The CEO of Anaplan explains how a company’s character is a critical driver of sustained success
In his career as an executive at IBM, Cisco, and now as CEO of Anaplan, Frank A. Calderoni discovered that character is just as vital for companies as it is for individuals. In Upstanding: How Company Character Catalyzes Loyalty, Agility, and Hypergrowth, the author explores the powerful link between corporate strategy, company culture, and individual character, and how activating this link is essential to realizing strong company character - and an essential ingredient for organizations to achieve hypergrowth, agility, and loyalty. This innovative resource features real-life examples of how today’s most successful companies are building upstanding character while increasing employee engagement, happiness, and performance.
The book is written to help executives, company founders, managers, and other leaders develop strategies that supercharge organizational performance while building a strong and high-engagement culture - providing real-world insights from the author’s own career along with a diverse cross-section of business thought leaders and CEOs of companies both small and large, local and global. The author draws upon his experience leading a $10 billion hypergrowth software company to explain how the fusion of culture and strategy, driven by a company’s character, leads to sustained internal and external success. Designed to empower leaders to make character the cornerstone of corporate culture, this invaluable resource:
- Explores what “upstanding character” means for an organization, and how building a culture based on empathy, courage, authenticity, integrity, respect, and other factors drives higher performance and value creation for employees, customers, partners, and shareholders
- Reviews research on how culture drives performance, and operational practices for building upstanding organizational character and driving value-aligned behavior
- Features original interviews with Shantanu Narayen, Cy Wakeman, Eric Hutcherson, Kellie McElhaney, Geoffrey Moore, and other leaders inside and outside the tech sector
- Provides practical tools and approaches for increasing inclusion and belonging, improving communication, strengthening engagement, and rewarding upstanding character in employees
- Discusses the “Big 9” cultural values that are essential to creating upstanding company character, such as agility, collaboration, diversity, integrity, and respect
With a foreword by Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe, Upstanding: How Company Character Catalyzes Loyalty, Agility, and Growth is essential reading for executives and business leaders interested in strategy, leadership, organizational culture, and management innovation, as well as leadership teams and HR professionals who are responsible for guiding their organization’s culture and developing its character.
Table of Contents
Foreword ix
Introduction 1
Part I It’s a New World 13
Chapter 1 A New Given: Culture Is Strategy 15
Chapter 2 21st-Century Ethos 31
Chapter 3 The New Essential Core: Upstanding Character 49
Part II Building Character-driven Organizations 61
Chapter 4 Know Your Values 63
Chapter 5 Top Down, Bottom Up 81
Chapter 6 Make Character-Led Culture Your Strategy 99
Chapter 7 Magnetic Character: Activating Positive Forces 119
Part III Putting Character Into Action 143
Chapter 8 Responding to Crisis 145
Chapter 9 Stories from Exemplar Companies - and Leaders 163
Chapter 10 Looking to the Future 183
Endnotes 201
Acknowledgments 213
About the Author 215
Index 217
