Walking the Talk

By Carolyn Taylor

Book Overview

A new, fully revised edition. The culture of an organisation can mean the difference between success and failure. Leaders cast long shadows, and if you want to change the culture you have to walk the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844138070
• ISBN13: 9781844138074
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Random House Business Books
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The best contemporary book on changing organizational culture

Lots of HR and OD people are raving about Walking the Talk. It's the most detailed, practical and readable book I've come across on how to change organisational culture. It's written by a highly experienced and successful culture change specialist. There are 16 comprehensive chapters in three sections: preparing for the journey, the culture development plan, and special circumstances (cultures within cultures, M & A, and small and medium businesses). The painstaking explanations about the origins and relationship of values and culture are excellent. And I loved the very detailed coverage of the beliefs, values, symbols and systems of five typical cultures you may wish to aim for: achievement, one-team, customer-centric, people-first and innovative. It won't matter what industry or country you're in. It will all make sense. There are plenty of suggestions about exactly what you should do. It's all there. And the 25 page case study of Lion Nathan helps (although, curiously, the measurement tools used to track culture and leaders' behaviour, both from Human Synergistics, don't rate a mention.) Sadly Random House has let this book down. It deserves better. It's as though the dictation of a life's work has been typed but not edited. An editor could cut some of the plugs for the author's consulting firm at the start, fix at least one typo, rewrite the odd illogical sentence, correct the misleading information about survey sample sizes, chop many of the exclamation marks, and add an index as a quality business book of 390 pages needs an index. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable read with loads of examples, tables and lists. There are no references, but there is a reading list of 20 excellent suggestions. This is an essential book for anyone in OD or HR, and strongly recommended to anyone who wants a solid grounding in organisational culture and what it takes to change it.

"Vision without execution is hallucination." (Thomas Edison)

One of several great challenges that many organizations now face is building and then sustaining what Carolyn Taylor describes as a "culture for success." To do so, they must make a commitment to change initiatives that inevitably encounter barriers, many of them cultural and the result of what James O'Toole, in Leading Change, so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." I agree with Taylor that anyone at any level and in any area of the given enterprise can influence culture, perhaps help to change it but ultimate success depends upon a sufficient number of people who are not just involved but fully engaged in achieving the desired results. The most recent research conducted by the Gallup Organization indicates that that 29% of the U.S. workforce is engaged and 55% is not engaged. What about the other 16%? They "actively disengaged" in that they are doing whatever they can to undermine their employer's efforts to succeed. These are stunning statistics. How to explain them? Reasons vary from one organization to the next. However, most experts agree that no more than 5% of any given workforce consists of "bad apples," trouble-makers, chronic complainers, subversives, etc. How to get as many as possible among the other 95% to become positively engaged? This is one of the questions to which Walker responds in her book. Here is a composite of brief excerpts that explain her purposes: "The is a `how to' book. It will take you step-by-step from the decision to take on culture as a strategic imperative, to how the process should unfold over a three to five year period, and what should be included in each phase. It will show you how to tackle the most challenging aspects: How to change yourself and how to change other people...In doing so, it creates a blueprint...[Moreover, this book] will enable you to review what you have achieved, map out your next step, and identify factors along the way, which may be contributing to difficulties you are having achieving the traction you seek...[In fact,] this book will provide a whole range of steps you could take, a map of a typical journey, so that you are making choices within a logical framework." This book is not for all organizations and those within them who are charged with designing and then launching change initiatives. Hence the importance of checking out reviews of this book and other works that are most often recommended. That said, some readers will find that Carolyn Taylor offers the information and counsel needed to build a "culture for success." Presumably she would be the first to agree that it would be a fool's errand to attempt to apply all of the material in her book. Rather, it remains for each reader to select only what is most relevant to her or his own organization's needs, interests, objectives, and resources. Meanwhile, I presume to suggest that leadership of any initiatives must be distributed among everyone involved at each level and in every a