The New Corporate Cultures: Revitalizing The Workplace After Downsizing, Mergers, And Reengineering

When Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy collaborated on Corporate Cultures in 1982, they were examining a facet of organizational life that over time would evolve from unknown to generally misunderstood to widely accepted. In light of the attention that corporate culture has since received--and the continuous pressures exerted upon it by everything from the broadening dependence on outsourcing to the growing recognition of shareholder value--Deal, a professor at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, and Kennedy, an international management consultant and writer, decided to revisit and update their thinking in New Corporate Cultures. The two contend that a solid corporate culture is more important today than when they wrote their first book and examine ways that business leaders can "find a balance between the management actions needed to stay competitive and the human needs of workers to belong to meaningful institutions." Deal and Kennedy discuss the reasons that today corporate cultures are "in crisis" and offer suggestions for reversing the decline. --Howard Rothman