Mitos (dongeng)
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Fakta
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| seorang yang bertindak/berbuat sesuatu, bukan seorang pemikir |
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| Usahawan dilahirkan secara semula jadi, tidak boleh dicipta |
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| Usahawan selalunya seorang pencipta |
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| Usahawan adalah bersifat akademik & merupakan seorang yg tidak dpt menyesuaikan diri (anti sosial) |
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| Keusahawanan mesti sepadan (fit) dengan “Profile” |
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| Kesemua usahawan memerlukan wang |
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| Semua usahawan bergantung kepada nasib |
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| Kebodohan (ketidaktahuan) adalah kebahagiaan (kepuasan) untuk usahawan |
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| Usahawan mencari kejayaan ttp mgalami kegagalan yg tinggi. |
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| Usahawan adalah penanggung risiko yang ekstrim |
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Monday, 26 May 2014
Mitos (dongeng) Mengenai Keusahawanan
Friday, 4 April 2014
Why Startups Fail
Reason 1: Market Problems
A major reason why companies fail, is that they run into the problem of their being little or no market for the product that they have built. Here are some common symptoms:
There is not a compelling enough value proposition, or compelling event, to cause the buyer to actually commit to purchasing. Good sales reps will tell you that to get an order in today’s tough conditions, you have to find buyers that have their “hair on fire”, or are “in extreme pain”. You also hear people talking about whether a product is a Vitamin (nice to have), or an Aspirin (must have).
The market timing is wrong. You could be ahead of your market by a few years, and they are not ready for your particular solution at this stage. For example when EqualLogic first launched their product, iSCSI was still very early, and it needed the arrival of VMWare which required a storage area network to do VMotion to really kick their market into gear. Fortunately they had the funding to last through the early years.
The market size of people that have pain, and have funds is simply not large enough
Reason 2: Business Model Failure
As outlined in the introduction to Business Models section, after spending time with hundreds of startups, I realized that one of the most common causes of failure in the startup world is that entrepreneurs are too optimistic about how easy it will be to acquire customers. They assume that because they will build an interesting web site, product, or service, that customers will beat a path to their door. That may happen with the first few customers, but after that, it rapidly becomes an expensive task to attract and win customers, and in many cases the cost of acquiring the customer (CAC) is actually higher than the lifetime value of that customer (LTV).
The observation that you have to be able to acquire your customers for less money than they will generate in value of the lifetime of your relationship with them is stunningly obvious. Yet despite that, I see the vast majority of entrepreneurs failing to pay adequate attention to figuring out a realistic cost of customer acquisition. A very large number of the business plans that I see as a venture capitalist have no thought given to this critical number, and as I work through the topic with the entrepreneur, they often begin to realize that their business model may not work because CAC will be greater than LTV.
The Essence of a Business Model
As outlined in the Business Models introduction, a simple way to focus on what matters in your business model is look at these two questions:
Can you find a scalable way to acquire customers
Can you then monetize those customers at a significantly higher level than your cost of acquisition
Thinking about things in such simple terms can be very helpful. I have also developed two “rules” around the business model, which are less hard and fast “rules, but more guidelines. These are outlined below:
The CAC / LTV “Rule”
The rule is extremely simple:
CAC must be less than LTV
CAC = Cost of Acquiring a Customer
LTV = Lifetime Value of a Customer
To compute CAC, you should take the entire cost of your sales and marketing functions, (including salaries, marketing programs, lead generation, travel, etc.) and divide it by the number of customers that you closed during that period of time. So for example, if your total sales and marketing spend in Q1 was $1m, and you closed 1000 customers, then your average cost to acquire a customer (CAC) is $1,000.
To compute LTV, you will want to look at the gross margin associated with the customer (net of all installation, support, and operational expenses) over their lifetime. For businesses with one time fees, this is pretty simple. For businesses that have recurring subscription revenue, this is computed by taking the monthly recurring revenue, and dividing that by the monthly churn rate.
Because most businesses have a series of other functions such as G&A, and Product Development that are additional expenses beyond sales and marketing, and delivering the product, for a profitable business, you will want CAC to be less than LTV by some significant multiple. For SaaS businesses, it seems that to break even, that multiple is around three, and that to be really profitable and generate the cash needed to grow, the number may need to be closer to five. But here I am interested in getting feedback from the community on their experiences to test these numbers.
The Capital Efficiency “Rule”
If you would like to have a capital efficient business, I believe it is also important to recover the cost of acquiring your customers in under 12 months. Wireless carriers and banks break this rule, but they have the luxury of access to cheap capital. So stated simply, the “rule” is:
Recover CAC in less than 12 months
Reason 3: Poor Management Team
An incredibly common problem that causes startups to fail is a weak management team. A good management team will be smart enough to avoid Reasons 2, 4, and 5. Weak management teams make mistakes in multiple areas:
They are often weak on strategy, building a product that no-one wants to buy as they failed to do enough work to validate the ideas before and during development. This can carry through to poorly thought through go-to-market strategies.
They are usually poor at execution, which leads to issues with the product not getting built correctly or on time, and the go-to market execution will be poorly implemented.
They will build weak teams below them. There is the well proven saying: A players hire A players, and B players only get to hire C players (because B players don’t want to work for other B players). So the rest of the company will end up as weak, and poor execution will be rampant.
etc.
Reason 4: Running out of Cash
A second major reason that startups fail is because they ran out of cash. A key job of the CEO is to understand how much cash is left and whether that will carry the company to a milestone that can lead to a successful financing, or to cash flow positive.
Milestones for Raising Cash
The valuations of a startup don’t change in a linear fashion over time. Simply because it was twelve months since you raised your Series A round, does not mean that you are now worth more money. To reach an increase in valuation, a company must achieve certain key milestones. For a software company, these might look something like the following (these are not hard and fast rules):
Progress from Seed round valuation: goal is to remove some major element of risk. That could be hiring a key team member, proving that some technical obstacle can be overcome, or building a prototype and getting some customer reaction.
Product in Beta test, and have customer validation. Note that if the product is finished, but there is not yet any customer validation, valuation will not likely increase much. The customer validation part is far more important.
Product is shipping, and some early customers have paid for it, and are using it in production, and reporting positive feedback.
Product/Market fit issues that are normal with a first release (some features are missing that prove to be required in most sales situations, etc.) have been mostly eliminated. There are early indications of the business starting to ramp.
Business model is proven. It is now known how to acquire customers, and it has been proven that this process can be scaled. The cost of acquiring customers is acceptably low, and it is clear that the business can be profitable, as monetization from each customer exceeds this cost.
Business has scaled well, but needs additional funding to further accelerate expansion. This capital might be to expand internationally, or to accelerate expansion in a land grab market situation, or could be to fund working capital needs as the business grows.
What goes wrong
What frequently goes wrong, and leads to a company running out of cash, and unable to raise more, is that management failed to achieve the next milestone before cash ran out. Many times it is still possible to raise cash, but the valuation will be significantly lower.
When to hit Accelerator Pedal
One of a CEO’s most important jobs is knowing how to regulate the accelerator pedal. In the early stages of a business, while the product is being developed, and the business model refined, the pedal needs to be set very lightly to conserve cash. There is no point hiring lots of sales and marketing people if the company is still in the process of finishing the product to the point where it really meets the market need. This is a really common mistake, and will just result in a fast burn, and lots of frustration.
However, on the flip side of this coin, there comes a time when it finally becomes apparent that the business model has been proven, and that is the time when the accelerator pedal should be pressed down hard. As hard as the capital resources available to the company permit. By “business model has been proven”, I mean that the data is available that conclusively shows the cost to acquire a customer, (and that this cost can be maintained as you scale), and that you are able to monetize those customers at a rate which is significantly higher than CAC (as a rough starting point, three times higher). And that CAC can be recovered in under 12 months.
For first time CEOs, knowing how to react when they reach this point can be tough. Up until now they have maniacally guarded every penny of the company’s cash, and held back spending. Suddenly they need to throw a switch, and start investing aggressively ahead of revenue. This may involve hiring multiple sales people per month, or spending considerable sums on SEM. That switch can be very counterintuitive.
Reason 5: Product Problems
Another reason that companies fail is becuase they fail to develop a product that meets the market need. This can either be due to simple execution. Or it can be a far more strategic problem, which is a failure to achieve Product/Market fit.
Most of the time the first product that a startup brings to market won’t meet the market need. In the best cases, it will take a few revisions to get the product/market fit right. In the worst cases, the product will be way off base, and a complete re-think is required. If this happens it is a clear indication of a team that didn’t do the work to get out and validate their ideas with customers before, and during, development.
