Revitalising the Workplace After Downsizing, Mergers and Reengineering.
This assesses the recent effects of economic forces (globalisation, technology) and management trends (downsizing, outsourcing, short-termism, merger mania) on the cultures of companies today.
Drawing from their extensive experiences working on the front lines with organisations around the world, and citing the most current data from hundreds of sources, Deal and Kennedy quantify for the first time the direct effects of these trends on corporate culture. Not surprisingly, they confirm that these forces have resulted in a corporate environment of fear, cynicism, distrust, self-interest and denial.
What is surprising, however, is the authors' discovery that despite enormous internal and external pressures, people still naturally form communities within organisations to gain a sense of identity, place and purpose. Taking examples from innovative organisations - from Southwest Airlines to British Telecom - Deal and Kennedy boldly proclaim a new mandate for managers: to exercise "cultural leadership" by finding common ground among these corporate subcultures. They call for corporations to rebuild the social fabric of work and institute performance measurement systems that emphasize long-term goals over the simplistic (and often destructive) current efforts to maximise shareholder value.
