win from within: build organizational culture for competitive advantage

There is significant evidence that an effective organizational culture provides a major competitive edge--higher levels of employee and customer engagement and loyalty translate into higher growth and profits. Many business leaders know this, yet few are doing much to improve their organizations’ cultures. They are discouraged by misguided beliefs that an executive’s tenure and an organization’s attention span are too short for meaningful transformation.

James L. Heskett provides a roadmap for achievable and fast-paced culture change. He demonstrates that an effective culture supplies the trust that makes managing change of all kinds easier. It provides a foundation on which changes in strategy can be based, and it’s a competitive edge that can’t easily be hacked or copied. Examining leading companies around the world, Heskett details how organizational culture makes employees more loyal, more productive, and more creative. He discusses how to quantify its effects in order to sell the notion of culture change to the organization and considers how to preserve an organization’s culture in the face of the trend toward remote work hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Showing how leadership can bring about significant changes in a surprisingly short time span, Win from Within offers a playbook for developing and deploying culture that enables outsized results. It is a groundbreaking demonstration of organizational culture’s role as a foundation for strategic success--and its measurable impact on the bottom line.

James L. Heskett is UPS Foundation Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, where he was previously faculty chair of the MBA program. His many books include Corporate Culture and Performance (1992), with John Kotter, and The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force That Transforms Performance (2012). Heskett has served as a board member for many for-profit and nonprofit organizations and has been a consultant for a range of prominent companies.