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/business-models/why-startups-fail/
Thursday, 3 April 2014
MEMUPUK BUDAYA KEUSAHAWANAN
MEMUPUK BUDAYA KEUSAHAWANAN
Diantara perkara-perkara yang perlu diberikan penumpuan dalam membangunkan budaya keusahawanan adalah:-
Mengawal halatuju masing-masing
Setiap perniagaan yang diceburi oleh usahawan akan sentiasa mengalami ketidakstabilan, perubahan dan terdedah kepada ancaman dalaman atau luaran. Keadaan ini memerlukan usahawan menyelia, melaksana dan mengawal halatuju perniagaan yang diceburi agar terus berkembang . Halatuju perniagaan yang jelas akan membolehkan usahawan menyusun strategi untuk terus memajukan perniagaan. Usahawan perlu mempunyai pemikiran yang mampu memfokus kepada masa depan dengan merancang strategi-strategi yang paling sesuai bagi memajukan perniagaannya.
Memaksimumkan potensi diri
Usahawan tidak boleh berpuashati dengan apa yang dicapai setakat hari ini sahaja. Mereka perlu meneruskan dan memaksimumkan usaha, kemahiran dan kemampuan diri bagi menjamin kelangsungan perniagaan yang diceburi. Mereka perlu sentiasa membuat analisis pemasaran produk, kekuatan pesaing dan melihat permasalahan, peluang seta sebarang perubahan secara holistik. Selain itu mereka mesti sentiasa bersedia untuk berhadapan dengan sebarang risiko dan juga ketidakpastian serta tahu tentang strategi dan taktik untuk menangani nya dan menjadikan sesuatu risiko dan ancaman itu sebagai satu peluang yang boleh menguntungkan.
Mendapat keuntungan
Walaupun keuntungan tidaklah semestinya menjadi objektif utama perniagaan tetapiia tetap menjadi kayu pengukur kejayaan seseorang usahawan. Keuntungan yang dicapai melambangkan kejayaan sesebuah syarikat kerana dengan keuntungan yang diperolehi membolehkan sesebuah syarikat itu mengembangkan lagi perniagaannya, mengaplikasikan teknologi terkini dalam pengeluaran dan operasi perniagaan dan membolehkannya membuat promosi yang lebih agresif lagi. Keuntungan juga boleh meningkatkan keyakinan pekerja terhadap syarikat kerana mereka tahu sebahagian daripadakeuntungan yang diperolehi akan dipulangkan kepada mereka sama ada dalam bentukdividen, bonus atau kenaikan gaji tahunan. Ia juga boleh meningkatkan keyakinan pembekal dan kreditor bahawa syarikat mampu membayar pinjaman dan kredit yangdiberikan kepada mareka. Keuntungan yang diperolehi akan meningkatkan keyakinanmasyarakat dan pelabur terhadap syarikat kerana mereka yakin syarikat bersediauntuk memenuhi tanggungjawab sosial dan memberi pulangan yang menguntungkan ke atas pelaburan yang dilakukan.
Berorientasikan perancangan
Perancangan merupakan satu aspek yang penting bagi seseorang usahawan dalam menyusun strategi perniagaan agar mencapai matlamat yang telah ditetapkan. Usahawanmestilah sentiasa memfokuskan kepada masa hadapan dan sensitif terhadap sebarang perubahan yang berlaku. Usahawan tidak sepatutnya gelojoh atau mengambil masayang lama untuk merebut peluang. Usahawan bukanlah seorang yang pakar dalam semua aspek maka mereka perlu melibatkan pihak yang mempunyai kepakaran dalam membuat keputusan yang diluar kemahiran yang dimiliki. Langkah berhati-hati membantu usahawan merancang masa depan dan perniagaanya dengan baik dan sistematik. Perancangan yang dibuat mestilah tidak terlalu panjang kerana ketidak pastian saiz pasaran yang mungkin berubah mengikut peredaran masa.
Menggunakan masa secara strategic
Pengurusan masa adalah amat penting bagi menjamin kejayaan seseorang usahawan.Pengurusan masa mestilah dilakukan secara strategik iaitu dengan memastikan setiap masa disusuli dengan aktiviti-aktiviti yang boleh meningkatkan perkembangan syarikat.
Inovatif
Komitmen terhadap inovasi perlu dipupuk dan dibaja dalam diri usahawan. Usahawan yang inovatif lagi kreatif akan memiliki kecenderungan untuk menggunakan imaginasi bagi mengesan serta merbut peluang, mengambil faedah daripada cabaran dan permasalahan yang dihadapi untuk memastikan pencapaian matlamat yang telah ditetapkan.Pembudayaan inivasi dalam penyelesaian masalah akan mengelakkan usahawan daripada bersikap pasif, defensif dan terlalu yakin dengan kejayaan semasa. Pembudayaan inovasi juga akan membolehkan syarikat terus mengembangkan saiz pasaran,memodifikasikan produk dan proaktif terhadap tuntutan semasa pelanggan.
Meningkatkan kualiti kerja secara berterusan
Penghasilan produk dan perkhidmatan yang bermutu tinggi secara berterusan akan dapat menjamin kesetiaan, komitmen dan kepuasan pelanggan. Seterusnya akan memberikan keuntungan kepada usahawan. Nilai kualiti yang tinggi akan memberikan pulangan yang menguntungkan melalui kesetiaan pelanggan. Oleh itu usahawan perlulah berusaha untuk menghasilkan produk atau perkhidmatan yang berkualiti tinggi.Teknologi merupakan satu mekanisma yang dapat membantu meningkatkan kualiti dankuantiti pengeluaran sesuatu produk. Oleh itu para usahawan juga perlu prihatin terhadap penggunaan teknologi kerana ia menymbang ke arah pembuatan dan teknikreka bentuk yang lebih cekap dan tingkat daya pengeluaran yang lebih tinggi.
Kesediaan untuk merebut peluang
Peluang-peluang perniagaan perlu dicari, dikenalpasti dan dieksploitasi sendirioleh usahawan. Oleh itu seseorang usahawan itu perlulah perlulah memaksimumkankekuatan daya berfikir dengan mencari jalan penyelesaian sebarang masalah yang dihadapi oleh masyarakat dan mengeksploitasikannya dengan menjadikan masalah-masalah tersebut sebagai peluang perniagaan. Justeru itu usahawan perlulah meningkatkan pengetahuan dengan mengambil manfaat daripada pergaulan hariannya, memberikan perhatian terhadap pendapat-pendapat pekerja, pelanggan atau pesaing, meningkatkan pembacaan dan mengenalpasti kemahiran, kebolehan dan potensi yang ada padadiri sendiri.Nilai Murni KeusahawananDi antara nilai-nilai murni yang perlu dimiliki oleh usahawan ialah:-
Berani mencuba
Usahawan yang berani mencuba mempunyai jangkauan kawalan dalaman yang tinggi. Mereka juga mempamerkan usaha yang berterusan dan lebih sensitif kepada perubahan-perubahan yang berlaku dalam persekitaran perniagaan. Usahawan yang begini mempunyai keyakinan bahawa kejayaan akan menjadi milik mereka selagi mereka bersedia memberikan komitmen sepenuhnya menggunakan tenaga dan keupayaan mereka.
Penetapan matlamat
Usahawan yang berjaya adalah usahawan yang mempunyai matlamat yang jelas dan meyakinkan. Penetapan matlamat oleh usahawan mendorong mereka untuk lebih berusaha sekaligus berjaya meraih kejayaan yang diinginikan. Matlamat yang sukar dicapai akan memerlukan komitmen dan prestasi yang tinggi berbanding dengan matlamat yang senang dicapai. Setiap usahawan perlu mempunyai perancangan dan matlamat jangka panjang dan juga jangka pendek. Matlamat-matlamat tersebut akan menjadi pengukur prestasi seseorang usahawan dan dapat membantu mereka mengenalpasti dan memperbaiki kelemahan-kelemahan dan merencanakan strategi-strategi baru.
Jangkaan diri
Jangkaan diri merupakan nilai yang perlu ada pada diri usahawan. Jangkaan diri menjadikan usahawan lebih bermotivasi untuk mengecapi kejayaan yang dicita-citakan Sebagai usahawan, tahap ketinggian motivasi adalah bergantung kepada jangkaanusahawan terhadap keupayaan mereka untuk melakukan sesuatu tugas dan menerima ganjaran yang dikehendaki. Jika mereka menjangkakan mereka mampu untuk bersaingdengan pesaing serta mempunyai pemikiran yang positif maka mereka akan berjaya.Jangkaan diri memerlukan individu untuk yakin kepada diri sendiri dan mampu melakukan yang terbaik dengan mengadun segala kemampuan yang mereka miliki. Justeru itu, usahawan perlu mempunyai jangkaan diri yang tinggi bagi mencapai prestasiperniagaan yang luar biasa.
