I was reading Richard Florida’s latest book Who’s Your City? and really liked the chapter on how the Big Five personality types (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) cluster geographically by region and in doing so, create geographic personality-scapes that one should be aware of when choosing a place to live. In other words, if you are a high Agreeable you will eventually feel out of place in a high Neuroticism place. Florida does not say that nice people shouldn’t move to New York, but that is what he means.
The “Big Five” types have been proven through extensive research and testing to be highly accurate descriptors of human personality. Florida says cities have personalities too….that stem from their economic structures and inform and constrain their futures.
So, I asked myself, as someone who thinks about how organizational values and culture drive brand, do organizations have personalities too? And I don’t mean the Aacker-style brand personality profiles that all seem to run together into the same words over and over. Everyone seems to be Innovative, Caring, Bold, Assertive, Rugged. I mean deeper personalities that determine what the organization can and cannot do well. And do these personalities also stem from the organization’s economic structures and inform and constrain their futures (brands) as with cities? (Read on …)
