The cultural sector is gaining increasing importance in our economies, consistantly registering growth rates above average GDP. This book presents insights on how cultural institutions can find new perspectives in their management and provides ideas to hasten culture's role as an economic developer.

Although culture is what gives companies the ability to survive, it is often addressed only after problems have emerged. While it is true that corporate culture cannot be put into numbers, it can be visualized and modeled using the author's Culture Map. The values underlying all corporate cultures are represented in seven colors which combine to form individual patterns. The Culture Map can be used as a basis for successful change and innovation processes, mergers, and integrations. When managers and employees see where they are trying to go, it enables them to take the appropriate decisions and actions. "This is the perfect (work-)book for those who want to know what makes their organization tick and who want to actively sculpt its success." Carina Kontio, Handelsblatt "An extensive introduction to the topic of corporate culture with vivid case studies and graphics. Very attractive design and great visual transfer." acquisa

Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive. In this book, Flamholtz and Randle define culture, identifying and explaining the five key dimensions that determine it: a customer orientation; a people orientation; a process orientation; strong standards of performance and accountability; innovation and openness to change. They explain why culture is a critical factor in organizational success and failure—a key determinant of financial performance. Then, they provide a theoretically sound, highly practical, and field-tested method for managing corporate culture—presenting a set of international and domestic cases that show how actual companies have leveraged culture as the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to well-known companies such as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, IBM, and Toyota, the text presents lesser known culture stars, such as Smartmatic and Infogix. While other titles on culture have focused too heavily on the organization as a psychological being, or on academic studies of culture as a business lever, Corporate Culture draws on empirics to present a go-to, must-read guide for leveraging corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage and as a means of impacting the bottom line.

Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.

This book explores business ethics as applied in a modern context including data management, corporate social responsibility, media ethics, and government ethics. Ethics are not the same as morals. They are contextual and apply to specific relationships. This work explores business ethics as applied in a modern context including data management, corporate social responsibility, media ethics, and government ethics. Drawing on the work of philosophers, the work is nonetheless contemporary and practical.