KIRSTY BASHFORTH
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: Kirsty Bashforth is founder and CEO of QuayFive Ltd, where she advises business leaders on organisational culture. She is also a non-executive director of Serco, PZ Cussons, Kier Group and Diaverum, and has an Economics degree from Cambridge University. Kirsty spent 24 years at BP plc pursuing a career in commercial leadership and operations, working in UK, US, Denmark and Belgium, ultimately leading the work to re-set BP’s culture in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon accident. Her book, CULTURE SHIFT: A Practical Guide to Managing Organizational Culture (Bloomsbury 2019), was a finalist in the Business Book Awards 2020.
CULTURE SHIFT
Business, 232 pages, Bloomsbury Business, July 2019
Nowadays, stakeholder consideration focuses as much on an organization's culture as it does on the bottom line - employees want to work for a company that has clear values and an engaging environment; customers and clients want to know they're supporting a worthwhile brand; and investors look to back socially responsible companies with good organizational health.
Too often, too many businesses see culture change as a project with a defined end point once the project is considered 'done', the dominant culture re-emerges and things go back to how they were. Culture Shift guides organizations on how to do things differently, ensuring that culture really does shift (with minimal budget and no external consultants) and putting culture permanently at the core of running the business.
Founded on behavioural economics, Culture Shift recognises that people do not always make average assumptions or follow rational logic. Changing a culture, therefore, is not about telling people what to do and expecting them to fall neatly in line - it's about identifying where they are now and how they make decisions, in order to help them form new habits to create a sustainable culture shift, from the very top of the organization's workforce to the bottom.
Using her extensive experience, Kirsty Bashforth outlines exactly what it takes to oversee sustainable culture change in an organization. The book explores how to communicate cultural expectations to a number of stakeholders; implement new, lasting habits in the workforce; effectively measure and track organizational culture; as well as deal with pushback from senior leadership when, as time passes, the planned culture shift risks falling lower on their agenda