busa2100logo.jpg (8307 bytes)
CORPORATE CULTURE

Articles

Corporate Culture by Auxillium West. An introduction to corporate culture, including:

  • How corporate culture is implemented at Southwest Airlines and Hewlett-Packard
  • Summary of the Hofstede Cultural Orientation Model, which classifies cultures based on five continuums.
  • Key elements of a "team culture."
  • The importance of corporate culture

Cultural Evolution by Daintry Duffy, CIO Enterprise, January 15, 1999. A focus on the financial benefits of building a solid corporate culture, such as reduced hiring and training costs due to lower employee turnover. The article also:

  • Summarizes the results of a Gallup employee survey showing a correlation between favorable employee responses and key "business outcomes like profit and loss, sales, employee turnover and customer satisfaction."
  • Describes the challenges of developing an effective corporate culture.
  • Profiles the efforts of several companies, such as Home Depot, to build and maintain their corporate cultures.

Corporate Culture / Organizational Culture: Understanding and Assessment by Richard Hagberg and Julie Heifetz, Hagberg Consulting Group. Comprehensive paper providing an academic foundation for understanding the subject of corporate culture. Among the topics covered:

  • How to identify a company's corporate culture, even when it is not articulated in words. For example, a company's architecture, decor, clothing worn by employees and status symbols (or the lack of them) all provide clues.
  • The importance of the leader in shaping the culture.
  • Reasons for assessing a company's current corporate culture. For example, a company must build a realistic assessment of its current culture in order to make the changes necessary to succeed in a rapidly changing business environment.

How an organization's culture is expressed and transmitted by the Hagberg Consulting Group. Eight ways are listed, such as "what leaders pay attention to, measure and control."

Seven Levels of Organizational Consciousness by Richard Barrett. The author presents a model of corporate culture that is loosely tied to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The premise of the model is that the most successful companies build corporate cultures that encourage and nurture higher level needs and values, such as genuinely caring for their employees and customers rather than viewing them only as a means to greater profits.

Corporate Transformation Tools