Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

Foreword

Ed and I have been partnering for the past year to expand his readership, grow his consulting business, and provide for more opportunities for helping and learning. It’s a great honor to share some thoughts in this foreword to the book that provides us with the name for our venture, the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute (OCLI.org).

When Ed first started this book in the early 1980s, organizational culture was a pretty new concept. Now, the concept is universally accepted, discussed, diagnosed, shaped, “changed,” blamed, and so on. This has happened in a generation. When I was finishing my social anthropology undergraduate degree in 1983, Ed was finishing the first edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership. Earlier this year (2016), as Ed’s granddaughter (my daughter) was finishing her undergraduate economics degree and was preparing to join an international management consulting firm, he asked her to describe the firm’s culture. This was perhaps presumptuous on Ed’s part as she had had only a summer internship’s worth of experience in this culture with which to answer the question. Yet, with little hesitation she described key artifacts and espoused values of this firm’s culture. We drew the inference that after just a couple of months she had been exposed to, even indoctrinated into, this culture deeply enough that she could articulate it and, ideally, thrive within it.

However, there is nothing surprising about this; mature corporations (in this ...