Culture through Crisis
One Team's Commitment to Winning with Purpose
Culture through Crisis is an impactful business guide that’s filled with important lessons about building organizations strong enough to handle tough times.
Andrew Limouris’s business guide Culture through Crisis shares advice for creating robust, values-based company cultures.
Even before COVID-19, Limouris writes, the leaders at his company, Medix, were focused on creating firm relationships with their employees and clients. In 2014, they clarified their culture, purpose, and values, creating a solid foundation that could withstand drastic changes. Doing so, the book says, helped Medix to navigate the pandemic and its aftermath. Limouris asserts that any organization can do the same—strengthening their foundations by addressing the same three areas.
Using Medix as a case study, the book shows how supportive, inclusive company cultures form. It shows people from different departments working together and supporting other teams; it recalls how the company was transparent about the effects of the pandemic on it, empowering its employees. It shows how they came to regard themselves as a family and operate accordingly: they traveled to Sierra Leone together to serve children from underprivileged backgrounds; elsewhere, they came up with a supportive policy for employees who wanted to adopt. Indeed, “family” becomes the book’s ideal example of how an organization should function.
Using practical examples to support its suggestions for implementing lessons about collaboration and macromanagement in one’s own company, the book also makes use of outside case studies to bolster its advice. A study of National Football League coaches who mentored other coaches factors in, proffering lessons about creating camaraderie and highlighting individual talents to ensure the success of the whole team, for example. And the book’s messages are further emphasized by clear photographs of engaged employees—of people working on philanthropic activities together; of a company-erected monument to a deceased girl, stressing the need for community involvement.
However, in handling its three pillars (core values, purpose, and culture) in close quarters in each chapter, the book blurs their distinctions. It does a better job of distinguishing its takeaway lessons, as of placing employees and their families above other aspects of an organization and about the need for transparency, beginning with company leadership. Such lessons are summarized at the end of each chapter and are usefully highlighted as side notes throughout the book.
Drawing from personal experiences, Culture through Crisis is an impactful business guide that’s filled with important lessons about building organizations strong enough to handle tough times.
Reviewed by
Edith Wairimu
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
