“Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” –Henry James (The Ambassadors)

Want to boost productivity? Ramp up innovation? Reduce turnover? Attract better candidates?

Live all you can.

As true as this is for life in general, it is even truer for the sub-sector called work-life and you should make a point of embedding the wisdom in your company/group’s DNA.

For your people, living all you can at work means

• having multiple opportunities to expand on all fronts;
• taking on unfamiliar roles;
• doing things outside their comfort zone; and
• understanding the “big picture” and how their efforts fit, affect and support it.

For you, living all you can at work means

• providing the above opportunities to everyone;
• encouraging them to go for it even when they resist; and
• providing the training, coaching and mentorship needed for them to expand successfully.

Doing so is the most critical part of your job description and all but guarantees you’ll accomplish the rest of it.

Live all you can—a worthy mantra as long as you’re willing to back it up with your own actions.

Flickr image credit: zedbee

According to Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, his number one job is empowering his people.

“Thinking about how I can empower my employees to be a part of the growth and innovation of the company.”

While employee empowerment is acknowledged as of key importance, it is an elusive goal for many CEOs, executives and managers. What makes Hsieh different?

Security.

Hsieh is comfortable in his own skin; secure in his own competency and limitations, so he doesn’t need to be the font from which all else flows.

As he points out, one good idea a day from him won’t come close to matching one good idea a year from each employee and not just the highly visible ones.

Some of the best ideas come from places a CEO would never have thought of.”

But employee empowerment often hits a positional brick wall that starts with the CEO and filters down through the ranks of the company’s positional leaders.

There are thousands of executives and managers who are insecure and the level of their insecurity defines to whom they will listen.

Most CEO’s who look at their corporate culture from the top-down are really preventing their company to grow faster, better, and more profitably.

And Just as true for other positional leaders as it is for the CEO.

What is most ironic is that by empowering employees, listening to everyone, adopting the good ideas without prejudice and publicly acknowledging their source does as much to enhance you as it does to push your group/company to greater success.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

Is culture sustainable? Ask Jim Sinegal who, over 28 years, took Costco from $0 to $78 billion and built it into a global powerhouse without catering to Wall Street—workers have health benefits, margins are 14% (15% for house brands) and the price of a hot dog and drink hasn’t change since 1985. Does it work?

Shares of Costco have risen nearly 40 percent in the past year, whereas Wal-Mart shares are up just 6 percent even though the world’s largest retailer enjoys a gross profit margin of close to 25 percent compared with Costco’s 10.8 percent. Shares of another competitor, BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc (BJ.N), have risen about 21 percent over the last year.

Any day you look you’ll find an account describing problems in the money-losing airline industry. But if you keep looking you’ll also find bright spots, such as Southwest and Jet Blue, whose cultures engage their people’s passion and that translates directly into dollars.

A 2009 study by Gallup found that companies in the top decile for employee engagement boosted earnings per share at nearly four times the rate of companies with lower scores.

What do 3M and Virgin have in common? Cultures that invite, enable and revel in creative employees—intrepreneurs—that drive innovation, profits and keep their new product pipelines packed.

3M is 109 years old, the company continues to churn out new products like a young startup which explains why 31% of 3M’s 2010 revenues came from products that were developed during the past five years.

“Virgin could never have grown into the group of more than 200 companies it is now, were it not for a steady stream of intrapreneurs who looked for and developed opportunities, often leading efforts that went against the grain.” –Sir Richard Branson

Finally, and mostly to give you a laugh, here are the totally obnoxious actions from some of today’s truly monster egos.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/

There is a sizable difference between accepting positional leadership when a company is at the bottom and there is no place to go but up and taking over when its at its height—even more so when what was the growth engine and source of extraordinary profits disappears from the economic landscape.

It is one thing to maximize what you have, wringing out every last possible dollar, and investing in innovation for sustainable growth in the future.

It is one thing to create a culture where public shame and the likelihood of termination for missing your numbers rules and changing that to a culture that encourages appropriate risk-taking and never kills the messenger when the risk doesn’t pan out; a culture that understands not every innovation will be a home run, but encourages and applauds the effort anyway.

