Thriving Culture Book

Most culture problems get treated like a poster problem. Get the values right, put them on the wall, run the survey, fix the comms. Thriving Culture argues that is backwards and why so much of what passes for culture work doesn't change anything.

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Drawing on Transactional Analysis, the Enneagram, and decades inside South Africa's largest financial services and hospitality brands, Clive Vanderwagen makes the case that culture is not built on what is said in the boardroom. It is built on whether people's basic psychological needs–safety, stimulus, structure, recognition, connection–are actually being met in the room, every day, by the people leading them.

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This book moves through what those needs look like when they're missing, what the leader's own emotion does to everyone around them, why teams are not families, why customer experience is a culture problem wearing a CX costume, and why most interventions fail at exactly the point where real change becomes possible. Drawing on real organisational interventions, it shows what actually shifts a culture, and what does not.

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No frameworks for their own sake. No motivational gloss. Just a clear, occasionally uncomfortable account of what it actually takes to build a workplace people can do their best work in.