Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies

This book provides useful insights around how to properly understand and manage a company’s brand and culture. It does a good job of explaining the importance of making brand and culture work together and has a good thesis explaining why companies with that mindset unlock more potential within themselves and can become more successful.

While this book does a good job of explaining the value behind what Yohn promotes, it is unfortunately unoriginal. Brand image and company culture literature has been all the rage over the last 15 years. Thus, it has become increasingly more difficult to offer original thoughts on the topic. For example, many of the main key points brought up in the book can be found in Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, which was published over a decade earlier. Due to the fact that this book offers an already established methodology, just packaged in a new form, we don’t see it being particularly valuable to anybody who has previously read books on this topic or is a seasoned veteran in this field.

“This compelling book shows how to connect the image you present to the outside world with the values and norms that operate inside your world of work.”

–Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

“Denise Lee Yohn hit a home run with her first book, What Great Brands Do. Now she’s written FUSION and it is just as provocative. Denise proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that great companies are powered by brand-culture fusion. I highly recommend this book!”

–Ken Blanchard, Coauthor, The New One Minute Manager®, Coeditor, Servant Leadership in Action

Internal culture + External brand = FUSION

For years, leaders at companies like Southwest, Starbucks, and Google have done something differently that’s put their organizations at the top of “the most admired companies,” “best brands,” and “great workplaces” lists. They don’t often talk about that “something” specifically in terms of brand-culture fusion, but, as author Denise Lee Yohn reveals, aligning and integrating their brands and cultures is precisely how they’ve achieved their successes.

Independently, brand and culture are powerful, unsung business drivers. But Denise shows that when you fuse the two together to create an interdependent and mutually reinforcing relationship between them, you create organizational power that isn’t possible by simply cultivating one or the other alone. Through detailed case studies from some of the world’s greatest companies (including Amazon, Airbnb, Adobe, Nike, and Salesforce), exclusive interviews with company executives, and insights from Denise’s 25+ years working with world-class brands, FUSION provides readers with a roadmap for increasing competitiveness, creating measurable value for customers and employees, and future-proofing their business.

This is a must-read for readers interested in workplace culture, brand management, strategy, leadership, employee experience, employee engagement, integration, branding, and organization development.

For emerging leaders who have yet to fully immerse or read up on literature around brand image and company culture, this is an invaluable read which will provide a useful basis for future reference. For seasoned professionals and those who are well versed in this field, this is a new song playing the same tune.