Does your firm’s culture support its strategy? If not, you’ll need to retool your culture, and that’s not so easy to do. The values, beliefs, and norms that make it up are intangible and diffused throughout your organization, and employees tend to resist anything that threatens established behaviors and relationships.

To figure out the secret to doing cultural change well, the authors examined how business leaders around the world approached it. They learned that successful ones didn’t begin with workshops, studies, or new HR policies. They began by creating stories highlighting actions that were deeply inconsistent with a firm’s established culture but reinforced an alternative culture more aligned with its strategies. The most effective stories were authentic, featured the leaders themselves, offered a break with the past and a path to the future, appealed to hearts and minds, and were dramatic and memorable. Most critically, they empowered employees to begin crafting their own stories about cultural change so that everyone in the organization ended up co-creating a new culture together.