A firm can exhibit many "good" cultural values, for example collaboration, integrity, or ambition. Influential theories of corporate culture claim that firms must choose which cultural values to foster because of inherent trade-offs between them. This paper tests this proposition using a new survey of managers (370 firms, averaging 27 respondents each). We find no evidence of trade-offs. To the contrary, we find that firms that score higher on one cultural value also tend to score higher on others. Our findings suggest that any inherent trade-offs are outweighed by the ability of good management practices to help a firm excel across many cultural values.

A growing body of literature finds that a healthy corporate culture is associated with superior financial performance. A separate stream of research has found that a firm's adoption of management "best practices" is correlated with higher efficiency and productivity. To date, the cultural and management practices literatures have proceeded in parallel, with few studies considering the relationship between an organization's processes and its culture. This paper uses data from a carefully-designed survey of 370 organizations and nearly ten thousand managers to simultaneously measure corporate culture and management practices. Our key finding is that the quality of a company's management practices and health of its corporate culture are highly correlated. This implies that studies which measure either culture or processes in isolation are likely to overstate their impact on performance. We also provide suggestive evidence that management practices may cause changes in corporate culture, or at least that this effect is stronger than the reverse.

This paper presents an easy-to-use measure of patent scope that is grounded both in patent law and in the practices of patent attorneys. We validate our measure by showing that patent attorneys' subjective assessments of scope agree with our estimates and that the behavior of patenters is consistent with it. Using our validation exercise, we find that previous measures of patent scope — such as the number of patent classes, the number of citations made by future patents, and the number of claims in a patent — are uninformative or misleading. To facilitate drawing causal inferences with our measure, we show how it can be used to create an instrumental variable, Patent Examiner Scope Toughness, which we also validate. We then demonstrate the power of this instrument by examining standard-essential patents. We show that an (exogenous) diminishment of patent scope leads to patents being much less likely to be declared standard-essential.