Keyakinan diri
Dunia keusahawanan penuh dengan cabaran, maka setiap usahawan perlu mempunyai keyakinan diri terutama didalam membuat keputusan atau menyahut sesuatu cabaran.Bagi meningkatkan keyakinan diri, seseorang usahawan itu perlu mengikis perasaantakut pada kegagalan dan mempunyai pendirian yang teguh serta tidak mempunyai perasaan rendah diri apabila berhadapan dengan pesaing.
Inisiatif diri
Daya inisiatif diri adalah salah satu daripada sikap yang perlu ada pada seseorang udahawan. Seorang usahawan yang berjaya biasanya mempunyai daya inisiatif yang tinggi kerana seorang yang berinisiatif tinggi mempunyai kecenderungan untukmelihat dan menganalisis sesuatu situasi atau keadaan dengan berkesan.
Bertanggungjawab
Sikap bertanggungjawab merupakan satu proses pembudayaan yang akan melahirkan usahawan yang tidak mudah mempersalahkan pihak lain jika berhadapan dengan masalahatau sesuatu kegagalan. Kesan daripada rasa tanggungjawab yang tinggi akan menjadi pencetus semangat kesediaan untuk mencurahkan khidmat bakti kepada keluarga, pekerja dan masyarakat.
Mewujudkan hubungan dengan individu yang boleh membantu
Perhubungan yang rapat dengan mereka yang berkepentingan dalam perniagaan merupakan satu kelebihan kepada usahawan untuk mengembangkan sayap perniagaannya. Melalui perhubungan membolehkan usahawan mendapat peluang perniagaan dan mengetahuiancaman-ancaman yang bakal dihadapi.KreativitiKreativiti adalah kelebihan bersaing yang perlu ada pada usahawan. Kreativiti membolehkan usahawan menghasilkan produk yang mempunyai kelainan daripada produk-produk yang dikeluarkan oleh pesaing-pesaing. Oleh itu produk yang dikeluarkanakan terus berada di pasaran dan terus diminati oleh pelanggan hasil daripada perubahan terhadap ciri-ciri produk.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35764350/MEMUPUK-BUDAYA-KEUSAHAWANAN
MEMUPUK BUDAYA KEUSAHAWANAN
Diantara perkara-perkara yang perlu diberikan penumpuan dalam membangunkan budaya keusahawanan adalah:-
Mengawal halatuju masing-masing
Setiap perniagaan yang diceburi oleh usahawan akan sentiasa mengalami ketidakstabilan, perubahan dan terdedah kepada ancaman dalaman atau luaran. Keadaan ini memerlukan usahawan menyelia, melaksana dan mengawal halatuju perniagaan yang diceburi agar terus berkembang . Halatuju perniagaan yang jelas akan membolehkan usahawan menyusun strategi untuk terus memajukan perniagaan. Usahawan perlu mempunyai pemikiran yang mampu memfokus kepada masa depan dengan merancang strategi-strategi yang paling sesuai bagi memajukan perniagaannya.
Memaksimumkan potensi diri
Usahawan tidak boleh berpuashati dengan apa yang dicapai setakat hari ini sahaja. Mereka perlu meneruskan dan memaksimumkan usaha, kemahiran dan kemampuan diri bagi menjamin kelangsungan perniagaan yang diceburi. Mereka perlu sentiasa membuat analisis pemasaran produk, kekuatan pesaing dan melihat permasalahan, peluang seta sebarang perubahan secara holistik. Selain itu mereka mesti sentiasa bersedia untuk berhadapan dengan sebarang risiko dan juga ketidakpastian serta tahu tentang strategi dan taktik untuk menangani nya dan menjadikan sesuatu risiko dan ancaman itu sebagai satu peluang yang boleh menguntungkan.
Mendapat keuntungan
Walaupun keuntungan tidaklah semestinya menjadi objektif utama perniagaan tetapiia tetap menjadi kayu pengukur kejayaan seseorang usahawan. Keuntungan yang dicapai melambangkan kejayaan sesebuah syarikat kerana dengan keuntungan yang diperolehi membolehkan sesebuah syarikat itu mengembangkan lagi perniagaannya, mengaplikasikan teknologi terkini dalam pengeluaran dan operasi perniagaan dan membolehkannya membuat promosi yang lebih agresif lagi. Keuntungan juga boleh meningkatkan keyakinan pekerja terhadap syarikat kerana mereka tahu sebahagian daripadakeuntungan yang diperolehi akan dipulangkan kepada mereka sama ada dalam bentukdividen, bonus atau kenaikan gaji tahunan. Ia juga boleh meningkatkan keyakinan pembekal dan kreditor bahawa syarikat mampu membayar pinjaman dan kredit yangdiberikan kepada mareka. Keuntungan yang diperolehi akan meningkatkan keyakinanmasyarakat dan pelabur terhadap syarikat kerana mereka yakin syarikat bersediauntuk memenuhi tanggungjawab sosial dan memberi pulangan yang menguntungkan ke atas pelaburan yang dilakukan.
Berorientasikan perancangan
Perancangan merupakan satu aspek yang penting bagi seseorang usahawan dalam menyusun strategi perniagaan agar mencapai matlamat yang telah ditetapkan. Usahawanmestilah sentiasa memfokuskan kepada masa hadapan dan sensitif terhadap sebarang perubahan yang berlaku. Usahawan tidak sepatutnya gelojoh atau mengambil masayang lama untuk merebut peluang. Usahawan bukanlah seorang yang pakar dalam semua aspek maka mereka perlu melibatkan pihak yang mempunyai kepakaran dalam membuat keputusan yang diluar kemahiran yang dimiliki. Langkah berhati-hati membantu usahawan merancang masa depan dan perniagaanya dengan baik dan sistematik. Perancangan yang dibuat mestilah tidak terlalu panjang kerana ketidak pastian saiz pasaran yang mungkin berubah mengikut peredaran masa.
Menggunakan masa secara strategic
Pengurusan masa adalah amat penting bagi menjamin kejayaan seseorang usahawan.Pengurusan masa mestilah dilakukan secara strategik iaitu dengan memastikan setiap masa disusuli dengan aktiviti-aktiviti yang boleh meningkatkan perkembangan syarikat.
Inovatif
Komitmen terhadap inovasi perlu dipupuk dan dibaja dalam diri usahawan. Usahawan yang inovatif lagi kreatif akan memiliki kecenderungan untuk menggunakan imaginasi bagi mengesan serta merbut peluang, mengambil faedah daripada cabaran dan permasalahan yang dihadapi untuk memastikan pencapaian matlamat yang telah ditetapkan.Pembudayaan inivasi dalam penyelesaian masalah akan mengelakkan usahawan daripada bersikap pasif, defensif dan terlalu yakin dengan kejayaan semasa. Pembudayaan inovasi juga akan membolehkan syarikat terus mengembangkan saiz pasaran,memodifikasikan produk dan proaktif terhadap tuntutan semasa pelanggan.
Meningkatkan kualiti kerja secara berterusan
Penghasilan produk dan perkhidmatan yang bermutu tinggi secara berterusan akan dapat menjamin kesetiaan, komitmen dan kepuasan pelanggan. Seterusnya akan memberikan keuntungan kepada usahawan. Nilai kualiti yang tinggi akan memberikan pulangan yang menguntungkan melalui kesetiaan pelanggan. Oleh itu usahawan perlulah berusaha untuk menghasilkan produk atau perkhidmatan yang berkualiti tinggi.Teknologi merupakan satu mekanisma yang dapat membantu meningkatkan kualiti dankuantiti pengeluaran sesuatu produk. Oleh itu para usahawan juga perlu prihatin terhadap penggunaan teknologi kerana ia menymbang ke arah pembuatan dan teknikreka bentuk yang lebih cekap dan tingkat daya pengeluaran yang lebih tinggi.
Kesediaan untuk merebut peluang
Peluang-peluang perniagaan perlu dicari, dikenalpasti dan dieksploitasi sendirioleh usahawan. Oleh itu seseorang usahawan itu perlulah perlulah memaksimumkankekuatan daya berfikir dengan mencari jalan penyelesaian sebarang masalah yang dihadapi oleh masyarakat dan mengeksploitasikannya dengan menjadikan masalah-masalah tersebut sebagai peluang perniagaan. Justeru itu usahawan perlulah meningkatkan pengetahuan dengan mengambil manfaat daripada pergaulan hariannya, memberikan perhatian terhadap pendapat-pendapat pekerja, pelanggan atau pesaing, meningkatkan pembacaan dan mengenalpasti kemahiran, kebolehan dan potensi yang ada padadiri sendiri.Nilai Murni KeusahawananDi antara nilai-nilai murni yang perlu dimiliki oleh usahawan ialah:-
Berani mencuba
Usahawan yang berani mencuba mempunyai jangkauan kawalan dalaman yang tinggi. Mereka juga mempamerkan usaha yang berterusan dan lebih sensitif kepada perubahan-perubahan yang berlaku dalam persekitaran perniagaan. Usahawan yang begini mempunyai keyakinan bahawa kejayaan akan menjadi milik mereka selagi mereka bersedia memberikan komitmen sepenuhnya menggunakan tenaga dan keupayaan mereka.
