Wisdom From "What Happy Companies Know"
$26.99 U.S., hardcover, 320 pages, Prentice Hall, June 2006, ISBN 0131858572
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Chapter 1
Cumulatively, corporate wrongdoing in the last decade has caused more total economic harm than terrorist attacks against the United States. Only the direct human death toll of 9/11 makes the terrorist actions more grievous or horrifying.
If Enron’s senior executives had taken all that energy and put it into addressing the real business opportunities of the company, wouldn’t they have made just about as much money and felt a whole lot better about themselves?
Happiness is not a mood (moods are biochemically regulated) or an emotion (emotions are subject to situational influence), but an approach toward life. Happiness is knowing what is truly important and living in accordance with what is important.
A Happy Company is: an organization in which individuals at all levels of authority exhibit a diversity of strengths, constructively work together toward a common goal, find significant meaning and satisfaction in producing and providing high-quality products and services for profit, and through those products and services make a positive difference in the lives of others.
Fun is not the goal, yet fun naturally arises when people do work that they enjoy and find meaningful.
Chapter 2
A happy company is one that distinguishes reality through a positive lens and a positive mindset. It perceives its universe as a marketplace with a multiplicity of opportunities rather than as a marketplace with a thicket of problems. … Leaders choose optimism over pessimism.
You cannot run a successful, dynamic business on fear.
As many people live lives of quiet desperation, many companies live lives of quiet apprehension.
Fear shuts down the consciousness that enables the pursuit of any possibility except that which is immediately apparent this instant.
Fear is the root cause for the failure of corporations that have succumbed to greed, malfeasance, or plain old competition.
Courage is the ability to think and act clearly during uncertain or dangerous times.
Chapter 3
The human brain cannot process fear and appreciation simultaneously.
Much as we would like to distance ourselves psychologically from our Neolithic forebears, the fact is that the “caveman” is just us with early technology, politically incorrect clothing, and bad haircuts. We are still built and wired for biologically hard times, when scarcity prevailed.
The brain processes more emotion than it does cognitive activity. It is not neurologically possible to be exclusively logical when so much of your brain is dedicated to processing emotion.
When focus is on priorities, urgency takes care of itself.
Businesspeople frequently complain about not having enough time, but time is the great equalizer. We all have precisely 24 hours in our day. Knowing how to properly prioritize projects separates the effective from those that work with great energy but seldom achieve lasting success.
Chapter 4
The complexity of our biology challenges male-biased assumptions that progress comes from aggression. Most often, aggression is a sign of fear, just as it is with other apes. Whether displayed as hostility or arrogance, fear-based leadership behavior is an expression of the fear of not being enough or … the fear of not having enough.
Managers need to understand that repeated aggressive behaviors can train employees either not to act (behavioral freezing) or to rebel in secret.
We often don’t recognize fear because it cloaks itself in attitudes such as arrogance, greed, turf-ism, backstabbing, lying, cheating and manipulation.
The vicious cycle of fear-based reactivity severely limits our opportunity to develop a corporate vision, to conduct business in an effective, proactive, constructive and productive way.
Chapter 5
Few companies recognize that problem solving is a negative rather than a positive attribute. It looks for the negative (what is wrong) rather than the positive (what is right). … The problem with problem solving is that it diverts a company from opportunities, focuses on the past, promotes conflict, and drains precious energy from the organization.
Companies that expend huge chunks of valuable time “fixing problems” have little time left over for the processes of constructive, creative and inspired innovation. They never get to the power of possibilities.
The Catastrophe of the Competitive Inverse: Companies that reflexively oppose a strong competitor will almost always lose.
Only one or possibly two companies will win in a market centered on competition. … In contrast, multiple companies can win in an opportunity-centered environment. It makes no sense to fixate on your competition instead of your future. You greatly increase the chance of losing.
The pursuit of opportunity will simply leave behind many of the problems.
The opposite of a problem is a zero, not an opportunity.
Chapter 6
Far more companies suffer from the “stress flu” of normal fear-based business behavior than ever suffer from the cancer of criminality.
Nature does not care that the adult salmon die from adrenal overload, because by now the salmon have procreated. But you may not care to go belly up from work-related stress.
Chapter 7
Happiness comes from exertion that challenges but does not break us, in the service of a goal that excites us.
Chapter 8
An overwhelming number of companies are lackluster because they culturally replicate fear-based behaviors that lead to short-term thinking or other self-defeating behavior, plodding along and reacting to events rather than driving toward a vision inspired by the executive brain. They are not doomed to mediocrity. But by failing to unleash human potential they behave in ways that lead to mediocre outcomes.
When you change the organizational structure, do so with the fundamental idea of changing behavior and culture around future possibilities, not simply redeploying bodies around new functional areas, or trying to achieve “efficiency,” or otherwise trying to solve an organizational problem.
Chapter 9
The right vision creates its own kind of streamlining.
