New Book Review: "Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture"
New book review for Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework (Third Edition), by Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn, Jossey-Bass, 2011:
In the introduction to this book, the authors share the familiar Tom Peters quote, "If you're not confused, you're not paying attention", because the purpose here is "not to offer one more panacea for coping with our turbulent times or to introduce another management fad." In the words of the authors, this book "provides a framework, a sense-making tool, a set of systematic steps, and a methodology for helping managers and their organizations adapt to the demands of the environment. It focuses less on the right answers than it does on the methods and mechanisms available to help managers change the most fundamental elements of their organizations" at the cultural level.
While the authors also state that other proposed approaches to measuring organizational culture have been proposed, and that their intent is not to provide an extensive review of this literature, they also provide what I consider important background information to the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), which includes the facts that the OCAI (based on the Competing Values Framework) is probably the most frequently used instrument for assessing organizational culture in the world today, and that although some versions are longer, some including up to 24 items that together describe organizational culture, the 6 items that are used in this book provide a simpler synthesis that addresses fundamental manifestations of organizational culture.