Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

Preface

This fifth edition of my Organizational Culture and Leadership book is being written in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. I am acutely aware that I am writing in a different place and at a very different time. I have now partnered with my son who has experienced over his 25 years of change in various Silicon Valley technology companies all kinds of leadership and all kinds of organizational cultures. I cannot convey adequately how different things feel at this time and in this place from what I was experiencing in Cambridge in 2008 when I wrote the fourth edition.

I am happy to have Peter working with me on this next edition and to help me capture some of what we both feel, and that provides some of the flavor of what has happened to the concept of “organizational culture” during the past couple of decades. With his insights and our joint experience of the past several years, I can navigate a bit better through the various different culture “trees” without losing sight of the forest as a whole.

Much of what is new in this book is hinted at in Peter’s Foreword. Before you get to that I want to say a few words about what I think is the same in this edition and what I think is different and to some extent “new.” My three-level model of how to define and think about culture has held up well and remains the strong skeleton of this whole approach to cultural analysis. What is new is to begin to apply this thinking to the bigger picture of a multicultural ...