Penetapan matlamat
Usahawan yang berjaya adalah usahawan yang mempunyai matlamat yang jelas dan meyakinkan. Penetapan matlamat oleh usahawan mendorong mereka untuk lebih berusaha sekaligus berjaya meraih kejayaan yang diinginikan. Matlamat yang sukar dicapai akan memerlukan komitmen dan prestasi yang tinggi berbanding dengan matlamat yang senang dicapai. Setiap usahawan perlu mempunyai perancangan dan matlamat jangka panjang dan juga jangka pendek. Matlamat-matlamat tersebut akan menjadi pengukur prestasi seseorang usahawan dan dapat membantu mereka mengenalpasti dan memperbaiki kelemahan-kelemahan dan merencanakan strategi-strategi baru.
Jangkaan diri
Jangkaan diri merupakan nilai yang perlu ada pada diri usahawan. Jangkaan diri menjadikan usahawan lebih bermotivasi untuk mengecapi kejayaan yang dicita-citakan Sebagai usahawan, tahap ketinggian motivasi adalah bergantung kepada jangkaanusahawan terhadap keupayaan mereka untuk melakukan sesuatu tugas dan menerima ganjaran yang dikehendaki. Jika mereka menjangkakan mereka mampu untuk bersaingdengan pesaing serta mempunyai pemikiran yang positif maka mereka akan berjaya.Jangkaan diri memerlukan individu untuk yakin kepada diri sendiri dan mampu melakukan yang terbaik dengan mengadun segala kemampuan yang mereka miliki. Justeru itu, usahawan perlu mempunyai jangkaan diri yang tinggi bagi mencapai prestasiperniagaan yang luar biasa.
Keyakinan diri
Dunia keusahawanan penuh dengan cabaran, maka setiap usahawan perlu mempunyai keyakinan diri terutama didalam membuat keputusan atau menyahut sesuatu cabaran.Bagi meningkatkan keyakinan diri, seseorang usahawan itu perlu mengikis perasaantakut pada kegagalan dan mempunyai pendirian yang teguh serta tidak mempunyai perasaan rendah diri apabila berhadapan dengan pesaing.
Inisiatif diri
Daya inisiatif diri adalah salah satu daripada sikap yang perlu ada pada seseorang udahawan. Seorang usahawan yang berjaya biasanya mempunyai daya inisiatif yang tinggi kerana seorang yang berinisiatif tinggi mempunyai kecenderungan untukmelihat dan menganalisis sesuatu situasi atau keadaan dengan berkesan.
Bertanggungjawab
Sikap bertanggungjawab merupakan satu proses pembudayaan yang akan melahirkan usahawan yang tidak mudah mempersalahkan pihak lain jika berhadapan dengan masalahatau sesuatu kegagalan. Kesan daripada rasa tanggungjawab yang tinggi akan menjadi pencetus semangat kesediaan untuk mencurahkan khidmat bakti kepada keluarga, pekerja dan masyarakat.
Mewujudkan hubungan dengan individu yang boleh membantu
Perhubungan yang rapat dengan mereka yang berkepentingan dalam perniagaan merupakan satu kelebihan kepada usahawan untuk mengembangkan sayap perniagaannya. Melalui perhubungan membolehkan usahawan mendapat peluang perniagaan dan mengetahuiancaman-ancaman yang bakal dihadapi.KreativitiKreativiti adalah kelebihan bersaing yang perlu ada pada usahawan. Kreativiti membolehkan usahawan menghasilkan produk yang mempunyai kelainan daripada produk-produk yang dikeluarkan oleh pesaing-pesaing. Oleh itu produk yang dikeluarkanakan terus berada di pasaran dan terus diminati oleh pelanggan hasil daripada perubahan terhadap ciri-ciri produk.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35764350/MEMUPUK-BUDAYA-KEUSAHAWANAN
Tuesday, 1 April 2014
Budaya Keusahawanan Bangunkan Ekonomi, Tamadun Islam
Budaya
Keusahawanan Bangunkan Ekonomi, Tamadun Islam
BUDAYA
keusahawanan bukanlah suatu yang asing daripada kerangka Islam. Malah, Islam
sebagai cara hidup menekankan nilai positif yang boleh diguna pakai dalam
membentuk budaya perniagaan jernih menepati prinsip dan matlamat syariah.
Tidak hairanlah
jika budaya keusahawanan turut ditekankan Nabi Muhammad SAW sebagai pintu
rezeki yang utama. Sabda Rasulullah SAW yang bermaksud: �Sembilan
daripada persepuluh rezeki datang daripada perniagaan.� (Hadis riwayat
at-Tirmizi)
Walaupun Islam
menitikberatkan bidang perniagaan dan keusahawanan, realiti hari ini
menunjukkan umat Islam lebih selesa menjadi masyarakat pengguna dikeluarkan
pihak lain atau negara luar terutama dari Barat.
Demikian juga
suasana dalam negara yang memperlihatkan umat Islam khususnya golongan
Bumiputera yang agak ketinggalan dalam penguasaan ekonomi khususnya bidang
perniagaan dan keusahawanan berbanding bukan Islam.
Budaya
keusahawanan sebati dengan keperibadian Nabi SAW. Sebelum Baginda diangkat
menjadi rasul lagi, Baginda adalah usahawan berjaya. Nabi Muhammad SAW pernah
diamanahkan sebagai Ketua Pengarah Eksekutif (CEO) yang bertanggungjawab
mengurus dan memperdagangkan harta dimiliki Saidatina Khadijah.
Budaya
keusahawanan dimiliki Baginda SAW ditambah dengan akhlak terpuji yang
dizahirkan dalam mengurus perniagaan lantas berjaya menambat hati Khadijah
hingga dilamar menjadi suami.
Tidak terhenti
setakat itu, apabila diangkat menjadi rasul, Baginda tetap menerapkan budaya
sama di kalangan sahabat dan umat Islam. Ini dapat dilihat dengan jelas apabila
Baginda berhijrah ke Madinah.
Selaku ketua
negara bagi sebuah kerajaan Islam yang baru bertapak, Nabi SAW amat mengerti
dan memahami kepentingan memperkasa ekonomi kerajaan Islam. Apatah lagi dalam
suasana Madinah pada ketika itu ekonominya hampir sepenuhnya dikuasai kaum
minoriti Yahudi.
Merekalah yang
menguasai pasar utama dan sumber asasi seperti air telaga. Mereka juga terkenal
dengan kelicikan menindas bangsa Arab dalam urusan muamalah harian. Umpamanya,
perniagaan dijalankan secara hutang dikenakan bunga yang tinggi hingga menjerat
sesiapa saja berhutang dengan mereka. Malah caj penggunaan air juga amat tinggi
hingga menjadikan mereka sebagai golongan berkuasa.
Sebab itulah
sejarah memaparkan bagaimana usaha kedua terpenting Nabi SAW selepas membina
masjid sebagai lambang pengukuhan aqidah dan iman penduduk Islam Madinah, turut
membina pasar yang dikhaskan kepada umat Islam sebagai satu usaha penting
pemantapan ekonomi Madinah.
Usaha pemantapan
ekonomi tidak hanya sekadar memberi penumpuan kepada aspek fizikal iaitu
membina pasar semata-mata, lebih ditekankan Nabi SAW ialah mencanai budaya
keusahawanan yang luhur dan jernih berpandukan akhlak serta nilai diwahyukan
Ilahi.
Baginda sendiri
turun dan mentarbiah usahawan baru di kalangan masyarakat Arab yang sebelumnya
tidak pernah terdedah kepada bidang perniagaan dan perdagangan. Kebergantungan
kepada minoriti Yahudi memaksa mereka hidup dalam suasana penganiayaan dan
persekitaran terhimpit serta tertekan.
Kehadiran Nabi
SAW berjaya membebaskan mereka daripada segala bentuk penindasan dan perhambaan
yang berkait rapat dengan kegagalan mengurus ekonomi hingga terpaksa bergantung
kepada ihsan orang lain.
Kemandirian
ekonomi penting bagi memastikan bukan saja umat Islam kuat daripada segi
fizikal tetapi membolehkan mereka mempertahankan aqidah dan keimanan. Kekuatan
ekonomi menjadikan umat Islam dipandang tinggi dan membantu menyebarluaskan
agama ke seantero dunia.
