This book has one purpose - to show you how your values, and not your business practices, are what drive your success. In a world where 98 per cent of organizations are fixated on the mechanics of their business, knowing this secret is perhaps the most strategic competitive factor in today's marketplace. These values, which nowadays we often refer to under the moniker of "corporate culture," are not just sterile, 20,000-foot level concepts for upper management - they are your personal keys to empower workplaces of any size to succeed at a level far beyond what most people imagine.

In The Soul of an Organization, we bring the concepts of understanding and managing these values home to people who lead workgroups of any size, including:

• Front line and operations managers who want to make substantial improvements in productivity, morale, costs, and turnover.
• Leaders of customer contact organizations who want to create a quantum increase in their service quality.
• Human resource and corporate training professionals who want to move from simple employee development to transforming their cultures.
• Senior management who want to dramatically change their organization's bottom line by rallying their people around a clear sense of purpose.

Having the right values sounds like the most natural thing in the world, like apple pie and motherhood. But in reality, managing around values rather than business processes succeeds precisely because it runs counter to the human nature that most people follow. For example, let's compare some common misconceptions about daily business life with the best practices of strong corporate cultures:

• You can't create great service by simply exhorting people to be nice - but when you design systems around responding directly to customers, like Dell Computer does, you create industry-leading customer satisfaction levels.
• You can't create productivity by constantly holding a stopwatch to people, which in fact breeds little more than sullen compliance. But when a company like Southwest Airlines instills a near-fanatical devotion to teamwork in everything it does, it breeds a level of productivity that is nearly double that of its competitors.
• You don't demonstrate leadership by simply telling people what to do. But when you invest in training at a level far above your competitors, like insurance giant USAA does, you produce a workforce where 40% of your people get promoted every year and barely 5% leave - in an industry where these numbers are often reversed.

In cases like these and others, your culture is ultimately determined by how you respond to each of the hundreds or thousands of business decisions you make every day. And each of these decisions is governed either by human nature, or core values that transcend human nature.

In the chapters that follow, you will learn how this conscious decision to transcend human nature is often the single common thread running between firms who dominate their markets, and workplaces that stand out within their organizations. In the process, you will see things like leadership, motivation, customer service quality and success itself in a light you have never seen it before.

Chapter 1 starts with a look at what business culture is - and more importantly, is not - and why it has such a strong influence on your success. We examine some real-life examples of how values drive successful businesses, explore common myths about values and corporate culture, and most importantly, provide a self-test that allow you to assess your own workplace practices against current best practices. This test forms the cornerstone of the material that follows, and will help you focus on how best to understand and strengthen your own culture.

Chapters 2 through 8 delve further into these best practices, as seen through the eyes of seven core traits that drive modern business culture - followed by profiles of specific organizations who practice them, including Vanguard, Dell Computer, Wendy's, Cirque du Soleil, and others:

• The Strategists, who create systems that drive operational excellence.
• The Motivators, who succeed by creating a positive working environment that promotes respect, autonomy and personal growth.
• The Teambuilders, devoted to creating a strong team environment, starting from recruiting all the way through building strong internal relationships in the workplace.
• The Nimble, who embrace change as an opportunity, and can adapt their cultures to shifts in markets, technology, demographics, and other factors.
• The Customer Champions, who focus on putting the customer at the front of every business decision they make.
• The Passionate, who see their work as a mission and a way of life, and infect everyone around them with this sense of mission.
• The Visionaries, who lead by setting goals that make everyone on their team part of something greater than themselves.

Many of these values sound self-evident in theory, but as we explore how real businesses succeed or fail at putting them into practice, you will understand that there is a predictable split between human nature and reaching for higher goals. No one wakes up every morning planning to run a bad workplace, but when human nature wins out, that is often exactly what they get. Once you understand the mechanics of this, you can chart your own personal track that leads you over and above your competition.

In Chapter 9, we look at the dynamics of how business cultures evolve over time, and why they succeed and fail. Chapter 10 takes this a step further, and explores how your cultural values can be the most important factor in the success or failure of mergers, acquisitions, and other forms of business expansion. Finally, in Chapter 11, we close with perhaps the most important point of all - how existing business cultures, including your own culture, can grow and change for the better.

For me personally, the path leading to this book began back in the 1980s, as part of a five-person startup company who set out to create a total service culture as well as a great software product. We grew to become a major firm that went public on the NASDAQ stock market. More importantly, we created a strong workplace where people bought in to what we were doing, and looked forward to coming to work in the morning. In later years, as a consultant and in management, I've seen the same process work over and over: core values, combined with a genuine respect for people, taking businesses to heights they never dreamed of. These firms see both themselves and their customers with a clarity afforded to few others, and exploit this clarity as a dominant advantage in the marketplace. It is a magical experience shared by only a few people in today's business world, and you are about to join the club. Enjoy!

Richard S. Gallagher, www.rsgallagher.com