Deal and Kennedy’s Cultural Model Understanding Rites and Rituals in Corporate Culture Corporate culture is one of the key drivers for the success – or failure – of an organization. A good, well-aligned culture can propel it to success. However, the wrong culture will stifle its ability to adapt to a fast-changing world. So, how do you attempt to understand your corporate culture? And what steps can you take to create a strong corporate culture that will best support your organization’s activities?
Business experts everywhere have been finding that corporations run not only on numbers, but on culture. In this revised and updated 2000 edition of Corporate Cultures, organization consultants Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy probe the conference rooms and corridors of corporate America to discover the key to business excellence. They find that the health of the bottom line is not ultimately guaranteed by attention to the rational aspects of managing-financial planning, personnel policies, cost controls, and the like. What's more important to long-term prosperity is the company's culture-the inner values, rites, rituals, and heroes-that strongly influence its success, from top management to the secretarial pool.For junior and senior managers alike, Deal and Kennedy offer explicit guidelines for diagnosing the state of one's own corporate culture and for using the power of culture to wield significant influence on how business gets done.
Management: perspective and practice 3.5.1 Deal and Kennedy model of organisational culture Deal and Kennedy’s (1982) model, based on two dimensions, suggested that the biggest single influence on a company’s culture was the business environment in which it operated.