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With all the stories I have heard in the past few years from employees in
companies around the world, Im convinced you cannot be too specific about
values and their related behaviors.
And Its in the Backup
Clarity around values and behaviors is not much good unless it is backed up.
To make values really mean something, companies have to reward the people who
exhibit them and punish those who dont. Believe me, it will make winning
easier.
I say that because every time we asked one of our high-performing managers to
leave because he didnt demonstrate the valuesand we said as much publiclythe
organization responded incredibly well. In annual surveys over a decade,
employees would tell us that we were a company that increasingly lived its
values. That made people even more committed to living them too. And as our
employee satisfaction results improved, so did our financial results.
And Finally, Its in the Connection
A concrete mission is great. And values
that describe specific behaviors are too. But for a companys mission and values
to truly work together as a winning proposition, they have to be mutually
reinforcing.
It seems obvious, doesnt it, that a companys values should support its
mission, but its amazingly easy for that not to be the case. A disconnect
between the parts of a companys framework probably is more a sin of omission
than of commission, but it often happens.
In the most common scenario, a companys mission and its values rupture due
to the little crises of daily life in business: A competitor moves into town and
lowers prices, and so do you, undermining your mission of competing on extreme
customer service. Or a downturn hits, so you cut your advertising budget,
forgetting your mission is to enhance and extend your brand.
The foregoing is excerpted from Winning by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY.
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