Charting the corporate mind

by Charles Hampden-Turner

Subtitle of my copy: Graphic Solutions to Business Conflicts. This is a book about how to manage dilemmas for wealth creation. It can serve as a companion to his book, Creating Corporate Culture, also 1990. Here too most of the book consists of examples in which he applied the concepts in his business consulting (1 per chapter, chs. 4-9). Both books are about dilemmas and about corporate culture as the way corporations manage dilemmas. The introductory chapter is about wealth creation, the creation of value. He rejects the concept of simple "value added" (which may be counter balanced by values lost,) for a model of reconciling as many values as possible. A second introductory chapter develops a model of the "helmsman" steering a course or "tacking," as in the mariners dilemma, between corporate "rocks" and "whirlpools," adjusting for external "wind" and "currents" as you go. Each chapter thus shows ways of reconciling dilemmas or value conflicts. He thus ties wealth creation to his ea