I’m sure most people leading businesses know what they do, regardless of their organization’s size or industry category. Their people can probably describe the products and services they sell, and most know how they do what they do. But very few leaders can clearly explain why they do what they do. An increasing number of… Read more
Corporate Culture
Open for Business
Is your business an open book? Open book management is a leadership philosophy that’s grounded in the notion of creating businesses of business people where everyone in the organization thinks and acts like business owners. I’ve been taking clients to open book management pioneer SRC Corporation in Springfield, Missouri for more than 25 years. For… Read more
The Goldilocks Standard in Corporate Culture
Getting It Just Right I’ve been fascinated with organization culture since Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy published Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life in 1982. It was among the first serious books about corporate culture. Deal and Kennedy cut through the academic mumbo-jumbo and defined culture simply as “the way we do… Read more
Can We Start with Civility in Business Meetings?
We ended 2017 with a Leadership Report entitled, “Bringing Civility Back,” because at the start of 2017, I naively wrote that I hoped political and news media pettiness could subside. No way! To the contrary, politicians have turned flat-out ugly and many in the news media seem to thrive on the Game of ‘Gotcha,” preferring… Read more
Would Jeff Bezos Forget The Customer?
A Facebook post from a former client caught my eye recently. He believes the NFL and a few other groups have forgotten about the importance of customers. “As customers, should we be subjected to self-righteous grandstanding, whether we agree or disagree with a particular point of view?” he asked. Let’s see, what would Peter Drucker,… Read more
Ask Me Anything
I often get great questions from people via email, social media, at conferences and in client meetings. Recently, I received a question from Chris D. who asked about ways to manage two groups of people who need to work together—those who are young, eager and willing to work within a new organization and culture and… Read more
Build a Business of Turned-On Business People
If you want to build trust and take performance into the stratosphere, open the books. Share information that matters to improving operating and financial results. Celebrate people when they score big successes. Repeat. Open book management is the purest leadership communication philosophy I’ve seen and worked with. It’s grounded in the notion of creating businesses… Read more
First Enron; Now Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo and its CEO John Stumpf have no doubt had better weeks than last week. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells $185 million for opening deposit accounts and transferring funds without customers’ approval. This came five years after Wells paid $85 million in fines for selling higher interest rate mortgages to customers who… Read more
Touch Screen TVs Don’t Fix Safety
I conducted a communication assessment of an under-performing operation inside a larger company. It has a poor safety record and is missing its quality, service-delivery, productivity and cost goals. Employee retention rates are poor. The assessment revealed no core communication process managed by the leadership. People throughout the operation complained about disconnected, often-conflicting information that… Read more
On Meetingship
One of the best leaders I’ve ever worked with also ran the best meetings. His name is Mike and he’s a rock star in a large corporation. He and his colleague, Mary, invited me to help turn a west coast operation around so the company could decide whether it would keep the operation or sell… Read more