Description

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Without a deep understanding of your company's culture, any change effort you undertake will fail. Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and his coauthors identify the four most critical cultural elements leaders need to focus on.

In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had resulted in no visible results. Why?

The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational--that's what makes it so hard to work with, but that's also what makes it so powerful.

For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center's proven methodology for identifying your culture's four most critical elements: traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale; authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of "emotional intuition" or social connectedness; and metrics, integrated, thoughtful measures to track progress, encourage the self-reinforcing cycle of lasting change and link to business performance.

By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap into a source of catalytic change within your organization. People will make an emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.

About the Author

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Jon R. Katzenbach is the founder of the Katzenbach Center at Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting business. Over the course of his more than forty years as an advisor, he has written extensively on leaders, organizations, and teaming, including the bestseller The Wisdom of Teams.
James Thomas is a partner with PwC's Strategy& and leads the Katzenbach Center in the Middle East.
Gretchen Anderson is a director at the Katzenbach Center, and she works with client teams across the globe.

Praise For…

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“This book describes the practice of culture change in personal detail and highlights through a composite story how the culture change process itself is a multi-faceted adventure, not the imposition of a few steps from a generic change model."
—Edgar H. Schein, Professor Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management, Author with Peter Schein of the 5th Edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership (2017) and Humble Leadership (2018)
 
“Katzenbach, Anderson, and Thomas expertly outline how to manage organizational culture as a critical asset in practical and actionable terms. Their decades of experience in advising leading organizations shines here as a pragmatic, optimistic guide to management.”
—Tim Ryan, US Chairman and Senior Partner at PwC  
 
“As a student of habit creation, I loved the The Critical Few. It guides leaders to follow a discipline of simplicity, to be deliberate and purposeful, and to focus on what matters. Best of all, it encourages leaders at all levels to close the book, engage in real conversations, and build teams that matter.”
—Charles Duhigg, author of bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better