The Missing Links: Launching a High Performing Company Culture

Rooted in decades of research and experience working with organizations of every kind, from cutting-edge Shark Tank startups to massive government agencies literally expanding our presence in the universe, Drs. Gallaher and Meade have so clearly defined what it takes to build an effective company culture. Their Missing Link model provides a foundation for evaluating, understanding, and encouraging change to help the four traits of a healthy culture – maturity, diversity, community, and unity – emerge within your organization.I’ve followed the work of Drs. Gallaher and Meade for the better part of a decade though conference keynotes, TED Talks, workshops, and more, and have seen firsthand how the content provided in this book can not only shape organizations but evolve us as humans. In my own personal journey, through practice of the things I’ve learned from working with Gallaher Edge, I’ve grown significantly in self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-accountability. This growth has enabled me to accomplish amazing things that I would have never imagined – not only in my career, but with friendships, family, and even love.I owe much of who I am, and the impacts I’ve made across the hundreds of enterprise organizations I’ve worked with, to my choice to develop the traits so clearly laid out in The Missing Links. Whether these concepts are new to you, or you’ve been working in this space for years, this book serves as a fantastic guide on your journey to create change.

The Missing Links: Launching a High Performing Company Culture by Phillip Meade and Laura Gallaher is essentially a workplace culture type of book. It is a great book to help guide leaders of a company, organization, or any team at all. It teaches “the missing links” that is the key between “human nature and organizational culture.” The real-life examples and references were the best part and is really what set this book apart from other books that are of a similar topic. It is one thing to write about leadership and give advice for boosting company culture, but it is another thing to prove the advice works and give solid examples to better help readers relate.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the company that has been used as a foundational example to base it on - NASA. The Missing Links allows readers into some of the innermost workings of one of the most coveted and famous organisations of this world. And not just from a perspective of what they do, but rather how they do it.I have plenty of personal experiences that have displayed, explicitly, the direct impact of organizational culture on pretty much everything that goes right or wrong. A negative culture - one that doesn't foster growth, is based on control and creating fear, lack of support, strict hierarchy, and an environment that doesn't let employees feel safe - is seldom successful in the long run. Short-term, yes, it achieves what is desired. But it isn't sustainable. People leave, word gets out, experienced employees find better avenues and opportunities, and finally it all crumbles.This book delves into the psyche of an organization's culture, which is probably the biggest intangible aspect that goes into making a company something beyond four walls, a roof, and a board of directors. It's what enables it to leave behind a strong, positive, inspiring and coveted legacy.

Authors Phillip Meade and Laura Gallaher are ‘culture scientists,’ a term that aids understanding their approach to this fine book on linking human nature with organizational culture. Some critics have hailed the book as a ‘master class in leadership and organizational success,’ and after reading THE MISSING LINKS, this reader agrees with that description. Meade has earned a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Gallaher, a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. Together they make a lasting and important impression.Gaining attention as the book opens with their involvement with the Kennedy Space Center in 2003, serving to explore and diagnose the tragedy of the Columbia spacecraft and the loss of lives of seven astronauts, addressing the investigation of the technical and cultural causes, the authors ‘launch’ their learned advice on applying the science of human behavior to organizational culture.The authors’ reason for writing this book is to evolve humanity –‘ to make the world a better place and investing the talents and gifts we have been given. Organizational culture is incredibly important and can be a powerful force in evolving humanity. Creating a healthy, effective culture is a tremendous leverage point because people spend so much of their time at work and draw so much of their self-esteem from how they are treated there and what they accomplish. Additionally, organizational culture is integral to the performance and success of your business and truly drives business results.’Explaining their approach, the authors’ offer their exploration of human behavior using the cornerstones of self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-accountability to link employees together to create the desired cultural attributes at the individual, personal level – and illustrating this technique through the use of DNA analysis is both informative and inspirational.A profound yet accessible presentation, this book is memorable, a resource for making the workplace sensitive and successful Grady Harp, November 21

This book shocked me!Partly because this was the first I had heard of the Columbia’s crash at all, and I thought surely it must have been all over the news at the time, including in the UK. Then I checked the date and realised that when it happened, I was 18, homeless, and in the midst of walking to Italy in what remained of my school shoes with blisters on my blisters, hungry and sheltering from the snow in empty farm out-buildings. So, that explains how I missed that news at the time. But still, it was a surprise to learn of it in this book.That aside, the real meat of the book is, of course, learning from where they went wrong and also from what they then did right, in the investigation that followed.There are many books on leadership and organisation both, and I’ve read a remarkable lot of them. This is absolutely one of the most clinical—yet approachable—tomes I’ve found on the topic.Because of the nature of my work, I’m often sliding in and out of companies on indeterminate rolling contracts or being paid by the project, and that means that I get to see a lot of different ways of doing things. And varied as they all may be, they’re almost always… A little slapdash. The company got set up with great enthusiasm on a skeleton crew, expanded, and like a city whose roads are no longer close to sufficient for its traffic but for whom a whole new transit system would be quite an upheaval, the company gradually gets messier and less clear as it expands; roles are created and destroyed, preferred systems change completely every 5–17 weeks, and there are at least 3–5 people with incredibly unclear job parameters who just about keep everything going by filling in the gaps.It’s understandable how and why companies end up that way—perhaps yours has done so too. But, as this textbook shows us, it is avoidable, if one applies an engineering mindset to a sufficient grasp of organisational psychology.This book, if not a complete guide (and it is quite comprehensive), will at the very least allow you to understand what you need to understand to proceed safely and securely for the heights you had in mind for your business.

The insights shared by the authors are very valuable. You can see their expertise and meaningful research. The examples are very useful and interesting.Definitely a book that will provide another point of view and guide you on putting this into practice.