The New Corporate Cultures: Revitalizing the Workplace After Downsizing, Mergers, and Reengineering

The other reviewers have summed up the best points about this book. Anyone studying organisational behaviour will be well advised to read this book. It brings you up-to-date in developments on the subject of corporate cultures in the 1990s. The book has global application. The notes at the end of the book are a useful reference to locate related articles and content.(My comments refer to the paperback edition.)

"In 1982 we published Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. We were motivated to write the book because of a nagging feeling that something was missing in our ability to understand organizations. This missing link was obviously very subtle-but also extremely powerful. Along with other pioneers (Organizational Culture and Leadership - E.Schein, Corporate Culture and Performance - J. Kotter / J. Heskett, Built to Last - J. Collins / J. Porras), we ventured an idea about what lay underneath the rational-technical veneer of business. We tagged the phantom force 'corporate culture.'... In this, our new book, we plan"Deal and Kennedy write, "to chronicle changes that have occured-where they came from, why they happened, and their effect on business cultures. We also offer suggestions for how corporations can be revitalized in the wake of the grueling assaults since the early 1980s. Our hope is that modern managers can use our book to find a balance between the management actions needed to stay competitive and the human needs of workers to belong to meaningful institutions."In this context, with their words, Deal and Kennedy basically :* summarize the evidence that has emerged since they first wrote about the importance of culture to superior performance over the long haul.* chronicle, one by one, the forces that have chipped away at the culture of companies since the early 1980s.* discuss the shareholder value movement and the impact it has had on corporate decisionmaking.* focus on downsizing, which has cut the soul out of many corporations.* show how outsourcing has emerged as the new tool of cost cutters just when conventional cost-reduction approaches have begun to run out of steam.* explore how merger mania has forced the most unlikely of combinations on workforces still reeling from the waves of cost cutting that decimated them in the early 1990s.* look at how computerization, potentially a tool for liberating workers from drudgery, has instead isolated workers from one another and made them servants to machines.* discuss how the combination of these factors has decimated traditional corporate cultures, replacing joy, commitment, and loyalty with fear, alienation, and self-interest.I highly recommend this study to all executives.

Corporate leaders need to re-visit corporate values to keep on track. Allan Kennedy and Terence Deal have put a message for corporations in their book. Corporations depend on their people - and people need to feel positive about their work and work situation to make the company fly. The book gets into outsourcing, downsizing, mergers, globalization, shareholder value, and cultural leadership. A wake-up book, written in clear, simple terms, a worthwhile read.