Altruism may be the defining signature of our race, more so than our other “civilized” traits, none of which—speech, tool making, culture—would amount to much unless mutual support and cooperation are a given.
A company’s area of expertise may not be awe inspiring on its face, but the right leader will imbue the mission with heart.
Diversity without a common goal is chaos. A vision will pull you together, as well as pull you to above-and-beyond efforts, not because it is required but because you cannot help yourself.
Leaders who believe in a vision and mission beyond the financials are themselves more believable, more credible. … They are energized about their mission, about their customers, about their employees. Not about themselves. Not about profits except as they prove the value of the mission.
Chapter 10
Innovation in an organization is like consciousness in a living being. It is not something separate but something that rises organically from the being itself.
Leaders of innovative companies … purposefully set out to achieve innovation. They do not leave innovation to happenstance or to the occasionally brilliant individual. They do not design their organizations first and then wonder how to insert innovation.
A subtle distinction exists between creating a talented team to carry out a particular project and separating a team from the general organization because the general organization is dysfunctional.
A worthy vision always evaporates internal competition.
Do not ‘ghetto-ize’ innovation by placing innovation in a skunk works, thereby telling the other 95 percent of the organization not to bother thinking.
The things that mark a successful skunk works are things that every organizational team should have: a lack of distractions and internal overhead, a bold, well-conceived goal, specific deadlines, and barely enough money to achieve that goal.
Leaders need to make sure that the industrious do not foreclose ideas before they are fully developed and the imaginative do not derail the organization during its dash to project completion.
People are likely to have a creative breakthrough today if they were happy yesterday. … Creative breakthroughs are the result of a happiness hangover.
Chapter 11
Compensation is not an important motivator except as it relates to fairness within and without the organization. Compensation can become a flashpoint for other areas of dissatisfaction, however, because pay is one area where employees can particularize their overall distress.
All businesspeople can run into style traps by not seeing how their style impacts others or how the style of others impacts them.
Appealing to a power leader’s spiritual side can help the leader act in a way that is good for the company and community while helping ensure that the leader does not fall into a reactive pattern of personal power grabs.
Passion is a perpetual motion machine, frictionless and self-renewing. Stress is the friction that comes from a lack of alignment between capabilities and assignment. Stress can burn out the individual and it can destroy the engine of an entire organization. Passion and stress are both culturally contagious.
Chapter 12
You are not in business to make money. You are in business to pursue a dream. Money indicates whether you have succeeded.
The choice is not between people and high profits. Being good to people causes high profits. The corollary is that leaders must have the guts to practice the professional and ethical standards they so often preach.
Chapter 13
A clear line of sight between the employee’s job and the company’s purpose is an individual’s single greatest motivating factor.
A real commitment to people has a far greater financial return than a commitment to things—processes, plans, policies, capital investments. … People are the only assets that generate profits. All other assets are derivative.
Chapter 14
Most companies treat their charitable work as a matter secondary to their primary role of generating profits for the benefit of shareholders and employees. We take a radically different view. We believe that in order to succeed, companies need to be highly engaged in their communities and to make community involvement a central part of the corporate mission.
Serious engagement with and for the community is the single most important way in which a company can develop and retain its heart and soul.
The secret is to find community work that stimulates innovation within your particular organization.
Looking to do good in business itself is one way to discover new markets.
Just as stress triggers chemical reinforcement of the body’s biology that drives continually more fear-based behaviors, positive activities trigger chemical reinforcement of the higher brain centers, tending to lock in creative functioning of the whole brain over time.
Like quality or innovation, social consciousness cannot be added on. It must be built into. In this way it has the power to transform people and organizations.
Chapter 15
Just about every organization has some undiscussable: the boss’s tyrannical style, which no one wants to confront; conflict between individuals that the team pretends does not exist; favoritism, cronyism, or nepotism somewhere in the company; a contradiction between what leaders say and what they do or what they ask of others and do for themselves; and so on.
Because many programs are driven too much by consultants and come across as “academic,” the CEO or other senior executives need to “own” [change] programs.
A positive climate, particularly one that encourages managers to use their best judgment to act upon the company’s mission and intent—rather than waiting for someone higher up to make a decision—improves a company’s ability to respond to change.
Chapter 16
Culture is what leaders stamp on an organization, not what happens while leaders are elsewhere attending to “business.”
You do not have a mission of achieving profits. You have profits in order to be able to pursue the mission.
Humans naturally gravitate to those who demonstrate leadership as opposed to dominance.
Few people have the opportunity to write a new chapter in history, but every business leader, at every level, has the opportunity to write a new chapter in the behavior of a business and do with the organization something more than make a serviceable product.
The difference between an unhappy company and a happy one is the difference between reacting to what the existing world wants you to do and modeling a new reality—the future that you want—and bringing the world along with you.
Source:http://www.h2cleadership.com/publications/what-happy-companies-know_wisdom.shtml
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