Ulama feqah
merumuskan suatu kaedah feqah (qaidah fiqhiyyah) yang berbunyi: �Sesuatu yang
tanpanya menyebabkan perkara wajib itu tidak lengkap maka ia menjadi wajib.�
Apa yang
difahami melalui kaedah itu ialah apabila wujud suatu perkara yang tanpanya
tuntutan kefarduan itu tidak lengkap atau tidak dapat dilaksanakan dengan
sempurna maka perkara itu dengan sendirinya menjadi wajib.
Aspek ekonomi
yang menjadi faktor penting menjana kekuatan tamadun Islam dan penyebaran agama
Allah dengan sendirinya menjadi wajib bagi menyempurnakan tanggungjawab dakwah
yang difardukan.
Hakikat
menyedihkan hari ini, rata-rata umat Islam mengalami masalah kecelaruan
pemikiran yang menyebabkan mereka menyimpang daripada ajaran Islam sebenar.
Umat Islam gagal
memahami keutamaan (fiqh awlawiyat) dalam mengatur kehidupan mereka. Rata-rata
umat Islam memahami agama daripada perspektif ibadah khusus seperti sembahyang,
puasa, haji dan sebagainya. Sedangkan aspek muamalah yang sama penting dikesampingkan.
Akibat
penyimpangan pemikiran sebeginilah menyebabkan umat Islam hari ini dilihat
lemah dalam pelbagai bidang kehidupan, utamanya dalam hal berkaitan pentadbiran
keduniaan, termasuk politik, ekonomi dan sosial.
Kebanyakan
negara Islam dikategorikan sebagai miskin dan terkebelakang, sedangkan 1/3
sumber asli dan galian serta ekonomi dunia berada di negara Islam. Umat Islam
tidak mampu bersaing dengan masyarakat lain dalam bidang perniagaan dan
keusahawanan.
Semua ini
pastilah tidak menepati semangat dan nilai yang terkandung dalam ajaran Islam.
Malah umat Islam hari ini bolehlah dikatakan gagal menghayati Islam seperti
tuntutan wahyu Ilahi.
Firman Allah SWT
yang bermaksud: �Kamu adalah
sebaik-baik umat yang ditampilkan kepada (faedah) umat manusia sejagat,
(kerana) dengan tugas menyuruh berbuat segala perkara yang baik dan melarang
daripada segala perkara yang salah (buruk dan keji) serta kamu pula beriman
kepada Allah dan kalaulah Ahli Kitab (Yahudi dan Nasrani) itu beriman (seperti
mana yang semestinya), tentulah (iman) itu menjadi baik bagi mereka. (Tetapi)
di antara mereka ada yang beriman dan kebanyakan mereka orang-orang yang fasik.� (Surah
Ali-Imran, ayat 110).
Friday, 14 March 2014
Perkasa budaya keusahawanan
Perkasa
budaya keusahawanan
Kangar:
Penganjuran Simposium Usahawan anjuran Kumpulan Permodalan Nasional Berhad
(PNB) sempena Minggu Amanah Saham Malaysia (MSAM), di sini, mampu meningkatkan
kefahaman sekali gus menyemai dan memperkasa budaya keusahawanan kepada
penduduk di negeri ini.
Program
berkenaan menampilkan barisan ahli panel dan tokoh usahawan tanah air turut
memberi peluang kepada peserta untuk berinteraksi melalui sesi soal jawab di
samping menjalinkan rangkaian perniagaan sesama usahawan.
Usahawan, Matt
Noh Kasa, 59, dari Jejawi Hutan Buloh, Arau, di sini, berkata, program
berkenaan secara tidak langsung membantunya melihat peluang yang boleh direbut
selain mendapatkan sumber kewangan untuk memperbesarkan lagi perniagaan
hotelnya di sini.
“Program ini
mengajar saya mendapatkan pekerja berkebolehan dalam industri perhotelan
disebabkan pekerja sedia ada tidak membantu memajukan perniagaan dan hanya
bekerja saja.
“Selain itu,
saya didedahkan dengan cara pengurusan kewangan supaya keuntungan yang
diperoleh tidak bocor dan simpanan dapat dibuat untuk tabungan pada masa
depan,” katanya ketika ditemui, di sini, semalam.
Lebih 300
peserta terdiri daripada usahawan Bumiputera dan bukan Bumiputera menyertai
simposium anjuran Malaysian Industrial Development Finance Berhad (MIDF)
sempena MSAM.
Penceramahnya
ialah Pengarah Urusan Skop Productions, Datuk Yusof Haslam; Pemilik Pasaraya
Borong Sakan, Datuk Che Umar Yatim dan Pengarah Urusan Les Copaque Production,
Burhanudin Md Radzi.
Katanya,
penceramah juga berjaya membuka mata dan mindanya untuk berfikir secara positif
dan tidak hanya bergantung kepada bantuan kerajaan, bahkan membuat dirinya mahu
berusaha dengan keras bagi merealisasikan impian menambah cawangan hotel.
“Pada awalnya
saya berfikir program ini seperti program keusahawanan lain, tetapi rasa
berbaloi kerana banyak jalan yang terbuka di hadapan bagi memantapkan lagi
perniagaan, bahkan kata-kata penceramah juga memberi kesan mendalam.
Sementara itu,
pengusaha makanan, Jaminah Teriau, 60, dari Kampung Guar Ujung Batu, Utan Aji,
berkata, program berkenaan begitu bermanfaat pada dirinya untuk memajukan lagi
perniagaan dengan membuat pengedaran terus ke pasar raya.
“Pada masa ini,
saya hanya mengedarkan produk kacang bersalut pedas yang dihasilkan ke kedai
runcit dan kedai makan saja kerana tidak berani mengambil risiko.
“Dengan
menghadiri program ini, saya bercadang untuk memperluaskan pasaran produk dan
akan berbincang dengan suami mengenai hasrat itu,” katanya.
Katanya, sejak
memulakan perniagaan pada 2002, dia hanya menyediakan beberapa kilogram kacang
dan bahan asas untuk seminggu, tetapi meningkat kepada 15 hingga 20 kilogram
selepas menerima bantuan kerajaan.
Artikel ini
disiarkan pada : 2013/04/22
http://www.hmetro.com.my/myMetro/articles/Perkasabudayakeusahawanan//Article/index_html
Corporate Culture
Corporate Culture
Here's why both your customers and employees will remain loyal if your company's culture is right.
BY JOHN CASE
It's back. (It never left!) Your employees crave it. Your customers will love it. (And the one who needs it most is you.)
Amy Miller has a secret. Granted, it's an open secret, not the kind she tries to keep. But to too many American companies and management experts--and, fortunately for Miller's business, to most of her competitors--it's a secret all the same.
Amy's Ice Creams, Miller's seven-store chain of premium-ice-cream shops in Austin and Houston, Tex., sells terrific products and gives excellent service. But that's where the similarity to other scoop shops ends. Visit an Amy's store--the one in Austin's Westbank Market, say, on a Friday night--and you'll see employees performing in a manner you won't forget. That's right: performing. They juggle with their serving spades, toss scoops of ice cream to one another behind the counter, and break-dance on the freezer top. If there's a line out the door, they might pass out samples--or offer free ice cream to any customer who'll sing or dance or recite a poem or mimic a barnyard animal, or who wins a 60-second cone-eating contest. They could be wearing pajamas (because it's Sleep-over Night) or masks (Star Wars Night); there might be candles (Romance Night) or strobe lights (Disco Night). They wear costumes. They bring props. They pop trivia questions. They create fun.
Miller obviously sells entertainment along with ice cream. That's her strategy. But her managerial secret--the real source of her competitive advantage--isn't the strategy, it's how she makes the strategy work. The real secret to her company's success is its corporate culture.
Culture? Competitive advantage? But corporate culture's been done, you say. Way done. (Isn't it something we believed in back when Reagan was president? Didn't it fade when Silicon Valley grew up, and fold when Wall Street grew imperious?) Everybody knows that success in today's business world comes from clinical, tough-minded stuff: a hot technology, savvy strategy and positioning, and brutal cost control (sorry, that's "business-process reengineering"). The competitive environment calls for hard edges now. And culture--all those beer blasts and Outward Bound excursions, all those golden retrievers by the water cooler--is so soft. So sentimental. One doesn't even see that sort of thing in commercials anymore.
Tell that to Miller--or to any of the dozens of other market-beating CEOs whose practices prompted this article. Culture's time, they argue, is now. Companies with clever, highly evolved cultures have an advantage precisely because of the particular challenges of the current marketplace. Culture helps companies compete.
