“The Way We Do Things around Here”

Corporate Cultures by Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy; Addison-Wesley; Reading, Massachusetts; 1982; 232 pages; $14.95.

In simpler times, anthropologists confined themselves to South Sea islanders, slums, and Stone Age tribes in Amazonian rain forests. These days they’re exploring corporate jungles, middle management, and executives of high technology companies. As always, they’re giving us a better insight into how organized groups of people work together. In the case of Corporate Cultures, we’re offered a primer on the “cultures” of business organizations…the glue that holds companies together almost in spite of their organizational structure.

In the strictest sense, of course, the authors aren’t anthropologists, one being a Harvard Graduate School of Education professor and the other a senior partner at the giant consulting firm of McKinsey and Company. They have identified four major corporate cultures; a culture being loosely defined in the words of Marvin Bower of McKinsey & Company as “the way we do things around here.”

The four major business cultures are:

The Tough Guy, Macho Culture…

Fortunes and flops are made overnight in the world of high-risk stakes and quick feedback…The marketplace provides a variety of organizations that fall in this category: construction, cosmetics, management consulting, advertising, the entire entertainment industry.

Work Hard/Play Hard Culture…

This business kingdom is the benign and hyperactive world of sales organizations: real estate, computer companies, automotive distributors.

Bet-Your-Company Culture…Life in this culture means a diet of high risk, but slow feedback. Slow doesn’t mean less pressure; instead it means pressure as persistent as slow-drip water torture.

Industries in this culture include capital goods, companies, large-systems businesses, oil companies.

The Process Culture…This low-risk, slow-feedback corner of the world is populated by banks, insurance companies, large chunks of government, utilities.

The book deals to a great extent with the roles or “characters” played by people in the inevitable cultural networks established within a company-heroes (who aren’t often nice guys); outlaws (who may be dynamic leaders); and, many other obliquely labelled functions which refer to people’s “other jobs” within a company; the job of keeping a corporate culture going. In addition there’s a chapter on “Learning to Read Cultures” that’s of substantial value to salespeople, financial analysts, competitors, and even job seekers. Unfortunately, it’s the only chapter in the book that offers broad practical advice about what to do with all the knowledge and analysis offered by the rest of the book. In fairness to the authors, they made no pretense of calling this a how-to book. It’s simply a highly descriptive major cut at describing how various types of business organizations truly get things done…or fail to.

The final chapter offers a vision of the future that has been drastically changed by computers, especially microcomputers. It envisions very small task-oriented groups rather than the present larger, more structured departments and divisions concepts.

I find two flaws in the book. First, it dwells too much on leadership styles in the initial chapters. Second, for “how-to” people like me, it doesn’t deal deeply enough with techniques that apply the theoretical concepts proposed.

It is, however, an important first work on the subject, if for no other reason than the thought it provokes. How important? What the Gamesman was to the second half of the 1970s, Corporate Cultures is to the 80s. If you’re a manager or business person who views as vital a better understanding of your world, this book is a “must read” for you.

-Henry Holtzman

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