A new book to fix how leaders think about culture

Two of the most influential researchers in organizational culture—one of whom now leads the Haas School of Business—have written the book executives didn’t know they needed.

When Professor Jenny Chatman asks executives in her leadership courses what one thing they should do to improve their organization’s culture, she has a ready answer for them. It usually gets a laugh.

“Get a spreadsheet,” she says.

The advice sounds almost comically simplistic for a subject that generates so much management mysticism. But that is precisely Chatman’s point. Leaders should track their culture-change process the same way they track anything else they care about. Culture is not a fuzzy, intangible force that resists management; it is a system that can be built, measured, and directed.

That’s the conviction behind Chatman’s new book with Stanford’s Glenn Carroll: Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs (Columbia University Press), published April 14. Chatman, now the Bank of America Dean of UC Berkeley Haas, and Carroll, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, are pioneering researchers who have spent decades shaping the field. Now they’ve written the guide they wish executives had been reading all along.

“The discomfort that many managers feel about culture often leads to misdirected efforts,” they write in the introduction. “The book’s mission is to demystify—to translate what social scientists actually know into guidance that leaders can use.”

The need is real. For many years, Carroll has been surveying the executives in his courses about whether their organization’s culture needs to change, and roughly 80% raise their hands. “Across all those different groups and years, it’s an empirical fact that continues to stand,” he says. Yet when he asks those same executives what they would do about it, the answers tend to collapse into the same three options: get the leadership team to agree on some values, tweak the incentives, maybe launch a training program. 

It’s a playbook so narrow and predictable that Chatman and Carroll began to compile a list of popular beliefs about organizational culture—and write a book to challenge them.

A psychologist, a sociologist, and three decades of research

Their collaboration has deep roots. Carroll served as a professor at Haas from 1982 to 2002 and was Chatman’s professor when she was a PhD student here. He is a sociologist; she is a social psychologist. They say the intellectual pairing turned out to be formative for both.

“I was very psychologically minded, and his perspective—the macro perspective—really expanded my mind,” said Chatman, BA 81 (psychology), PhD 88, in an interview on The Culture Kit podcast. “It got me thinking not just at the individual level—how do different people experience different organizations?—but also, what do organizations do that could be different? It gave me a level-of-analysis upgrade.”

Carroll credits Chatman in equal measure. Her dissertation produced the Organizational Culture Profile (OCP)—a way to measure culture quantitatively that he says “just blew my mind.” The OCP remains the field’s standard assessment instrument today. “I didn’t really think about individuals all that much,” Carroll says. “Jenny provided a real benchmark and a way to think about culture based on fairly hard, objective, quantitative data that we really didn’t see very much in the literature before then.”

That blend of perspectives shapes the book throughout. Drawing on scientific findings, Chatman and Carroll evaluate and debunk common misconceptions, showing how research empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively.

Five myths, one framework

The book is organized around five popular beliefs which the authors subject to scrutiny and illustrate with real-world examples. Is culture inert and impossible to change? No—but it requires deliberate effort, as cases at Apple and Ford demonstrate. Is it driven purely from the top down? CEOs matter enormously, but so do employees, subcultures, and outside events. Is culture too soft and nebulous to measure? Nope—the OCP proved that. Does culture only benefit those who fit in? “Fit” is far more nuanced than most managers assume. And does culture actually move the bottom line? Yes, even if the mechanisms are often indirect.

The opening story is an account of how Jennifer Cook, MBA 98, one of Chatman’s former students, used a systematic culture-change process to triple the business she was running inside Genentech—not in the five years her boss allotted, but in just 11 months. The case studies span Disney, Ford, Netflix, Maersk, Google, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and many others. 

The ‘Three Cs’: What actually works

At the heart of the book is a framework Chatman and Carroll call the “Three Cs”: coherence, comprehensiveness, and consistency. None of it, they insist, is rocket science.

Coherence means giving people a clear narrative that connects the culture to the strategy—helping employees connect the dots between the organization’s values and their daily behavior, and what is gained through those behaviors.

Comprehensiveness means using many levers simultaneously. While Carroll and Chatman observed that people often revert to employee training, incentives, and lists of values, the book identifies more than two dozen levers. Many powerful tools are often overlooked—such as job rotation programs, flattened hierarchies, peer-led socialization, changes to decision-making authority. 

Consistency can be the hardest of all. “You have to be consistent and comprehensive in the changes that you make in an organization, and leaders must model the culture personally, day after day,” Chatman says. The challenge is that repeating the same messages hundreds or thousands of times will inevitably feel tedious before it has fully landed.

Strong, not rigid

One of the book’s persistent themes is the difference between a strong culture and a rigid one. Strong cultures are defined by high consensus and high intensity—people agree on what matters and hold each other to it, reducing the need for management oversight. But strong does not mean inflexible, and Chatman’s own study of large technology firms backs this up: Companies with high-consensus cultures that also prize adaptability have significantly higher annual revenue growth.

Chatman argues that every time an organization changes its strategy, it should revisit its culture accordingly. Carroll points to Netflix. Its culture of radical candor and transparency has remained constant even as the company’s strategy pivoted from mailing DVDs to streaming to producing its own content. “It’s a strong culture, but it’s not rigid in terms of constraining the strategy,” he says.  

The book’s closing argument is direct. Culture is not something that just happens, it’s something leaders must choose to build—and keep building, deliberately, comprehensively, and coherently. “The execution of this stuff is much harder than understanding the science of it,” Carroll says. “Our book is an attempt to communicate the science so that when you do go out and execute, you’re operating from a position of confidence, knowing that what you’re doing is the right thing.”

Read the book:

Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs
By Jennifer Chatman and Glenn R. Carroll
Columbia University Press, April 14, 2026