Without a deep understanding of your company's culture, any change
effort you undertake will fail. Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and
his coauthors identify the four most critical cultural elements leaders
need to focus on.
In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents
believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full
quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had
resulted in no visible results. Why?
The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage
their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling,
thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an
organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather
than rational--that's what makes it so hard to work with, but that's
also what makes it so powerful.
For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center's proven
methodology for identifying your culture's four most critical elements:
traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional
connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead
your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale;
authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of emotional
intuition or social connectedness; and metrics, integrated, thoughtful
measures to track progress, encourage the self-reinforcing cycle of
lasting change and link to business performance.
By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap into a source of
catalytic change within your organization. People will make an
emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will
elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company
that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.