The challenge for Amy's Ice Creams? An increasingly universal one: it must keep its stores from becoming just another commodity. Miller saw superpremium-ice-cream stores, once a safe niche, become almost as easy to find as espresso shops. Her way to differentiate her stores was to sell an experience with every triple-scoop cone. Her way to sustain that difference--to ensure you'd encounter the experience that sets her stores apart--was to create and nurture a culture that made that experience inevitable. She had to get the right people and get them to behave in the right way. And because their behavior needed to be inventive and unflagging and self-initiated, she somehow had to get them to know what the right way was, without being told.
That's what her company's culture accomplishes. It's also what smart, intense cultures do for many other hot young businesses--and, it turns out, for some of the country's more established entrepreneurial successes, as well. The right culture isn't just the product of what a founder willfully wants his or her company to feel like (though it can be that, too). Through the symbols and practices that give it life, the right culture solves a company's most critical competitive problems.
Out of fashion for a decade, corporate culture--as the examples here demonstrate--may be the best response there is to the business conditions that all company builders face right now.
Does your company have a corporate culture? Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and attitudes that permeate a business. It defines what the company considers important and what it considers unimportant. If strategy defines where a company wants to go, culture determines how--maybe whether--it gets there. Every business has some kind of culture, just because it's an organization of human beings. But most businesses never give the topic a second thought. Their culture is to do things the way they always have or the way everybody else does them.
A few companies, by contrast, have explicit, highly distinctive cultures--strong, focused cultures that stick out from the crowd like the Grateful Dead at a marching-band convention. They have mission statements and values that mean something, and that people take seriously. They have a set of overarching beliefs that serve as powerful guides for everyday action--and that are reinforced in a hundred different ways, both symbolic and substantive. You'll recognize the classic examples: 3M Corp.'s relentless focus on innovation, Disney's commitment to treating its theme-park customers as guests. Those cultural values inform every move and decision made by employees or managers at those companies. (And in the cases in which they haven't, you're probably looking at a former employee or manager.)
For a while--it really was back when Reagan was in the White House--corporate culture of this type was hot stuff. The book Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, by Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, became a big best-seller. Every CEO worth his or her inflated salary had to nod knowingly when the talk turned to squishy subjects like mission and values. But then the fad dissipated, as fads do. More important, the demands of the marketplace intensified. Competition heated up. The pace of technological change quickened. In the 1990s businesspeople seemed to survive and prosper only if they could cut costs beyond recognition, deliver unprecedented levels of quality and service, and develop relationships with customers so intimate they were almost embarrassing. Nobody had time for luxuries like corporate culture. Probably nobody thought it would play too well, either. Even corporate executives can't expect employees to get misty-eyed over a new mission statement right after thousands of their colleagues get the ax.
Of course, some companies never got the message that they were supposed to forget about culture. Three come to mind immediately.
The first is Quad/Graphics, the Wisconsin-based printer. (Full disclosure: Quad is Inc.'s printer.) Founder Harry Quadracci takes his trust-the-employees culture so seriously that he still runs his annual Quad/University, in which managers literally walk out of the plant for up to three days and leave it in the hands of hourly workers. The second is Southwest Airlines, famous for its wild and woolly--not to say manic--culture. Everybody at Southwest, from CEO Herb Kelleher to the newest gate attendant, pitches in to make sure that customers have a good time and that airplanes get unloaded and reloaded and back in the air fast. The third: Nucor, the steel company, with its austere egalitarianism ("Senior executives do not enjoy any traditional perquisites," proclaims a company document) and day-in, day-out focus on production.
All three companies went from Inc. 500 size to Fortune 500 size in only a few decades, even though they were competing in some of the toughest businesses around. They're growing and thriving today. The graybeards in those industries are still wondering how they do it.
How they do it. the fact is, powerful cultures have powerful effects on how a company's people work together. Look at Southwest. Its strategies are no secret. Other airlines have duplicated its no-frills, point-to-point service. But maybe you remember that Wall Street Journal article a few years ago detailing the intricate, help-each-other-out teamwork necessary for a Southwest ground crew to turn its planes around in one-third the time other airlines require. Reading the article, you could only conclude that those employees wanted to get that plane back up in the air and making money. Somehow it's hard to imagine the workers at American or Delta caring much, one way or the other.
Walk into a high-culture outfit and you feel the difference right away. Earlier this year I spent a day at AES Corp.'s Thames facility, near New London, Conn. Only 15 years old, AES operates electric-power-generating plants in 35 countries. In 1995 it racked up $107 million in earnings on $685 million in revenues. It's a company that does bizarre things like planting millions of trees in Guatemala (to make up for the carbon dioxide produced by its facilities) and asking teams of hourly workers to manage its multimillion-dollar cash-reserve funds. No doubt I sounded a little skeptical when I asked one of the technicians about the latter practice. "Yeah, I was a little nervous at first," he agreed. Then he proceeded to explain how, with just a few phone calls, he had learned to get a good rate on $5 million worth of commercial paper. "It was a lot of fun," he concluded.
In such an outlandish atmosphere, the unusual becomes the usual. At AES, materials-handling technicians negotiate contracts with coal suppliers, thereby reducing the need for high-priced managers. Machine operators order replacement parts themselves, ensuring a minimum of downtime. When plant manager Dan Rothaupt wanted to change the bonus plan, he put it to a vote of the employees. It lost resoundingly--and so no one was left feeling that management had rammed an unwanted compensation system down employees' throats. With such a culture, is it any wonder that AES thrives even in today's competitive environment?
A successful corporate culture, however, is not some kind of black magic. It derives its power not just from abstractions but from specific practices that employees understand as symbolizing and representing the culture. It pays off not because it's some kind of softheaded do-goodism but because it relates to the specific competitive demands of today's marketplace. Consider a handful of mini case studies illustrating the relationship between the practices of culture--the artifacts, so to speak--and how they enable companies to outstrip their competitors.
The White-Paper-Bag Job Application. Remember the challenge Amy Miller faced? Used to be, market niches were safe. All you needed was the best location. Or a distinctive product. Or a capability that no one else had. Today there are no safe niches. Make a little money doing something, and you can bet that competitors--often competitors with deeper pockets than your own--will show up looking for a piece of the action. That's what might have happened to Miller. She started Amy's Ice Creams in 1984. It wasn't long before national companies such as Baskin-Robbins and Steve's were setting up shop close by.
The thing is, as we've said, Miller wasn't just selling ice cream. Anyone can sell ice cream. She was selling entertainment. All that crazy stuff her employees do--the theme nights, the impromptu musical comedies, the costumes, games, and jokes--keeps customers coming back for more. And it keeps Amy's Ice Creams (now at $2.2 million) growing about 20% a year.
Miller sends her cultural message to employees--this is what we value above all, this is what makes us different--from the day they show up looking for a job. Instead of a formal application form, they get a plain white paper bag along with the instructions to do anything they want with it and bring it back in a week. Those who just jot down a phone number will find that "Amy's isn't really for them," says Miller. But an applicant who produces "something unusual from a white paper bag tends to be an amusing person who would fit in with our environment."
Unusual, indeed. Applicants use the bags to create cartoons, board games, works of art, and elaborate parodies ("The Amysburg Address"). One job seeker turned his into an elaborate pop-up jack-in-the-box--and became a scooper at the Westbank Market store. That store's former manager painted an intricate green-and-blue sphere resembling the earth atop a waffle cone on his bag. Later he could be found passing out $5 gift certificates to customers willing to do their best animal impression or otherwise act up in ways that, among the Amy's staff, pass for normal. Like any performers, employees of Amy's can't rest on their laurels. The half a dozen or so white paper bags that applicants turn in during busy weeks remind them that there are plenty of creative people out there--and that creativity, not just ice cream, is what their boss really puts a premium on.
The War Room. Customers used to be less demanding, too. Now their expectations have ratcheted up several notches. Manufacturers have to deliver near-perfect quality. Service companies have to--well, almost set up housekeeping with their customers. Because what the customers expect in today's market isn't just a service, it's a solution to their problems. That's why travel agents have started to offer full travel-management capabilities along with plane tickets and hotel reservations. It's why distributors have begun running clients' inventories instead of just shipping them parts.
And in advertising, as Roy Spence and his colleagues have figured out, it's why agencies can't just dream up clever ads and do the media buys. Clients don't want advertising. They want to increase market share. They want to better their margins. They want marketing effectiveness, as measured by the attainment of specific, well-defined objectives.
