Expand Your Mind: Culture Makes It Happen
by Miki Saxon
More proof that culture is the difference between winning, losing and turning around.
What can culture make happen? Just about anything.
What do Apple, McDonalds, IBM, Continental Air Lines and ABB have in common with Western Digital, U.S. Steel, Waste Management, Nutrisystem and Orbital Sciences? They all came back from near death experiences or brushes with irrelevance.
Culture drives everything that happens in a company.
Steve Jobs says that Apple has a startup culture and it was the culture he focused on when he came back to bring the company back from the brink.
When it comes to culture Jim Goodnight’s 30 year-old SAS is at the top of the heap and likely to stay there. Goodnight decided not go public because he “didn’t want analysts on Wall Street telling him how to run his business and forcing him to cut out the elements of SAS’s culture that give it an edge” and what an edge that is.
Finally, there is no way today’s column can end without a reference to Zappos.
You’ve probably already seen it, but the article in Inc. Magazine on why Zappos was sold to Amazon is actually an excerpt from Tony Hsieh’s new book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.
In his column about Zappos Chris O’Brien supplies a great close to today’s post.
If you treat employees like they’re just a bottom-line expense, they’re bound to act like one, delivering the very least performance possible. And if you treat customers like they’re a problem, then they’ll eventually get the message and go away.
Image credit: pedroCarvalho on flickr
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