Cambridge Business Association
Culture Rules
Book

Culture Rules

The Leader's Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

Mark Miller
Matt Holt Books, 2023
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Engaging

Recommendation

In any organization, culture dominates. A strong culture equals a strong organization. In strong cultures, employees love their work and care about how they perform. Consultant and prolific business author Mark Miller and his team interviewed thousands of insiders to learn how to create a strong business culture (or transform a weak one). Miller sets out three requirements – “alignment, performance, and improvement” – and three rules. You should “Aspire” to achieve your firm’s goals, “Amplify” to expand your organization, and “Adapt” to change when you must. Then, he says, train the right leaders to pull it all together.

Summary

Games such as Monopoly create a “magic circle” that envelops players. Your culture can do the same.  

Board games capture players’ interest and attention, enveloping them in a magic circle. This concept originated in 1938 when Dutch historian Johan Huizinga first described how play directly influences culture. As he pointed out, when players become immersed in a game’s magic circle, they temporarily put aside personal judgment as they enthusiastically accept a game’s often arbitrary rules.  

Consider Monopoly. Players agree to elaborate rules as they get caught up in the race to buy fabled properties such as Boardwalk and Park Place. At the same time, they accept Monopoly’s negative aspects, such as obeying a “Go to Jail” card. They do it all to remain in the magic circle and have fun, the ultimate objective of any game. 

Creating a high-performance culture is the ultimate game for any organization, and establishing a magic circle is an important facet of building a culture, though it’s difficult to achieve. Culture is amorphous – tough to identify and nail down.

For example, ...

About the Author

Mark Miller is the author of The Heart of Leadership: Becoming a Leader People Want to Follow, Chess Not Checkers: Transform Your Leadership Game, Smart Leadership: Four Simple Choices to Scale Your Impact, Uncommon Greatness: Five Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership, and more. His first book was The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, co-written with Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One-Minute Manager. Miller began at Chick-fil-A as an hourly worker and became an executive serving in multiple areas of the company, including training and leadership development.  

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