Spence's agency, GSD&M--also in Austin, as it happens--is a monument to that realization. The agency's billings have grown nearly sixfold in the past decade. It counts blue-chippers such as Wal-Mart Stores and Southwest Airlines among its 22 clients and boasts a 90% client-retention rate. Part of GSD&M's pitches to prospects: measurable goals. Goals are a subject of discussion at the start of a campaign. ("Clients let us know how they definewinning," says one staffer.) Progress toward them is scrutinized carefully as the campaign progresses. The agency hands out bonuses when clients achieve their goals, not when GSD&M achieves its own.
The artifact that reinforces the culture of pure client-centeredness is called a war room, and GSD&M invented it six years ago. "We were working with a client and really needed to concentrate," explains Spence. "So we just took over an empty office and started posting urgent information on the wall."
Today the war rooms have evolved into a kind of command central. They're often painted in the client's colors. Red phones, exclusively for calls to and from the client, dot the tables. Up on the wall are the client's (and sometimes its competitors') earnings reports, stock price, newspaper clippings, competitive analyses, and weekly sales figures; along shelves are products, industry paraphernalia, and personal items that the client's customers might possess. In the war rooms, agency staffers prepare pitches or repositioning initiatives. They conduct conference calls, look at reels of past commercials, brainstorm, and debate. "War rooms raise the intensity level and give us a mental edge," says Spence. "They remind us to keep our eye on the prize," the prize being the client's success. Forget your office, the rooms broadcast to employees, this isn't about you. It's about the needs of the people who've hired us.
And is it any surprise that clients like the war rooms, too? (Think of the message sent about where GSD&M's attention is.) When the agency moves into new quarters later this year, there will be eight war rooms as opposed to the three in its current facilities. Says Spence, GSD&M's president, "Clients see that we're 100% focused. And as we build their business, they build ours."
Open-Book Wallpaper. Customer expectations aren't just higher; sometimes they change character completely. And that kind of marketplace volatility presents a challenge of its own: sometimes you have to turn your company on a strategic dime. Pat Kelly, CEO of Physician Sales & Service (PSS), based in Jacksonville, Fla., found himself in just such a situation a couple of years ago. Kelly built PSS into a leading distributor of supplies for doctors' offices mostly on the basis of top-level service. Surveys showed that was what his customers wanted. And the extraordinary service allowed him to charge a premium. When the Clintons took office, however, health-care reform was in the air, and suddenly doctors were worried about costs. In just a matter of months, price went from last to first on their list of concerns.
So Kelly decided that PSS had to become a low-cost supplier, even while maintaining its service levels. He launched some innovative strategic moves, such as setting up a frequent buyers' club. He also had to tell his salespeople and employees that commissions and bonuses would likely take a hit.
Companies rarely make that kind of change easily. Employees grumble. They quit. The work doesn't get done the way it once did. At PSS, the opposite happened. No one was exactly overjoyed--but no one left. The company made the move, experienced a tough year, and rebounded quickly. PSS continued its breakneck growth and is now the national leader in its industry.
The difference? PSS has a share-the-wealth, share-the-information culture of a sort rarely found in American business. Every employee is a shareholder; some have more than a million dollars' worth in their accounts. Every PSS branch meets monthly to review its profit-and-loss statement. But it isn't just the P&L that gets employees' attention. Branches seem to paper a sizable portion of their walls with financial information: What salespeople X, Y, and Z sold yesterday. How much gross margin each of them realized. How the branch is doing, week by week and month by month, against plan. The wallpaper sends a strong message to everybody, every day: There are no secrets here. Nobody will ever try to put one over on you.
In an environment like that, it's impossible for employees to be cynical about the management's motives or actions. When Kelly told the PSS rank and file why a strategic shift was needed and what it would entail, employees believed him. Remember--and this is important to note--he hadn't just opened his books all of a sudden, when the crisis came; he'd had them open all along. He'd earned his employees' trust. He knew that the power of culture comes in part from its consistency. It has to seem as natural as the air employees breathe. That's the way we do things around here.
As a result of PSS's culture, Kelly could ask for--and get--the extraordinary cooperation and commitment needed to make a painful change. And PSS could convert short-term pain into long-term gain.
Different as they are, the cultural artifacts at Amy's, GSD&M, and PSS all belie the stubborn notion that the point of corporate culture is to accommodate employees' wishes--to make employees comfortable at the expense of their employer's competitive health. (Although comfort is occasionally the means to a competitive end: Born Information Services Group, a $36-million information-technology consulting firm in Wayzata, Minn., maintains lakefront vacation homes for employees' use--the better to keep turnover negligible in an industry in which it's the number one problem.) Contrary to the stereotype, high-culture organizations tend to be both tough and practical. The artifacts that animate their cultures emerge not from abstract theory but from clever yet simple responses to a business threat or opportunity.
For example, at Direct Tire and Auto Services, a Greater Boston tire retailer, the tactical desire to make a notoriously low-rent industry more professional inspired the construction of a now-renowned customer waiting room--which reminds employees how different their company is, and how differently they should perform for it, every day. At Pentagram Design, a small, internationally esteemed design firm with offices around the world, the constellation-like organizational chart defines and lastingly reaffirms the company's unique-in-the-industry network of 14 autonomous yet interdependent partners. (Pentagram's resulting competitive advantage: the ability to operate like a big company and a small one at the same time.) And at Zingerman's Delicatessen, in Ann Arbor, Mich., cofounder Ari Weinzweig writes an internal newsletter to spread the company's service-is-everything gospel. Filled with super-service war stories, letters from grateful customers, service contests, and profiles of employees who win service awards, it helps propagate Weinzweig's zeal now that the $9-million company is too big for him to convey his message directly to everyone. "Culture spreads because one hourly person tells the next hourly person," he says. The newsletter places his voice in that conversation among frontline sandwich makers.
More examples of practices that began as simple management moves and evolved into cultural symbols:
The Stump-the-CEO Contest. AGI Inc., a Melrose Park, Ill., designer and printer of nontraditional packaging for cosmetics, compact discs, and multimedia software, has grown to $97 million by outinventing its competitors. Its culture, CEO Richard Block explains, maintains that creative edge by promoting open debate and the combustive rub of ideas--"an environment that is for experimentation and that urges you to take responsibility for a problem instead of working at concealing it." To underscore that principle, Block submits to lively interrogation at a monthly companywide meeting--and rewards his toughest questioner with a prize. The message: Nothing is sacred. Questions are good. We're all--the CEO included--accountable to one another.
The Barroom Production Meeting. Visual In-Seitz, in Rochester, N.Y., creates business presentations for companies such as Xerox and Kodak. "Timelines are very short and client demands very high," says CEO Charles Engler, "which equals stress." How to vent it? Hold Thursday-afternoon production meetings off-site--at a bar. Employees share problems and tips, track performance, and voice complaints that (they hope) clients will never, ever hear. The message: we see the pressure you're under, and we value how you handle it; let's devote time to fixing snafus here, so our customers never experience them.
The Customers-Only Hiring Policy. How does Black Diamond Equipment, in Salt Lake City, keep ahead of its rivals in the trendy rock-climbing-equipment industry? By filling its workforce with the sport's enthusiasts--the users of its products--and capitalizing on their passion. "We breathe it, live it, think about it constantly," says human-resources vice-president Meredith Saarinen, "which makes the whole company a marketing and design resource. It kills complacency." The messages: 1) What we do here makes possible a sport so devotion-worthy that people build their lives around it; what work could be more important? 2) You and your coworkers are our ideal customers, so satisfy one another and yourselves. "It's not that our employees can make suggestions," adds Saarinen, "but that they have the duty to make them."
Saarinen's insistence may come as close as any comment yet to describing the business condition that makes company culture more important today than ever. At Black Diamond, where competitive advantage depends on every employee's doing product research and development; at Zingerman's, where frontline service will make or break the business; at GSD&M, where small teams must hoist customers to their goals; and throughout the new economy at businesses both high-culture and low-, real responsibility for company success has been spread to every employee in the organization.
Confronted by today's unprecedented customer expectations of perfect quality, errorless service, and tailored-to-their-needs relationships, every employee is making key judgment calls--whether when moving a product down an assembly line or handling a client's complaint. Whole companies are only as strong as their weakest links. Employees in networks, teams, or flat organizations (remember, all the middle managers were fired) must make good choices on the fly, without being told how. They need help, and it can't come from supervisors. They need a set of overarching beliefs that serve as powerful guides for everyday action. They need a culture.
Companies with such strong corporate cultures have an almost unfair competitive head start. The work they do is invested with meaning. Their employees have reasons to care about how they perform. Even the challenges presented by mind-bending change--whether imposed by the marketplace or necessitated by internal growth--are easier to handle because a stable culture begets a fast-moving, flexible company.
Companies these days have to change all the time. They find new customers, develop new product lines, enter new markets, introduce new technology. Employees in conventional companies find all those moves unsettling, even unnerving. They worry about their jobs and about their futures. A strong, distinctive culture, however, offers a fixed reference point--and means that change is that much less threatening. "A strong culture is sort of an anchor for letting people loose to create a lot of change," not to impede it, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School.
