Getting Started with Culture Change

Most executives know how a great culture "looks and feels," but they are uncertain about how to implement one. The task is large, but definitely worthwhile.

Some clues can tell executives when a culture change is necessary or appropriate: the company is being outperformed in its category, key positions experience high turnover rates, satisfaction surveys of customers and employees are consistently low, or the company demonstrates poor or declining financial performance. Typically, any of these issues can result from an ailing culture and can be addressed by changing the culture.

Every company already has a culture, so its executives can begin the change process by letting employees define the culture that already exists. The next step is to identify the culture that will best drive the organization's success.

The ideal is a high-spirit culture where everyone is engaged for the good of the company, aiming for the same goals and helping each other succeed. An amazing transformation in enthusiasm and behavior occurs when values and culture are clearly defined.

For culture change to be successful, the company must involve its best front-line people to ensure the culture becomes tied to what is most important: giving customers such a satisfying experience that they will do business with the company again and again. The top front-line people are eager to inform their leaders, and they command the respect that will lend instant credibility to any changes that are instituted based on their suggestions.

From that initial process will emerge a Values Blueprint that codifies the values the company's people agreed upon and the behaviors that exemplify those values. Subsequently, the values can be explicitly incorporated into daily operations by tying them to expected behaviors and rewarding employees for living them.

The Values Blueprint method of changing culture has been used successfully by many companies to create values-rich cultures. These companies are large and small, for-profits and non-profits, and operate in various industries.

Even though each company defines its own culture using different sets of values, six fundamental principles informed every successful values-based culture change.

A company cannot force culture; it can only create environment. Culture is a culmination of the leadership, values, language, people processes, rules, and other conditions within the organization. Leaders can only create the right conditions and working environment that will help the desired culture to emerge and flourish.

The service a company provides to its customers will never be greater than the service it provides to its employees. A company cannot create a great customer service organization if it treats employees badly. The companies that excel in customer service also excel in how they treat their employees.

Success is doing the right things the right way. Redefining corporate values helps companies make better decisions. Clearly defined values and the expected behaviors based on them empower employees to handle problems personally and immediately and simplify the day-to-day tasks of decision making.

People do exactly what they are given incentives to do. A values-rich culture succeeds when it rewards the behaviors that the company wants, taking into account how those behaviors lead to desired outcomes. Values will be perceived as hollow and meaningless unless the company bases compensation and rewards on expressions of the behaviors that mesh with the values. Hiring, promotion, and appraisal methods must be revised to select people who already display the values that are important to the company.

Organizations will get out of this process only what they are willing to put into it. A company never finishes defining and fostering a values-rich culture; it must always be vigilant against digressions into its old ways. Companies must regularly monitor their progress toward fully implementing the model, developing value-based leadership, and planning for leadership succession.

The desired environment can be built on shared, strategic values and financial responsibility. Conscious action, beginning with determining a set of shared values, can set up the necessary condition for encouraging a culture that will make an organization a leader in its industry. Those values should also be vetted in terms of responsible fiscal management; however, financial concerns should not derail the process in its infancy.

Culture change will likely save money as turnover and training costs are reduced and customers become more satisfied. Values are most critical when making tough decisions, but that is also when they illuminate the way forward.

This article is based on the book "Built on Values" by Ann Rhoades. The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Leader Detoxification: Strategies for Transforming Toxic Leaders and Organizations

The best solution for toxicity problems is transforming toxic leaders through detoxification. Author Alan Goldman describes detoxification as "the umbrella term for directly addressing dysfunctional decisions, policies, oversights, miscalculations, avoidance behavior, and leadership and follower behaviors that contaminate employees and operations."

Detoxification is a complex process that involves both leaders and their organizations and is a "process that calls for coaches and consultants who are able to identify the multiple sources and players that contribute to toxicity within a system." Without assistance, leaders should refrain from attributing the cause of dysfunctional behavior to a single event or person.

A troubled leader may wield an extraordinary level of toxic influence; however, the detoxification process often uncovers multiple and interdependent sources. Even the most poisonous acts may be symptomatic of orders dispatched from the top of the organizational hierarchy making the source of toxicity less obvious at first glance.

