Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
The Culture Playbook is Daniel Coyle’s practical follow-up to The Culture Code, distilling the same research into sixty specific, highly actionable exercises leaders can run with their teams immediately. Rather than another theory-heavy culture book, Coyle organises the playbook around the same three pillars, safety, vulnerability and purpose, but this time hands you the drills rather than just the diagnosis.
What we appreciate most is how unglamorous many of the exercises are. Simple practices like a flash mentoring exchange, naming the elephant in the room at the start of a tense meeting, or ending projects with a structured after-action review rather than just moving on to the next thing, these are small, repeatable behaviours rather than big cultural initiatives that fade after a launch event.
Coyle is explicit that culture change rarely comes from a single retreat or values workshop, it comes from stacking small, consistent practices until they become the way a team naturally operates, which lines up closely with how we design culture and team effectiveness engagements for clients.
We like recommending this alongside The Culture Code precisely because it closes the gap between understanding culture and actually doing something about it on a Monday morning.
- Sixty concrete exercises replace abstract culture theory with practical drills
- After-action reviews turn every project, successful or not, into a learning opportunity
- Naming tension directly is more effective than working around it politely
- Culture change comes from stacked small practices, not one big initiative
A good place to start is picking just one exercise from the book, an after-action review or a naming-the-elephant check-in, and running it consistently for a month before adding anything else.
We give this book four out of five stars.
