Introduction

My purpose in writing this book is to develop and build on the ideas contained in Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization ¹ published in 1998. The basic premise of Liberating the Corporate Soul was that the most successful organizations on the planet are vision-guided and values-driven. The results of mapping the values of more than 500 companies in 35 countries since 1997 support this premise—values-driven companies are without a doubt, the most successful companies on the planet. Many other researchers also support this conclusion. ^{2 – 4} Therefore, I will not spend much time on making this case. Rather, I prefer to take this opportunity to draw on our own ⁵ experiences and the vast amount 2of data we have collected over the past 8 years to describe the key characteristics of values-driven organizations; explain how to build valuesdriven organizations; and show how the process of values management can be used to support continuous improvements in organizational performance and develop long-term sustainability. In addition, I will detail the improvements we have made to the cultural transformation tools since the publication of Liberating the Corporate Soul.