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Managing Change Across Corporate Cultures
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Managing Change Across Corporate Cultures

Fons Trompenaars and Peter Prud'homme
Wiley, 2004
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Editorial Rating

6

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Recommendation

Consultants Fons Trompenaars and Peter Prud’homme thoroughly explore issues in corporate culture, and focus on managing change across disparate cultures. They first review milestones in business publishing, tracing the ebb and flow of corporate culture as a fashionable management subject. They offer a unique model for analyzing and assessing corporate culture, though that will primarily interest academics. General business readers will find more utility in the very brief but interesting profiles of companies that successfully managed cultural conflict while becoming global leaders: Nokia, Ikea, Applied Materials, Acer and Suez. The book’s style sometimes veers into the numbingly academic but, for the most part, it speaks comfortably to the general reader, despite grammatical errors. getAbstract recommends this to anyone who must resolve cultural issues in the wake of a merger or acquisition.

Summary

Eight Principles of ChangeMany business change programs fail because leaders neglect, overlook or don’t tackle thorny corporate culture issues. To avoid problems, you should know eight axioms about change: Change may happen with planning or not, maybe because a firm evolves or revolts.Change in an organization usually results from change in its environment.Change is necessary if an organization is to survive in a shifting environment.Change management is necessary because of the inevitability of change.Change management processes affect every other process.Poor change management can leave a firm ill-equipped to cope with future change.Change management often addresses leadership, middle management, management development, feedback, quality circles and business processes.Despite change, managers may continue to guide organizations based on core assumptions about industries, technology and people that no one bothers to question. What Corporate Culture Is and Why It MattersFour fundamental, long-accepted definitions of corporate culture say it is: 1) how we do things, 2) what our tacit rules are, 3) what our guiding values, beliefs and assumptions are; and 4) what we think is distinctive...

About the Authors

Fons Trompenaars is Director of Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (THT), an intercultural management consultancy. He is author or co-author of several books including, Did the Pedestrian Die?, 21 Leaders for the 21st Century and Riding the Waves of Culture. Peter Prud’homme is an expert on business culture with 15 years of experience as a manager with international responsibilities at Philips.

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