The Critical Few: Energize Your Company's Culture by Choosing What Really Matters

By: Jon Katzenbach, James Thomas, Gretchen Anderson

Narrated by: Sandy Weaver

Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

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 three 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; and authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of “emotional intuition” or social connectedness.

By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap in to 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.

©2018 PwC (P)2018 PwC

Practical strategy to take forward to implementation

The book feels like and excellent summary of a way to approach cultural change while including the right balance of practicality to get started. It offers opportunity to sculpt what makes contextual sense without being a cookbook. Finally I appreciate idea of thinking about measurement first and keeping things simple.

The Narrative Style is refreshing

I really appreciate the interludes between Katz and Alex throughout The book that began each chapter and bring a narrative approach to reinforcing the concepts laid out in the book. Keeps it from being just another book on culture.

One of the most novel parts of this work is learning to identify and engage authentic informal leaders (AILs) as part of a culture change movement.

Katz is kind and brilliant, and that shines through in this book.