Corporate Culture Wiki
From WikiForGood
See also Business For Good.
The purpose of this wiki is to call attention to organizations that have cultures that can serve as role models. If you know of a company with a great culture, you can write about it or a add a link to an article about it below. No organization is perfect, but we are hoping to provide examples of the good things that companies do in an effort to help other companies adopt these policies where applicable. Also, investors may be interested in learning about companies with great cultures.
Companies With (Arguably) Great Cultures
Equal Exchange must set the standard, since they have been a worker cooperative business since 1994. All the employee owners vote on company decisions.
Hypertherm is employee owned, has a no layoff policy and has achieved amazing results implementing a home spun version of Japanese lean manufacturing and continuous improvement techniques.
Pixar's success is attributed to its unique (for Hollywood) learning culture in an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (January 29, 2006).
Southwest Airlines is famous for having happy, funny, and highly motivated employees; and it is widely believed that these kinds of cultural elements contribute to Southwest's success in the brutally competitive airline industry plagued with difficult labor relations.
Of course, St. Luke's offers an excellent account of an employee owned business. Marjorie Kelly (Nov 1, 1999) writes in The Divine Right of Capital about St. Luke's Ad Agency in London, England, formed by employees of industry giant Chiat/Day who were about to be subjected to layoffs in a pending acquisition.
Sun Hydrolics has avoided formal hierarchies such as job titles, reporting relationships, job descriptions, and organizational charts...and has achieved great success.
"The W.L. Gore culture seeks to avoid taxing creativity with conventional hierarchy. The company encourages hands-on innovation, involving those closest to a project in decision-making. Teams organize around opportunities and leaders emerge based on the needs and priorities of a particular business unit. To avoid the traditional pyramid of bosses and managers, Bill Gore created a flat lattice organizational structure in which there are no chains of command and no predetermined channels of communication." W.L. Gore is not publicly traded an has an Associate Stock Ownership Plan (ASOP).
High Schools With Great Cultures
High Tech High High Tech High began in 2000 as a single charter high school launched by a coalition of San Diego business leaders and educators. It has evolved into a school development organization with a growing portfolio of innovative charter schools spanning grades K-12. HTH combats the twin problems of student disengagement and low academic achievement by creating personalized, project-based learning environments where all students are known well and challenged to meet high expectations. HTH schools attempt to show how education can be redesigned to ensure that all students graduate well prepared for college, work, and citizenship.
