True to Yourself: Leading a Values-Based Business (SVN, Band 2) - Softcover

Albion, Mark

 
9781576753781: True to Yourself: Leading a Values-Based Business (SVN, Band 2)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1576753786 ISBN 13: 9781576753781
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

The bestselling author “frames his advice in terms of compassionate, socially responsible leadership, though a lot of it is just plain good management” (Publishers Weekly).

How do you build the kind of company you’ve always wanted to work in—one that serves people and the planet while being financially successful, too? What do you do when you believe that business should serve the common good, but everyday business pressures—meeting payroll, battling competition, keeping customers and investors happy—are at a fever pitch? Leading a small business when you measure success more broadly than with a single financial bottom line is no easy task. True to Yourself is a practical guide to doing just that. It provides tools you can use to combine profit with purpose, margin with mission, value with values.

“A perfect blend of inspiration and instruction. A must-read manual for anyone who aspires to a position of leadership.” —Alan M. Webber, Cofounding Editor, Fast Company

“If you want to build a values-based business, as I did with Kinko’s, Mark Albion provides you with the practical know-how to avoid mistakes and lead your company’s growth.” —Paul Orfalea, Founder and Chairperson Emeritus, Kinko’s

“If you want to build a business with social conscience, a company that reflects your core values and that people are proud to work for, True to Yourself will help you pour your heart into doing just that.” —Howard Schultz, Former Chairman, Starbucks Coffee Company

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Albion is a social entrepreneur who has cofounded seven organizations, including Net Impact, an international network of MBA students and professionals committed to using the power of business to create a better world. He wrote the New York Times business bestseller Making a Life, Making a Living® based on his twelve-year-old monthly Making a Life e-newsletter, which is read in eighty-seven countries. Formerly, Albion was a student and professor at Harvard University and its Business School for eighteen years. He was profiled on 60 Minutes, praised by leaders as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Mother Teresa, and dubbed “the savior of b-school souls” by Business- Week for his efforts to nourish our next generation of business leaders.

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The New Values
TRANSPARENCY, SUSTAINABILITY, AND RESPONSIBILITY

The birth moment for an organization is critical. Almost like conception, the genetics are set, and if you are not conscious of them, they can lead to an organization with a set of values and mission the founder doesn’t want. You need to spend a lot of time on your initial mission and values, as they will attract the founding group of people and develop the organization’s personality. Be mindful of the founding moment.

MARK A. FINSER, PRESIDENT OF RSF (RUDOLF STEINER FOUNDATION), A $90 MILLION (2005) NONPROFIT FINANCIAL SERVICES ORGANIZATION

In this chapter, we’ll learn the three strategic requirements for building a successful values-based small business. The sooner you focus on these organizational values, the easier your job will be. It all starts with your example.


It’s My First Day on the Job: What Should Be My Strategic Focus?

During my years as a Harvard Business School professor, I learned about leadership and strategy from the most successful CEOs of the world’s largest corporations. In the 1980s and 1990s, I listened closely to General Electric’s Jack Welch, who I believe set the standard for how to lead a profitable global 14 corporation. His leadership mantra was simple: To dominate your markets, you must focus on what will increase your reputation and productivity or decrease your costs of regulation. Your success in managing these three factors will determine the success of your business.

Seasoned business leaders know what their key determinants of financial success are. Many monitor them daily. For a retailer, the key determinant may be shrinkage. If inventory lost from employee theft, shoplifting, vendor fraud, and administrative error is less than 2 percent of revenues, this indicates that the company is running efficiently. For one executive director of a school for challenging teenagers, his barometer is the students’ “positive feelings” created at school. He monitors them each night in his office on wall charts of data collected daily.

Whatever these determinants are for your company, CEO Welch maintains that you need to focus on the ones that have the greatest impact on your reputation, productivity, or regulation. Your job as company leader is to ensure that everyone understands that and is working in that one direction.

