Upstanding: how company character catalyzes loyalty, agility, and hypergrowth

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword

Introduction

PART I: IT’S A NEW WORLD

Chapter 1: A New Given: Culture Is Strategy

Chapter 2: 21st-century Ethos

Chapter 3: The New Essential Core: Upstanding Character

PART II: BUILDING CHARACTER-DRIVEN ORGANIZATIONS

Chapter 4: Know Your Values

Chapter 5: Top Down, Bottom Up

Chapter 6: Make Character-led Culture Your Strategy

Chapter 7: Magnetic Character: Activating Positive Forces

PART III: PUTTING CHARACTER INTO ACTION

Chapter 8: Responding to Crisis

Chapter 9: Stories from Exemplar Companies—and Leaders

Chapter 10: Looking to the Future

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

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.