Books and Articles
Strategic Alignment by Norman Chorn
Three key takeaways, culture is about alignment, organisations have an archetype or personality and the need to align your people infrastructure to support the culture you need to create.
I came across this book when it was first published in 2004. I was working at the Leadership Development Centre (LDC) at the time and we were working with Norman as one of the key presenters on the Leadership in Practice (LIP) programme that we ran. Norman’s session was always one of the highest rated sessions on the programme and was based around this book.
This has remained one of my favorite books for the last 15 years and I recommend it constantly to the people and organisations I work with. It has been one of those books that has certainly influenced my practice when working with organisations on their cultural change programmes.
What is so helpful about this book is that it provides a framework to think about culture as an alignment challenge where you need your culture, leadership practice and organizational infrastructure to align with your strategy.
It provides a view of culture that suggests culture is neither right nor wrong , good nor bad and the key question is how aligned it is to allow you to execute your organizational strategy. The cultural archetype model links nicely with Jung’s work on underlying patterns of behavior. I love practical books and models that you can pick up and use in an organizational context right away. This is one of those books.