Corporate Culture and Performance

"A corporate culture will enhance a firm's long-term economic performance if the managers care deeply about their customers, their stockholders, and their employees, as well as leadership and other processes that can produce change."

"These cultures undermined economic performance because they did nothing to help the firms adapt to change."

"The single most visible factor that distinguishes major cultural changes that succeed from those that fail is competent leadership at the top."

"Lower- and middle-level managers are not, however, irrelevant in these stories. Ultimately, it is their actions that produce the change."

"Because of the difficulty, executives appear to fail often in their efforts to make a big cultural change."

"Although it is widely believed today that strong cultures create excellent performance, we have found that the recent experiences of nearly two hundred firms do not support that theory."

"Holding onto a good culture requires being both inflexible with regard to core adaptive values and yet flexible with regard to most practices and other values."

"Without leadership, firms cannot adapt to a fast moving world."