In fact, blaming the most visible and obvious cause and perpetrators and responding slowly to dysfunctional behavior are actually ways to accelerate toxicity and make it extremely difficult to address internally. Goldman says, "The shock and dismay expressed by clients who identify their organizational pain as already reaching into the lymph nodes of their operations is testimony to the need for a detoxification process that incorporates affective coaching and consultation."

The most successful consultations result in collaborations between internal or external consultant and organization, and stimulate positive transformations of both the toxic leader and the company. There are deficits and negative organizational behaviors that must be overcome by toxic clients in order to reach a state appropriate for a positive transformation.

There can be numerous roadblocks, rationalizations, pseudo-interventions, ulterior motives, and acts of sabotage and resistance that can undermine the best of intentions. Organizations that suffer from high levels of toxicity are immersed in systems of deficit thinking and behavior that affect leadership, human capital, operations, and policies.

When deficient systems engulf the workplace, negative organizational behavior becomes the rule. A myriad of dysfunctions can affect relations between leaders and subordinates, research and development, work teams, and customer service, and result in a toxic system.

These can include prolonged conflict, sabotage, the abrupt hiring of mercenary CEOs, and savage overnight re-structurings. These acts all constitute extreme deficits and are on the short list of prime sources of toxicity in many organizations.

This article was based on the book "Transforming Toxic Leaders" by Alan Goldman. The book summary is available on the Business Book Summaries website.

A New, Improved Business Book Summaries Website to Serve You

The team from Business Book Summaries is very pleased to let you know that we have a brand-new, enhanced website to serve you better! Please read on and let us know what you think.

What we believe: 
At Business Book Summaries, we believe people become better professionals through learning. We believe that business books contain some of the best and most current business thought.

We believe that summaries of the best business books help people to learn more efficiently and more effectively. We believe that a summary can provide the basic overview of the book, and give you insights into the author’s ideas.

Nothing substitutes for reading the book, but we believe our summaries will help you to get a solid grasp of the lessons in the book, so you can decide which books to read and when to read them.

What we do: 
We provide you with the best summaries of the best business books, every day. We enable you to acquire business knowledge faster, and with more understanding.

We provide our summaries to you in over 30 languages through a range of media, from PDFs to MP3s, on a range of devices, from PDAs to desktops.

What you can expect from the new website:

• The site will be updated with 5 new summaries each week.

• There are over 1,000 summaries in the catalogue.

• Users can use keyword searches using the search box or search by category

• Many summaries have audio available.

• All recent summaries (going back about 5 months) have HTML fulltext, so if a summary does not have audio, users can take advantage of our text-to-speech technology.

• Translation is offered for more than 30 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Italian, and Indonesian

• Users will receive a weekly newsletter informing them of the new summaries that week with links to each one.

For corporate customers:

• Users will have the ability to comment on summaries and post in the forums.

• Companies will get an autologin link to post on their intranet page.

• We can create reading lists for companies and target summaries of interest.

If you would like to check out or subscribe to business book summaries, please visit Business Book Summaries online.

The Cost of the Generational Divide

The generation gap is most often noticed when older workers are trying to mentor or motivate younger workers, and younger workers are not receptive. The younger workers complain they just want to hear the company goals and be set free to work rather than be forced to sit through a pep rally.

The older workers complain the younger workers do not respect tradition and have no sense of teamwork or any work ethic, for that matter. This kind of miscommunication happens all the time in companies all over the nation.

Every employee is valuable and brings skills and talent to the table. Miscommunication and conflict across generations impact a company’s productivity and bottom line.

Lost revenue and turnover, costly consequences of the generational divide, can be averted if managers learn to bring employees together.

Generational harmony impacts a company’s profitability. In 2005, it was predicted that unemployment would be at five percent at the end of 2006.

Low unemployment and steady job growth usually makes employees comfortable enough to look for jobs with better opportunities and better benefits. It was predicted that by 2010 the United States would be short 10 million workers with the right skills.

The U.S. was short only three to four million workers in the late 1990s, and hiring managers were scrambling to fill empty chairs. Organizations need a plan to recruit and retain employees from all generations with the right skills.

Turnover is expensive, costing “50 to 150 percent of a departing employee’s annual wage.” It is time for organizations to assess the demographics of their workforce to make sure they have the “bench strength” for projected retirements.

