Corporate Culture and Performance

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Corporate Culture and Performance pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

1. Kotter and Heskett tested three rival theories of culture and performance across 207 firms in twenty-two industries: the strong-culture theory (intense, widely shared values predict success on their own), fit theory (values matched to strategy and industry predict success), and adaptive-culture theory (values oriented toward continuous responsiveness predict success). Only the third held up against a decade of actual financial results.
2. Over the eleven years the study tracked, firms with adaptive cultures far outgrew the rest: roughly 682 percent revenue growth versus 166 percent, 901 percent stock price growth versus 74 percent, and 756 percent net income growth versus essentially flat.

The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.

1. A Puzzle Inside the Excellence Boom
2. What a Culture Actually Is
3. Strength Without Guarantee
4. Fit Is Necessary, Not Sufficient
5. The Adaptive Culture Advantage
6. How an Unadaptive Culture Takes Root
7. Leaders Who Broke the Mirror
8. The Mechanics of Change, Not Just the Message
9. Keeping an Adaptive Culture Adaptive