Change the Culture, Change the Game
The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results
By: Roger Connors, Tom Smith
Published: January 4, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
ISBN-10: 1591843618
ISBN-13: 978-1591843610
Publisher: Portfolio/Penguin
"We begin by introducing our core belief: Either you will manage your culture, or it will manage you", write co-founders of Partners In Leadership, Inc., Roger Connors and Tom Smith, in their brilliant and organization renewing book Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results. The authors describe how creating a culture of accountability results in a game-changing transformation of the entire organization.
Roger Connors (photo left) and Tom Smith recognize that the greatest assets in any organization are its people. While every company makes that same statement regarding its employees, not every organization capitalizes fully on their abilities. The authors define a corporate culture as the way that people think and act. That organizational culture, can be a positive one that works for the organization, or it can be a negative one that stifles and works against the company. To create a culture that energizes the organization, the authors present the concept of accountability. Instead of the usual application of of accountability, as a principle that that is only used when there is a problem, the authors share how accountability can become a positive force within the company. To create an accountable organization, everyone must embrace the principle. Without that commitment to accountability, there can be no effective or sustainable change process.
Tom Smith (photo left) and Roger Connors understand that without a process for creating an accountable organization, no meaningful change will take place. To achieve that goal of an accountable culture, the authors provide a step by step systematic approach to generating change. The process is based on what the authors call the Results Pyramid®. It presents in graphic form how experiences, beliefs, and actions form a holistic balance to achieve positive results. The entire process is built these important core principles:
* Leaders must create the needed culture
* The culture produces the results
* The most effective culture is a Culture of Accountability®
* The Results Pyramid® will accelerate the transition to a Culture of Accountability®
For me, the power of the book is how Roger Connors and Tom Smith provide both a strong theoretical background for the need to create a Culture of Accountability, and a thorough and effective system for generating the necessary cultural change. The theory and practical applications of the accountability principle are supported and illustrated through examples in the real world. The authors offer an essential modification to the usual idea of accountability as punishment for failure. Instead, the concept of accountability is transformed from a debilitating drag on the organization, to a positive and guiding principle that facilitates change within the culture. That resulting cultural change involves the people within the company taking ownership of their own actions, and becoming accountable to themselves, to other employees, and to the organization as a whole.
With the necessary change in the cultural belief system in place, the change process will move toward the desired goals seamlessly, and with much less resistance and fewer obstacles. Unlike many books on cultural change, this book offers both the reasons for change, and the means to make that desired change a reality. The authors point to the critical importance of changing internal cultural beliefs and actions as essential to enabling change to occur across the entire company. With the idea of accountability fully embraced and internalized, the very unique and useful Results Pyramid® process can then guide the change both naturally and effectively.
I highly recommend the landmark and organizational energizing book Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results by Roger Connors and Tom Smith, to anyone who is serious about effecting positive and lasting change to an organizational culture. As the authors emphasize in the book, the need to create a company culture based on accountability is not just another management fad, but a crucial element of building a competitive and successful organization.
Read the essential and approachable book Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results by Roger Connors and Tom Smith, and transform your organization from one where a negative culture reigns supreme, to an organization based on accountability. The resulting new company culture will be an unstoppable force in your industry.
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