Culture.com: Building Corporate Culture in the Connected Workplace - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peg Neuhauser has worked for over eighteen years as a speaker and organizational consultant, specializing in the areas of organizational culture, communication, and conflict management. Her company, PCN Associates works with clients in many industries, including high-tech, health care, finance, and publishing. Peg completed studies in the United States and England with an M.A. in psychology and undergraduate work in sociology. She is the author of two other books, Tribal Warfare in Organizations and Corporate Legends and Lore: The Power of Storytelling as a Management Tool. Ray Bender, Ph.D. is a speaker and consultant specializing in alliances, leadership, and organizational change. Prior to establishing his own company, he was a Vice President and Research Director for executive programs at the Gartner Group, where he was responsible for setting the research agenda to support the issues of Chief Information Officers of large North American organizations. Prior to joining Gartner Group, he was a Consulting Instructor at IBM's Advanced Business Institute. He has a B.S. in History and Sociology, an M.S. in Industrial Administration, and a Ph.D. in Management. Ray is a graduate of the Army's Command and General Staff Course and a retired Army Colonel. Kirk L. Stromberg is the managing partner of the StarCompass Group, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in organizational and individual change. Previously, he was an executive at the senior management level at AARP responsible for strategic planning, several major change initiatives, and management of its research and training operations. He was also a lobbyist at the state and federal levels for two major associations and an Operations Officer in the clandestine services of the CIA.

Aus dem Klappentext

We are living in a .com world. The old rules are changing, but it is not yet clear what the new rules are. Everything is in flux, and the speed and complexity of the changes are difficult for many of us to absorb. Futurists, historians, and social scientists tell us the transition to a networked economy is the biggest shift in the way the world functions since the Industrial Revolution. The people working today are the bridge generation, spanning the gap between the old and the new ways of doing business.

The business and professional world is working feverishly to learn how to change its business strategies to capitalize on this .com world. A great deal of attention is directed at the external business issues of designing, marketing, selling, and delivering goods and services in the networked environment. But the internal infrastructure and culture changes that are needed to deliver on those new business strategies have received very little attention so far.

Culture.com tackles the question of how to create a corporate culture that matches the new .com business strategy. It explains how a company's internal culture must adapt to complement, support, and be properly aligned with the organization's external business strategy. And it shows how failure to adapt can undermine, or even destroy, a company's ability to carry out its objectives.

Culture.com is a highly practical guide to the pressing corporate culture issues that face every e-business, from .com start-ups to traditional organizations making the transition into the clicks-and-mortar world.

* Explains the 9 key characteristics of a .com culture that are vital for all organizations. * Offers practical tips and strategies to ensure that your corporate culture can be a competitive advantage, rather than a liability, in the .com world. * Provides hands-on advice on changing your corporate culture to reflect the new realities of e-business: debugging on the fly, rapid risk taking and decision making, developing a culture of collaboration, building corporate culture in virtual organizations, and much more. * Shows how to break old organizational habits that that no longer fit the world of e-business, and how to learn now ways to think, believe, and behave. * Features examples and interviews from a wide range of companies, government settings, and not-for-profit.

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Preface

A Road Map for Moving to a .com culture

Corporations, non-profit organisations, and government agencies are racing to transform themselves into e-business enterprises. For traditional organisations this represents a massive shift in business strategy and infrastructure. The purpose of this book is to provide a road map for building a corporate culture that can help companies succeed in carrying out their business strategies in a connected business world. Leaders and managers in the corporate, government, and not-for-profit sectors can use the ideas in Culture.com to find practical tools to ensure their organisation's culture fits the demands of the connected workplace.

Because the transition into e-business is still so new, there is very little research to draw on about how to build a .com corporate culture. This was our biggest challenge in writing Culture.com. We gathered our data from scratch by interviewing the people living through the changes and inventing what to do as they go. We also reviewed articles in journals, newspapers, and books on e-business, looking for stories about its effect on how work is now being conducted in organisations. We found that culture.com is a moving target. No one knows for sure what will happen or how to make it all work. In many ways, we are all living in the middle of a grand experiment. When we mentioned to one colleague that we had to do our own research through interviews, he laughed and said the word "research" was an old one that may not even apply in this case. And he is right. In this book we observe and report on fast-changing moving target. We also coach and offer some tips for proceeding down this road.

Our sources for the ideas in this book were you: the people who are living through it. We interviewed people from a wide variety of corporations, making sure to include start-up .com companies, as well as older, traditional organisations. We collected ideas on what worries them, what they are trying to do to change their enterprises, and what frankly has them stumped at the present time. We collected their advice, added our combined expertise on corporate culture, and wrote this book as a practical road map of ideas and advice on how to build a .com culture. It is the best current thinking but certainly not the end of the story. Actually, it is just the beginning of the journey.

To track the ongoing culture evolution inside companies in the coming years, we have set up a web site and will continue to do research on what is happening out there. We will probably continue to avoid the traditional academic forms of research to track the trends, because the process of conducting and analysing that type of research is too slow and would likely leave us with obsolete information rather than useful updates about current workplace developments.