These are the differences between Jack Welch

But Welch had taken over when the company was in the bottom of an economic cycle. He took over GE in a recession, not the height of a bubble. Immelt got the job right after the end of the high-flying 1990s, an era which crowned CEOs with mythical, God-like crowns, and Welch was bestowed the biggest of them all.

and Jeff Immelt.

Immelt had known before the meltdown the company needed to ween off the leveraged risk from finance that was begun under Welch. … He admitted mistakes, as any good leader must do, and GE more quietly if not humbly went about its business in making the company a 21st century sustainable and reliable profit engine.

The differences are worth noting.

Flickr image credit: laurita13

Entrepreneurs, mompreneurs, solopreneurs, micropreneurs, partnerpreneurs, kidpreneurs, the list grows daily.

If you listen to the media these days the only career of merit is to be a somethingpreneur and that those who work for large companies should quit to start their own biz or be branded as losers.

I am taking this opportunity to state categorically, once and for all that that’s a crock.

Seriously.

There are millions of talented, driven, high producers who work happily in large companies of all kinds across the country.

They aren’t there because they are scared to do their own thing.

They aren’t there because they aren’t innovative or lack creativity.

They aren’t there because they are lazy, uncaring or stupid.

They don’t deserve to be labeled drudges or losers because they thrive in the corporate world.

They are the people who will buy or use the somethingpreneur products.

Their employers are the companies that will acquire or partner many of the somethingpreneur companies.

The somethingpreneur ecosystem would crash and burn without these companies and their employees.

The companies would crash and burn without those employees.

Somethingpreneurs couldn’t scale their companies without these people.

The idea that a person is better because they founded or work in a startup is hype; they are different, not worse or better—just different.

No matter the size of the company, it comes down to cultural fit.

Not just the company culture, but the specific culture propagated by the manager for whom they work.

It’s not just about risk-taking. The days when corporate size, unions, public service or professional degrees (doctors, lawyers) mitigated job risk are long gone.

It’s not even about a person’s accomplishments in their previous/current job.

It’s about what that person would do in your company’s culture and under your management.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koalazymonkey/5089128512/

Go culture if you want to change.

Go culture if you want to innovate.

Go culture if you want to solve problems.

Go culture if you want better hires.

Go culture if you want to improve retention.

Go culture if you want to win.

I’ve spent decades saying go culture.

Culture is the font, the basis, the cause and the reason. It is the tao.

Need a bigger ‘brand’ to convince someone?

Click over to HBR and read Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time by Nilofer Merchant, author of The New How. (Or send them one of the dozens of links from my culture posts over the years.)

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

When I started RampUp Solutions way back in 1999 and talked/preached/ranted) about the importance of culture I was often met with a bored expression or an eye roll.

Back then culture was an ethereal concept compounded of smoke and mirrors and propagated by consultants whose main purpose was to generate business.

That attitude has radically changed over the last decade…

“…Our final advantage is the hard-to-duplicate culture that permeates Berkshire. And in businesses, culture counts.” —Warren Buffett

“Culture has become the defining issue that will distinguish the most successful businesses from the rest of the pack.” —Ginny Rometty, SVP, Group Executive, Sales, Marketing, and Strategy, IBM

“…he [Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO, DreamWorks Animation] didn’t always know how important it is to make employees happy in their jobs. … Had Katzenberg known earlier how critical it is to build a best company to work for, he told me, he might have been more successful than he is.”

Tony Hsieh, Jeff Immelt, numerous academics, assorted pundits, gurus and coaches, not to mention all forms of media, are focused on culture.

With all the talk and solid examples of the bottom line value of good culture why do so many companies, large and small, provide an employee experience that can only be described as ‘lousy’?

Because companies don’t provide culture, managers do.

Managers, from CEO to team leader, create/enable whatever culture exists below them.

But they have little-to-no effect on the shape of the culture above them, unless that culture permits the influence, as illustrated by the creation of Best Buy’s ROWE.

It’s not that managers don’t get it, but understanding something and doing it is not the same thing.

Understanding is grounded in intellect.

