Wildly Successful! The Intentional Culture Cookbook, by Tom Bellinson and Thomas Meloche
The Book

Wildly Successful!

The Intentional Culture Cookbook

This isn't another preachy business book. It's a cookbook — packed with step-by-step recipes for building a company where people actually love showing up to work. Including you.

Funny, practical, and built from decades of real-world scars and successes. Stop stumbling into a culture you hate. Start cooking up one that makes your business wildly successful.

By Tom Bellinson and Thomas Meloche — The Two Toms

Get it on Amazon

Available in Kindle, paperback, and Audible

[ Book on iPhone — Audible or Kindle app ]

Why a cookbook?

We know leaders who are continually reading great business books with fantastic ideas to help their organizations. Yet their organizations don't change much. Those books aren't translating into action.

That got us thinking. What type of book drives action more than any other? The answer is a cookbook. Most people buy them as a guide for preparing meals. That's what we want for you — a guide for preparing your organization to reach its full potential.

Each recipe follows the same format:

1

Storytime

A real experience from one of us — because everyone loves a good story, and context matters.

2

Background

The context behind the recipe. Why this matters and where it fits in the bigger picture.

3

Ingredients

The fundamental steps, boiled down. Easy to reference later when you're ready to act.

4

Instructions

The details — adapted for the reality that every business is different. Enough context to apply it your way.

5

Variations

Specific alternatives to the standard approach. Good cooks develop their own variations.

We didn't intend for you to just read this book. We intended for you to do this book.

What's inside

01

Principles

  • What is Intentional Culture?
  • Culture starts and ends with people
  • Drafting a mission statement
  • Creating a vision statement
  • Values and guiding principles
  • Two universal values every org needs
  • Leadership characteristics
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Humility and empathy
02

Structure

  • Servant leadership
  • How many layers of management?
  • Delegation of decisions
  • Removing obstacles
  • Instrumenting for failure
  • Building trust, eliminating fear
  • Full-function teams
  • Hiring for EQ & IQ
  • Communities of practice
03

Ceremonies

  • Designing a ceremony
  • Daily check-in
  • Planning ceremony
  • Show and tell
  • Retrospective
  • Feedback ceremony
  • Blameless postmortem
  • Plus 11 additional ceremonies

"We did not intend for you just to read this book; we intended for you to DO this book. If all you did was read it, we have failed in our mission."

— From the Obligatory Last Section of the Book
[ Tom B. ]
[ Tom M. ]

The Two Toms

Tom Bellinson and Thomas Meloche have been building, breaking, and fixing organizational cultures for over four decades combined. Tom Meloche co-founded Menlo Innovations — the company featured in the bestselling book Joy Inc. — and has trained over 20,000 people in agile practices.

Together, they've worked with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between. They've seen enough failed Agile transformations to know that practices aren't enough. Culture is what makes or breaks the whole thing.

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Founders of A2Agile.

Prefer doing to reading?

The book gives you the recipes. We help you cook. Take the assessment to see where your culture stands, or go straight to Amazon if you want the book first.

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