Culture Shift: A Practical Guide to Managing Organizational Culture

Shortlisted for the 2020 Business Book Awards Nowadays, stakeholder consideration focuses as much on an organization's culture as it does on the bottom line – employees want to work for a company that has clear values and an engaging environment; customers and clients want to know they're supporting a worthwhile brand; and investors look to back socially responsible companies with good organizational health. Too often, businesses see culture change as a project with a defined end point – once the project is considered 'done', the dominant culture re-emerges and things go back to how they were. Culture Shift guides organizations on how to do things differently, ensuring that culture really does shift (with minimal budget and no external consultants) and putting culture permanently at the core of running the business. Founded on behavioural economics, Culture Shift recognises that people do not always make average assumptions or follow rational logic. Changing a culture, therefore, is not about telling people what to do and expecting them to fall neatly in line – it's about identifying where they are now and how they make decisions, in order to help them form new habits to create a sustainable culture shift, from the very top of the organization's workforce to the bottom. Using her extensive experience, Kirsty Bashforth outlines exactly what it takes to oversee sustainable culture change in an organization. The book explores how to communicate cultural expectations to a number of stakeholders; implement new, lasting habits in the workforce; effectively measure and track organizational culture; as well as deal with pushback from senior leadership when, as time passes, the planned culture shift risks falling lower on their agenda.

About the Author :
Kirsty Bashforth is CEO of QuayFive Ltd, advising CEOs on change, organizational culture and leadership, with clients across energy, utilities, health and financial services sectors both in the FTSE 100 and globally. Previously, she was Group Head of Organisational Effectiveness with BP, designing and delivering the shift in the company's organizational culture for five years from 2010, as part of the company's response and recovery following the Deepwater Horizon incident.

Review :
The mix of personal experience and straight-talking advice creates a vital handbook for anyone taking on the task of managing culture. I taught culture at a business school for years, and always felt that I was about to get found out, because all the models I came across sounded plausible but simply didn't work. I wish I'd had this book, and I wish I'd written it. Bravo – it should be issued to all new leaders along with their security pass on day one. Culture is so fundamental to performance, and yet working to improve it often attracts myth, mystery and scepticism. Seen on the one hand as the intangible soft stuff, or on the other as something simplistically to be fixed, neither approach will be successful. This book finds a way through the middle, based on real experience and outcomes. It's straight talking, realistic and refreshingly honest. If you are approaching the topic of driving change through culture, start here with this book. It will help you make sense of a topic so often avoided, yet so essential to grasp. One person's logic is not another's – a key premise of this accessible book that unpicks why you can't simply announce the culture you want, and expect to create it. It takes time, effort, balance and a healthy dose of pig-headedness. Wonderful, original stuff.