Corporate Culture

Every company, even a new one, has a corporate culture. Companies that cultivate, articulate and sometimes reinvent their particular corporate culture are the corporations that survive.

The importance of recording and transferring corporate culture has become even more critical over the last 20 years as the commercial sector is more volatile and change of ownership and direction have become the norm in business. With mergers, takeovers, acquisitions and buyouts the norm, a new set of dynamics in terms of corporate identity has evolved.

These dynamics have resulted in:

• Corporate memory becoming virtually non-existent.
• Financial and corporate stresses resulting in a questioning of traditions, longstanding corporate goals and the ethos of any company.
• New management wants to stamp its culture on the organisation yet retain those elements of the existing culture that are deemed valuable.
• New management wants to understand the background to the company and major decisions/directions.
  

All the above is only possible if the company's heritage is recorded and accessible. Management can only learn from the company's beginnings and past events if the history and culture have been captured.

At Focus Publishing, the job of retaining/recording a company's history and culture, and projecting this in book form, is not undertaken in the detached removes of the university library or scholar's study. The active life of the business is recorded, relating the written work to first-hand accounts of the development of the company, and using a variety of living and non-living resources.

Focus has worked on corporate culture projects for Westpac and Woolworths, among others.

A Focus book captures the corporate history and culture of companies - those elements which make the company unique and which have given it its identity.