Corporate Culture: The Ultimate Strategic Asset

1. Jay B. Barney, “Organizational Culture: Can It Be a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage?” Academy of Management Review, 11(3), 1986, 656–665; Daniel Denison, Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness (New York: Wiley, 1990); Caren Siehl and Joanne Martin, “Organizational Culture: A Key to Financial Performance?” in Organizational Climate and Culture, ed. Benjamin Schneider (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 241–281; John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1992).

2. Flamholtz has proposed that corporate culture is an asset in the accounting sense. See Eric Flamholtz, “Conceptualizing and Measuring the Economic Value of Human Capital of the Third Kind: Corporate Culture,” Journal of Human Resource Costing and Accounting, 9(2), 2005, 78–93.

3. See, for example, Joanne Martin, Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kotter and Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance; Joanne Martin, Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2002); Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004); Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

4. This implies that these five dimensions must all be included in corporate culture statements and must be explicitly treated as part of the overall culture management process.

5. Chapter 10 focuses on the process of managing change in corporate culture. This should not be confused with the process of managing one of the specific dimensions of culture, the innovation and change dimension, which is the subject of Chapter 7.

6. See note 3 for several significant previous contributions to the literature. Others are cited throughout this book.

7. The authors’ firm, Management Systems Consulting, was founded in 1978.

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