Managers can take the following actions to immediately improve retention:
• Evaluate age of workforce.
• Develop strategies to attract and retain those about to retire.
• Identify ways to operate more efficiently.
• Create a formal process to assess manpower over the next five to 10 years.
• Evaluate current turnover.
• Establish two-way communication on all issues.
• Assess skill development commitments.
• Proactively work to retain talent.

Managers should be developing strategies to coax ready-to-retire workers into semi-retirement so they can mentor younger workers to do their jobs. Employers should not only be thinking of ways to retain quality employees, but also how to retain valued customers and colleagues. Generational misperceptions can injure these critical business relationships.

People are a business’s key resource. It is the people that make a company successful. Managers need to understand the demographics of their workforce, and to do whatever they can to retain and develop the skills of all their employees, regardless of generation. This plan of action will minimize turnover and increase the bottom line.

Bridging the Generation Gap was written as a reference tool for managers confronted with recruiting, retaining, and balancing the needs of five generations of employees. To access the book summary, please go to BusinessSummaries.com.

The 10 Attributes Of An Offer According To A Blur World

Let us take a look at all these attributes, keeping in mind that the most essential feature of all offers is that they are connected.

Anytime
Accessibility by users at any time of day is becoming a must-have for offers of all kinds.

Real Time
This need for Speed of response in today’s business environment puts a premium on systems that can operate in “real time”.

Interactive
Another great benefit of online systems that eliminate the middle person – travel agent, bank teller, stockbroker (and sometimes maybe even the physician) – is that they can easily be made interactive.

Anyplace
Hand in hand with anytime access goes anyplace access; this is the other half of the mail-order boom. The trick is being able to service anyplace access effectively – anytime. Is your offer available to customers wherever they are?

Learning
Offer really start to get interesting when they make it possible to learn; that is, when they can not only capture information about their use, but make adjustments or initiate action in line with that new information.

Anticipating
Once offers have the ability to learn, it’s just a short step to give them something even more blurred: the ability to anticipate.

Filtering
A special form of customization is the filtering of the wide range of information and choices that increasingly confront users.

Customizing
Customization is a major theme running through the offers cited so far, whether they involve computers, jeans, or books.

Upgrading
One distinctive feature of software products is the constant stream of upgrades they spawn. Once you’ve bought a program, it isn’t necessary to make a whole new purchase when its functionality is improved.

In this groundbreaking book, Stan Davis and Chris Meyer deliver more than a guided tour to these momentous shifts. They offer readers a working model to illustrate and benefit from the new rules of the connected economy, where advantage is temporary and nothing is fixed in time or space. To access the full book summary, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Respecting Employee Diversity

It has been previously mentioned that the larger the organization, the more diverse the workforce and the more varied the type of personalities that are present. In addition to ethics training, a highly-effective and complementary practice is to offer diversity training as well.

By recognizing employee differences, celebrating them, and teaching individuals how to respect them, it is more likely that teams will be more collaborative and employees will be able to work together more effectively.

There are two primary goals for diversity training:

1) eliminate values, stereotypes, and managerial practices that inhibit the personal and professional development of diverse employees, and

2) allow diverse employees to contribute their best efforts for achieving superior organizational performance.


As with ethics training, there are a wide number of exercises and workshops that organizations can hold to encourage more effective diversity management. When individuals within a company are able to respect each other for the behavioral choices they make, as well as for the cultural differences they may have, a more cohesive unit can be formed for greater efficiency.

The Essentials of Business Ethics by Denis Collins takes an in-depth look into the many ways companies can incorporate an ethical mindset into their business. To access the full book summary, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Emotional Intelligence: The New Science of Success

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to control and use one’s emotions in a constructive—rather than destructive—manner. This allows an individual to achieve his best performance, while inspiring others.

EI is a composite of many other qualities, such as effective oral communication and an ability to respond well to setbacks, which distinguish the competent from the truly successful. While success has basic threshold requirements—technical skills, for example—the truly crucial characteristics are those that enable people to manage their emotions rather than be derailed by extreme or upsetting circumstances.

Fortunately, there are strategies to improve one’s emotional intelligence. It is important to understand the four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Self-awareness and self-management are related to one’s own personal competence, while social awareness and relationship management have to do with one’s competence in the social arena. One can improve behaviors in each of these domains to develop better overall emotional intelligence.

Ready to increase your emotional intelligence? More resources are available at BusinessSummaries.com. BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of new books released in the United States. Simply go to http://www.bizsum.com for more details.