Lead Right for Your Company's Type: How to Connect Your Culture with Your Customer Promise - Hardcover

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William E. Schneider, Ph.D. is a consulting psychologist and co-owner of Corporate Development Group (CDG), a leadership and organizational development firm. He is the author of The Reengineering Alternative.

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What’s wrong with these management scenarios?

• A former Apple executive implements Apple-like leadership, power, and compensation practices within J.C. Penney, and sales plunge 25%.

• Microsoft shifts its focus from new and effective technologies to ideas that promise quick profits, and the company loses half its value in three years.

• A large day care chain states that the priority for administrators and teachers is to keep classrooms continually filled with children, and loses 30% of its staff and 23% of its customers within a year.

In these three examples, leaders adopted approaches that ran contrary to their customer promise and the nature of their enterprise. And in each case it had devastating consequences.

For too long, leaders of organizations around the world have focused on solving the people problems they face with minimal success because they try to implement management ideas that don’t fit their kind of organization. As a result, problems reoccur, leaders fail, and organizations like J.C. Penney and Microsoft take falls—some to never rise again. One size does not fit all.

The solution? Understanding your enterprise’s customer promise and leading in the way that properly fits your promise. Simply put, a nuclear power plant, a day care center, a PR firm, and a high-tech business have fundamentally different promises and must be led differently. Choose leadership practices that fit your customer promise and company type, and your organization can thrive. Apply the wrong practices, and the contradictions will cause strain that pulls your company apart.

Lead Right for Your Company Type shows how every organization falls into one of four categories determined by their customer promise: the predictable and dependable enterprise delivering consistent, reliable, and dependable products or services; the best-in-class enterprise delivering one-of-a-kind and distinctive products or services; the customized enterprise delivering a unique solution to each customer; or the enrichment enterprise promising fulfillment and the realization of higher-level purposes.

This book provides examples of world-renowned companies in a wide range of industries to illustrate the benefits of leading in the way that fits their company type. And it gives practical steps you’ll be able to apply immediately to your organization. You’ll learn:

• Which of the four enterprise types fits your organization

• The system-centric mindset and how to thrive in your “living system”

• How to establish the “magnetic north” for your enterprise

• Tips for connecting core and support work processes

• The 15 drivers of culture and 3 drivers of leadership

• How to balance and keep your strengths from becoming weaknesses

• Ways to adapt to environmental and life cycle changes

Escape the same old superficial results of leadership approaches and books that propose one-size-fits-all solutions. Embrace your enterprise’s customer promise and start leading and building to effectively deliver on your promise. Lead Right for Your Company’s Type is the book that shows you how.

William E. Schneider, Ph.D. is a consulting psychologist and co-owner of Corporate Development Group (CDG), a leadership and organizational development firm in Englewood, Colorado. Over the course of his 35-year career, he has consulted with over 4,000 leaders in non-profit and profit sectors. He is the author of The Reengineering Alternative, and can be reached at www.cdg-corp.com

Aus dem Klappentext

What’s wrong with these management scenarios?

• A former Apple executive implements Apple-like leadership, power, and compensation practices within J.C. Penney, and sales plunge 25%.

• Microsoft shifts its focus from new and effective technologies to ideas that promise quick profits, and the company loses half its value in three years.

• A large day care chain states that the priority for administrators and teachers is to keep classrooms continually filled with children, and loses 30% of its staff and 23% of its customers within a year.

In these three examples, leaders adopted approaches that ran contrary to their customer promise and the nature of their enterprise. And in each case it had devastating consequences.

For too long, leaders of organizations around the world have focused on solving the people problems they face with minimal success because they try to implement management ideas that don’t fit their kind of organization. As a result, problems reoccur, leaders fail, and organizations like J.C. Penney and Microsoft take falls—some to never rise again. One size does not fit all.

The solution? Understanding your enterprise’s customer promise and leading in the way that properly fits your promise. Simply put, a nuclear power plant, a day care center, a PR firm, and a high-tech business have fundamentally different promises and must be led differently. Choose leadership practices that fit your customer promise and company type, and your organization can thrive. Apply the wrong practices, and the contradictions will cause strain that pulls your company apart.

Lead Right for Your Company Type shows how every organization falls into one of four categories determined by their customer promise: the predictable and dependable enterprise delivering consistent, reliable, and dependable products or services; the best-in-class enterprise delivering one-of-a-kind and distinctive products or services; the customized enterprise delivering a unique solution to each customer; or the enrichment enterprise promising fulfillment and the realization of higher-level purposes.

This book provides examples of world-renowned companies in a wide range of industries to illustrate the benefits of leading in the way that fits their company type. And it gives practical steps you’ll be able to apply immediately to your organization. You’ll learn:

• Which of the four enterprise types fits your organization

• The system-centric mindset and how to thrive in your “living system”

• How to establish the “magnetic north” for your enterprise

• Tips for connecting core and support work processes

• The 15 drivers of culture and 3 drivers of leadership

• How to balance and keep your strengths from becoming weaknesses

• Ways to adapt to environmental and life cycle changes

Escape the same old superficial results of leadership approaches and books that propose one-size-fits-all solutions. Embrace your enterprise’s customer promise and start leading and building to effectively deliver on your promise. Lead Right for Your Company’s Type is the book that shows you how.

William E. Schneider, Ph.D. is a consulting psychologist and co-owner of Corporate Development Group (CDG), a leadership and organizational development firm in Englewood, Colorado. Over the course of his 35-year career, he has consulted with over 4,000 leaders in non-profit and profit sectors. He is the author of The Reengineering Alternative, and can be reached at www.cdg-corp.com

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When we promise a product or service to customers, we form an immediate interdependence with them. They are now "depending upon" us to deliver on our promise. Our promise connects them with our living people system. They are not "outside" our enterprise. Every enterprise exists to deliver on its promise to its cus-tomers. The four fundamental enterprises discussed in this book are each named by their customer promise--predictable and dependable, enrichment, best-in-class, and customized. Everything starts with your customer promise. Customer promise determines your culture and leadership approach. There is no one right culture or leadership approach. One size does not fit all.

Culture means how we hire, structure, deploy, compensate, and develop our employees to deliver on our customer promise. It establishes and underpins, among other factors, structure, membership criteria, conditions for judging effective performance, communication patterns, expectations and priorities, the nature of reward and compensation, the nature and use of power, decision-making practices, and teaming practices. It is about our community of employees. It is about how we do things in order to succeed. It is all about implementation. Over time, if we are more and more successful, culture becomes equivalent to our identity (e.g., the GE way, the Disney way, the Apple way). The more successful our enterprise is, the stronger our culture becomes. Culture is not a compilation of individual people's values. Culture is essentially formed by what it takes for your people to fully deliver on your enterprise's customer promise. It is driven by the nature of your business and what it takes for you to succeed in your marketplace.

Leadership means to set a direction for your enterprise based on customer promise, to mobilize commitment, and to build enterprise capability. It is where greater power exists in order to influence events within the enterprise. Leadership includes people who lack observable rank or title. The more versatile the leader, the more effective he or she is. Versatile leaders understand their core approach to leadership and adapt that approach to the strategic and cultural requirements inherent in their type of enterprise. They create conditions for their whole enterprise to fully deliver on its customer promise. At the end of the day, leadership is about creating unity and empowering people to live up to the enterprise's customer promise.

Excerpted from LEAD RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY'S TYPE: How to Connect Your Culture with Your Customer Promise by William E. Schneider. Copyright © 2017 by William E. Schneider. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

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