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.
Building Family Business Champions provides a theoretically sound and practical framework for understanding the challenges that family businesses face. Drawing on three decades of consulting with more than 250 companies, their own experience running a family-owned firm, and sound research, Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle explain that the success of these companies hinges upon the dual management of family functionality and the company's infrastructure. They present a set of managerial tools for planning, structuring the business, measuring performance, and managing culture. After laying this groundwork, they attend to issues that uniquely pertain to these companies, such as succession and the challenges of familial dysfunction. Finally, the book offers a set of short self-assessments that can be used in any family business. Richly illustrated with stories of companies at various stages of growth from around the globe, this book provides a comprehensive guide for building businesses that thrive from generation to generation.
An insightful and practical toolkit for managing organizational growth Growing Pains is the definitive guide to the life cycle of an organization, and the optimization strategies that make the organization stronger. Whether growth is rapid, slow, or not occurring at all, this book provides a host of solid tools and recommendations for putting everything in order. Now in its fifth edition, this invaluable guide has been fully updated to reflect the current economic climate, and includes new case studies and chapters discussing nonprofit life cycle tools, leadership challenges and the "leadership molecule", and real-world applications of the frameworks presented. The latest empirical research is presented in the context of these ideas, including new data on strategic organizational development. Mini-cases that illustrate growth management issues have been added throughout, with additional coverage of international entrepreneurship and companies that provide a frame of reference for the perspective being developed. Growing pains are normal, and a valuable indicator of organizational health, but they indicate the need for new systems, processes, and structure to support the organization's size. This book provides a practical framework for managing the process, applicable to organizations of all sizes. Understand the key stages of growth and the challenges of each Measure your organization's growing pains and development Deploy new tools that facilitate positive organizational development Make the necessary transitions required to ensure sustainable success Some companies, even after brilliant beginnings, lose their way as growth throws them for a loop. Growing Pains identifies the underlying factors that promote long term success, and gives you a framework for successfully managing the transitions of growth.
Why do some companies continue to be successful while others experience difficulties and even failure? In Leading Strategic Change, Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle demonstrate that the key to long-term organizational success is the ability to adapt to and manage different types of change. Drawing on over 30 years' consultancy experience within major firms, they combine theoretical and practical models of organizational change, together with a new theory of leadership, to build a framework for understanding, planning, and leading change. The scope and value of this framework is then shown in relation to nine real-world case studies, ranging from relatively small companies (IndyMac Bank, Infogix) to large multinationals (Starbucks, Westfield). The focus throughout is to provide practical guidance to those concerned with managing and leading change in organizations. This book is an excellent guide to the many lessons to be learned about successful organizational change.
Effective Management Control deals with a critical but relatively neglected and misunderstood aspect of organizational effectiveness: the process of controlling the behavior of people in organizations. The issue of organizational control and the design of an optimal control system is essential for the long term effectiveness of an organization: too little control can lead to confusion and chaos; conversely, too great a degree of control can result in the erosion of innovation and entrepreneurship. This monograph presents a conceptual framework for approaching these issues, and examines the role accounting can play in a successful control system. The author works towards an understanding of the nature, role, elements and functioning of organizational control and control systems in organizations. The book posits and discusses the features of a core control system and its component parts, including: planning, measurement and feedback, evaluation and reward sub-systems. It also discusses the ways in which a core control system operates within a larger organizational structure and culture. The theory is illustrated through its application to a particular case study.
How do companies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart rise to the top of their industries and dominate year after year, while others like People Express and LA Gear burn out after promising starts? In Changing the Game, Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, two leading management consultants, reveal that the key to success lies in how you transform your organization. Virtually all organizations face critical transition points in their life cycle, when they must change how they play the game, or perish. Flamholtz and Randle focus here on three critical moments: the move from entrepreneurial to professional management, when a firm reaches a stage of growth where it can no longer operate in an informal, unstructured way; the revitalization of an established business that is losing ground to competitors; and a radical change in a business vision. The authors show, for instance, how American Century Investors made the transformation from a $50 million entrepreneurship to a professionally managed company with a market value of $2 billion; how IBM, one of the great American corporations, was forced by the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s to overhaul its business to survive; and how Starbucks Coffee, originally a Seattle coffee-bean store, was inspired by Milans romantic coffee bars to recreate itself and transformed an entire industry. The book concludes with a look at how one company--Bell Carter Olive Company--pulled together all the concepts and tools presented in the book and successfully changed the game. Changing the Game provides a comprehensive framework and a set of tools for the strategic management of organizational transformation. It will help managers meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive business environment.
Updating the book since its last publication in 1985, this new edition of the landmark work on human resource accounting has been substantially revised to reflect the current state of the field through the late 1990s. The economies of many nations are increasingly dominated by knowledge- or information-based sectors driven by highly trained and specialized personnel. Whereas physical capital was of the utmost economic importance in the past, the distinctive feature of the emerging post-industrial economies is an increasing reliance on human and intellectual capital. The growing importance of human capital as a determinant of economic success at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels dictates that firms need to adjust to this new economic reality. Specifically, if human capital is a key determinant for organizational success, then investment in the training and development of employees to improve performance is a critical component of this success. This broad socioeconomic shift underscores a growing need for measuring and analyzing human capital when making managerial and financial decisions. Yet important human resource decisions involving hiring, training, compensation, productivity and other matters are often made in the absence of specific information about the different costs and benefits of these particular choices. Human resource accounting is a managerial tool that can be used to gain this valuable information by measuring the costs of recruiting, hiring, compensating and training employees. It can be used to evaluate employee training programs, increase productivity, and improve managerial decision-making regarding promotions, transfers, layoffs, replacement and turnover. Case studies illustrate, for example: How an insurance company evaluated a training program for claims adjusters and found that it would return two dollars for every one dollar spent. How a human resources accounting study revealed that an electronics firm's losses from employee turnover equalled one year's new income, and how the company initiated a program to reduce turnovers. The third edition presents the current state of the art of human resource accounting by (1) examining the concepts and methods of accounting for people as human resources; (2) explaining the present and potential uses of human resource accounting for human resource managers, line managers and investors; (3) describing the research, experiments and applications of human resource accounting in organizations; (4) considering the steps involved in developing a human resource accounting system; and (5) discussing some of the remaining aspects of human resource accounting that require further research.
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