In small, values-based companies, these three organizational factors are no less important than in more traditional large corporations—at one level. But values-based leaders have broader company goals than CEO Welch and, therefore, a somewhat different set of organizational values as requirements for success.

Many are committed to environmental responsibility. It’s not enough to make a simple calculation on what environmental regulations make financial sense to meet. For example, Aveda’s founder, Horst Rachelbacher, once told me that when faced with potentially conflicting corporate goals, he expected his people to “report to the Earth.” Profitability was important for the personal care products company, but most important was to “care for the world we live in… and set an example of 15 environmental leadership and responsibility” (part of the company’s mission statement). If there were a conflict between the profitability of a decision and environmental damage, Horst and the culture were clear about what to do.

These values suggest that reputation is built on openness and honesty, what I call “transparency.” “Sustainability” denotes longer-term thinking than productivity. “Responsibility” to people and the planet means that you do the right thing proactively instead of reacting to regulation. In this chapter, I illustrate these organizational values with examples of how they impact your job as a values-based leader.


Leading Transparency: How Much Openness Do You Want?

How much openness and honesty do you want to engage in every day? It’s a lot easier to measure your CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions than the level of honesty and transparency in your company. What it’s about is that when you are committed to a certain set of values, like transparency, you will communicate that in all you do, no matter what. Around here, if we mess up, someone immediately tells the person who writes our external corporate responsibility report to make sure that is included.

JEFFREY HOLLENDER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF SEVENTH GENERATION, THE LEADING U.S. BRAND OF NONTOXIC AND ENVIRONMENTALLY SAFE HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTS

I often think of building a reputation as a marketing effort, an act of persuasion. Transparency builds your reputation as a leader and your business’s reputation as a values-based company, too, but in a way that is stronger yet more delicate. Transparency is about being honest, open, and imperfect. Transparency means no secrets (within reason; e.g., trade secrets must be kept)—not only within the company but also in the marketplace. Its cousins are integrity, authenticity, and credibility. Its power comes from its source: truth. 16


The Power of Doubt and Not Knowing

Transparency requires that you change how you spend your time and how you lead. Listen to Danny Grossman, CEO of Wild Planet Toys, a manufacturer of innovative nonviolent products that appeal to both parents and children and treat girls and boys with equal respect. A former diplomat, Danny speaks thoughtfully and in measured tones: “How do you lead with doubt? How do you express that doubt? It’s a critical nuance of leadership. If you don’t express it, it will erode your credibility. So I’m clear about what I know and don’t know. If we launch a product that I think might fail, I say so and say why, but I also always offer a Plan B, too, in case my doubts prove correct.”

Leading with doubt and opening yourself up to other people’s opinions and your own imperfections means you should be comfortable with not knowing the answer for everything—and spend time to develop Plan B, too! Women in leadership positions can face even greater challenges.

Nina Simons is the co-executive director of Bioneers/CHI (Collective Heritage Institute), a national nonprofit organization that promotes practical environmental solutions and social strategies for restoring the earth and communities. Though her résumé swells with experience, she has had to overcome insecurities by making peace with not knowing: “I’ve found that the practice of not knowing has a powerful effect on people. I had no formal business training, but I did have a strong innate set of skills and talents. I knew that the only way to work toward a leadership position was in an honest way, to recognize repeatedly what I didn’t know.”

Not knowing allows people to contribute and grow with you. But Nina knows it’s important to let others know you don’t 17 know in a way that doesn’t undermine your authority or sense of self-esteem: “We’ve all grown up in a culture that tends to value masculine versus feminine traits. There’s often an acculturated insecurity among women, a fear of not being up to the task. It’s taken me fifteen years to learn to value myself and gracefully accept my not knowing. You need to give yourself permission to fail and communicate that to others. My mantra is ‘It’s okay to not know.’”

Leadership requires that you continually reinvent yourself. At times you will fail. If you don’t, you limit your self-expression and possibilities and create a stiff, conservative culture. Not knowing means that you look at power in a new way.

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576753786
ISBN 13 
9781576753781
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
eucomplyOÜ
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt. 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

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