read half and skimmed the other 1/2. Found it in a packed floor-to-ceiling second-hand bookshop just before Christmas and noticing it felt momentous at the time thinking it was the missing piece for my dissertation to finally shape up into something. I am not so sure anymore, but I did appreciate all the tight and logical taxonomies and hopefully I'll be able to make use of them. Picked up Roth's The Dying Animal alongside this one and eavesdropped on one of the owners waiting on news about a friend's cat named Domingo who was undergoing surgery at that very moment to remove some string he had swallowed. If this was a proper writing thing, I feel like linking that story with Roth's title could take me somewhere, but I can't be arsed. All this to say the book is good, but I need the 2022/2023 version, and that quite possibly nothing beats a good used bookstore.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the first books I read on organizational culture. Though interesting and up to date, it was a bit more superficial than what I was looking for at the time. Nonetheless, it is a good introduction to ideas around corporate culture.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though this sometimes reads like a textbook and was originally published in 1982, I really enjoyed it and found it to be completely relevant. There's great stuff in here if you're interested in organizational structure, management, brands and company core values.