What does good corporate Culture look like?

Online friend and enthnographer extraordinaire Grant McCracken is about to publish his book, Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living, breathing corporation. He's asking for votes on three choices for his cover art so go over there and throw your 2 cents in.

The title of this post brings what seems, to me at least, a good and layered question: What does good corporate Culture look like?

I haven't read the book obviously, but I'm betting Grant addresses in some way the wrestling-smoke nature of such a necessary but hard to describe thing. The folks I most respect in the brand-building realm, of whom Grant is one, all seem to get the sum-is-greater-than-the-parts aspect of a sensibility woven of one-half feeling and one-half matter and bound up in a product or service. And, beginning in the 1980s even CEOs began to grasp the idea of fragile and often nebulous thing called "Goodwill", so much so that it now factors in valuation of many companies when merging or selling. I hope these ladies and gentlemen will respond to what Grant offers with the curiosity and respect it deserves and that they can perceive the power of the asymmetrical ideas (to balance sheet cowboys and -girls anyway) that he's likely going to present.

But still, what does Corporate Culture look like? And can you skin it and say: "Voila!"?

I think so. In my experience it's hard to fake culture in the sense that encountering it is very much like Don Norman's Threebie: We usually have a visceral response followed by a behavioural one and, upon reflection, these sum up to be spiffy and sensuous and satisfying, or not. Okay, there's more to it than that but this is a blog post - It's a metaphysical baton-passing between expectation and experience, chock full of nuance and "english." I even drew a chart once ot try and explain the je n est c'est quoi:



That's a magical gap that a lot of metrics and sliderules just aren't calibrated to recognize nor jump. So, what does Corporate Culture look like? While these aren't book covers, the need to communicate something immediately, the requirement to spark further interest, and the visual channel/medium are the same. Question is, what do they convey? You tell me.