Doing is grounded in MAP.

And MAP is a personal choice over which companies have no control.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

A great deal of innovation, including those with the potential to change the world, is done not just by entrepreneurs, but internally in corporations.

Fast Company offers a list of what it considers the 2011’s 50 Most Innovative Companies. Some are innovation standards, while others will surprise you, however number 21, DonorsChoose, innovative or not, is a sad commentary on US education.

Innovation, like sex and love is often progressive, with one idea often leading to another. First off, now on the Web, the two have progressed from sex (general and nitch porn) to love (general and nitch dating sites) to infidelity. Obviously, if someone works their way through these sites sequentially then the next needed innovation is divorce, which is provided by Tim McNamara at ClearViewDivorce.

The next three are my personal favorites, because they address my personal needs so perfectly.

Liquid glass looks like a solution to any problem surface that I want smooth and easy to clean.

A new wall panel made by National Gypsum called Thermalcore seems like a great way to cut my heating bills when I finally remodel.

Finally, my office faces my front yard where I feed dozens of birds, a few squirrels and the occasional hawk that stops by for a starling lunch and I enjoy them through three large fixed pane windows. Unfortunately, the birds often crash into the glass, but a German company has solved that problem. I’m replacing the panes with Ornilux.

What fabulous new product have you found lately?

Image credit: MykReeve on flickr

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes, sizes and ages, but, contrary to the conclusions you might draw from media hype, most aren’t all that young.

“In every single year from 1996 to 2007, Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20-34.”

Another entrepreneur myth is that they all work 80 hour weeks and think of nothing but their company forsaking friends, family and any kind of balance. Yes, entrepreneurs work incredibly hard, but those who don’t want to burn out add balance to their lives knowing that they perform better when they take time to recharge their batteries—and some go to extreme lengths to unwind and recharge as described in this Forbes Personal Best segment. (Check it out, the videos are spectacular.)

What I’ve found over the past year is that some of the most successful men and women on the job, are just as successful outside of the office, living their lives to the fullest. They say it’s incredibly important to live a well-balanced life in order to keep their creativity fresh and focused.

What does a laid off 40 year old Manhattan real estate attorney have in common with a low caste Indian child?

Both got mad, both were unhappy with their world, both went against accepted norms and in doing so are changing their culture—although the Indian change is seismic, while the NY change is more on the silly level.

India: “I just believed that we all are equal human beings, so why do we have differences, as far as social status is concerned, economical status is concerned, social recognition and honor and respect?” (Think beauty contests, roller-skating and English classes.)

NY: “I was prepared to fail when I started this. Now people come up to me on the street and call me Cupcake Dude. Cupcake Dude! Are you kidding me?” (Think rum-soaked lime cake with mint white-chocolate ganache)

Image credit:  MykReeve on flickr

Lot’s of talk about creating a culture of innovation, but often that’s all it is—talk.

The most important factor in a culture of innovation is the ability to fail.

India’s Tata is a leader in creating a culture of innovation and Sunil Sinha, an executive in Tata Quality Management Services, discussed its approach recently at Harvard.

Sinha described a culture of innovation at Tata that includes employee-awards programs for both successful and unsuccessful ideas. What’s important, Sinha said, is that employees feel comfortable in bringing forward ideas, even ones that don’t pan out, and that they feel they work in a place that values fresh thinking.

The innovation culture has produced several notable products, he said. One is a water purification system that costs just $20 and produces enough water to keep a family of four supplied for more than a year.

Not only that, but in 6 short years, from the time its CEO publicly mentioned the idea in 2003, Tata Motors produced a $2500 car for sale in developing worlds; it’s a small, two-cylinder car that gets 55 miles per gallon and meets all of India’s vehicle emissions and regulatory requirements.

Done in spite of all the global pundits who said it couldn’t be done.

I speak with managers all the time who talk about their desire to enable a culture of innovation and when it doesn’t happen, whether through laziness, benign neglect, or more active negativity, take no responsibility and place the blame squarely on their people.

A culture of innovation starts not in talk or even actions, but in MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and its willingness to change.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/ and Tata Motors