AGI's Richard Block and his peers already know that. Better still, they know that culture has made their companies the kind that every CEO dreams of growing: the kind nobody wants to compete with. "If you were a customer and you came here," he says, "and then you went to all your other suppliers, I guarantee you that the place you'd enjoy most--the place you'd want to do business with--is this one. Just because of how it feels.
"And though that's a competitive advantage that isn't patentable," he adds, "it's also one that nobody can steal."
Vera Gibbons, Phaedra Hise, and Mike Hofman contributed to the reporting of this article.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19961101/1861.html
Here's why both your customers and employees will remain loyal if your company's culture is right.
BY JOHN CASE
It's back. (It never left!) Your employees crave it. Your customers will love it. (And the one who needs it most is you.)
Amy Miller has a secret. Granted, it's an open secret, not the kind she tries to keep. But to too many American companies and management experts--and, fortunately for Miller's business, to most of her competitors--it's a secret all the same.
Amy's Ice Creams, Miller's seven-store chain of premium-ice-cream shops in Austin and Houston, Tex., sells terrific products and gives excellent service. But that's where the similarity to other scoop shops ends. Visit an Amy's store--the one in Austin's Westbank Market, say, on a Friday night--and you'll see employees performing in a manner you won't forget. That's right: performing. They juggle with their serving spades, toss scoops of ice cream to one another behind the counter, and break-dance on the freezer top. If there's a line out the door, they might pass out samples--or offer free ice cream to any customer who'll sing or dance or recite a poem or mimic a barnyard animal, or who wins a 60-second cone-eating contest. They could be wearing pajamas (because it's Sleep-over Night) or masks (Star Wars Night); there might be candles (Romance Night) or strobe lights (Disco Night). They wear costumes. They bring props. They pop trivia questions. They create fun.
Miller obviously sells entertainment along with ice cream. That's her strategy. But her managerial secret--the real source of her competitive advantage--isn't the strategy, it's how she makes the strategy work. The real secret to her company's success is its corporate culture.
Culture? Competitive advantage? But corporate culture's been done, you say. Way done. (Isn't it something we believed in back when Reagan was president? Didn't it fade when Silicon Valley grew up, and fold when Wall Street grew imperious?) Everybody knows that success in today's business world comes from clinical, tough-minded stuff: a hot technology, savvy strategy and positioning, and brutal cost control (sorry, that's "business-process reengineering"). The competitive environment calls for hard edges now. And culture--all those beer blasts and Outward Bound excursions, all those golden retrievers by the water cooler--is so soft. So sentimental. One doesn't even see that sort of thing in commercials anymore.
Tell that to Miller--or to any of the dozens of other market-beating CEOs whose practices prompted this article. Culture's time, they argue, is now. Companies with clever, highly evolved cultures have an advantage precisely because of the particular challenges of the current marketplace. Culture helps companies compete.
The challenge for Amy's Ice Creams? An increasingly universal one: it must keep its stores from becoming just another commodity. Miller saw superpremium-ice-cream stores, once a safe niche, become almost as easy to find as espresso shops. Her way to differentiate her stores was to sell an experience with every triple-scoop cone. Her way to sustain that difference--to ensure you'd encounter the experience that sets her stores apart--was to create and nurture a culture that made that experience inevitable. She had to get the right people and get them to behave in the right way. And because their behavior needed to be inventive and unflagging and self-initiated, she somehow had to get them to know what the right way was, without being told.
That's what her company's culture accomplishes. It's also what smart, intense cultures do for many other hot young businesses--and, it turns out, for some of the country's more established entrepreneurial successes, as well. The right culture isn't just the product of what a founder willfully wants his or her company to feel like (though it can be that, too). Through the symbols and practices that give it life, the right culture solves a company's most critical competitive problems.
Out of fashion for a decade, corporate culture--as the examples here demonstrate--may be the best response there is to the business conditions that all company builders face right now.
Does your company have a corporate culture? Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and attitudes that permeate a business. It defines what the company considers important and what it considers unimportant. If strategy defines where a company wants to go, culture determines how--maybe whether--it gets there. Every business has some kind of culture, just because it's an organization of human beings. But most businesses never give the topic a second thought. Their culture is to do things the way they always have or the way everybody else does them.
A few companies, by contrast, have explicit, highly distinctive cultures--strong, focused cultures that stick out from the crowd like the Grateful Dead at a marching-band convention. They have mission statements and values that mean something, and that people take seriously. They have a set of overarching beliefs that serve as powerful guides for everyday action--and that are reinforced in a hundred different ways, both symbolic and substantive. You'll recognize the classic examples: 3M Corp.'s relentless focus on innovation, Disney's commitment to treating its theme-park customers as guests. Those cultural values inform every move and decision made by employees or managers at those companies. (And in the cases in which they haven't, you're probably looking at a former employee or manager.)
For a while--it really was back when Reagan was in the White House--corporate culture of this type was hot stuff. The book Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, by Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, became a big best-seller. Every CEO worth his or her inflated salary had to nod knowingly when the talk turned to squishy subjects like mission and values. But then the fad dissipated, as fads do. More important, the demands of the marketplace intensified. Competition heated up. The pace of technological change quickened. In the 1990s businesspeople seemed to survive and prosper only if they could cut costs beyond recognition, deliver unprecedented levels of quality and service, and develop relationships with customers so intimate they were almost embarrassing. Nobody had time for luxuries like corporate culture. Probably nobody thought it would play too well, either. Even corporate executives can't expect employees to get misty-eyed over a new mission statement right after thousands of their colleagues get the ax.
Of course, some companies never got the message that they were supposed to forget about culture. Three come to mind immediately.
The first is Quad/Graphics, the Wisconsin-based printer. (Full disclosure: Quad is Inc.'s printer.) Founder Harry Quadracci takes his trust-the-employees culture so seriously that he still runs his annual Quad/University, in which managers literally walk out of the plant for up to three days and leave it in the hands of hourly workers. The second is Southwest Airlines, famous for its wild and woolly--not to say manic--culture. Everybody at Southwest, from CEO Herb Kelleher to the newest gate attendant, pitches in to make sure that customers have a good time and that airplanes get unloaded and reloaded and back in the air fast. The third: Nucor, the steel company, with its austere egalitarianism ("Senior executives do not enjoy any traditional perquisites," proclaims a company document) and day-in, day-out focus on production.
All three companies went from Inc. 500 size to Fortune 500 size in only a few decades, even though they were competing in some of the toughest businesses around. They're growing and thriving today. The graybeards in those industries are still wondering how they do it.
How they do it. the fact is, powerful cultures have powerful effects on how a company's people work together. Look at Southwest. Its strategies are no secret. Other airlines have duplicated its no-frills, point-to-point service. But maybe you remember that Wall Street Journal article a few years ago detailing the intricate, help-each-other-out teamwork necessary for a Southwest ground crew to turn its planes around in one-third the time other airlines require. Reading the article, you could only conclude that those employees wanted to get that plane back up in the air and making money. Somehow it's hard to imagine the workers at American or Delta caring much, one way or the other.
Walk into a high-culture outfit and you feel the difference right away. Earlier this year I spent a day at AES Corp.'s Thames facility, near New London, Conn. Only 15 years old, AES operates electric-power-generating plants in 35 countries. In 1995 it racked up $107 million in earnings on $685 million in revenues. It's a company that does bizarre things like planting millions of trees in Guatemala (to make up for the carbon dioxide produced by its facilities) and asking teams of hourly workers to manage its multimillion-dollar cash-reserve funds. No doubt I sounded a little skeptical when I asked one of the technicians about the latter practice. "Yeah, I was a little nervous at first," he agreed. Then he proceeded to explain how, with just a few phone calls, he had learned to get a good rate on $5 million worth of commercial paper. "It was a lot of fun," he concluded.
In such an outlandish atmosphere, the unusual becomes the usual. At AES, materials-handling technicians negotiate contracts with coal suppliers, thereby reducing the need for high-priced managers. Machine operators order replacement parts themselves, ensuring a minimum of downtime. When plant manager Dan Rothaupt wanted to change the bonus plan, he put it to a vote of the employees. It lost resoundingly--and so no one was left feeling that management had rammed an unwanted compensation system down employees' throats. With such a culture, is it any wonder that AES thrives even in today's competitive environment?
A successful corporate culture, however, is not some kind of black magic. It derives its power not just from abstractions but from specific practices that employees understand as symbolizing and representing the culture. It pays off not because it's some kind of softheaded do-goodism but because it relates to the specific competitive demands of today's marketplace. Consider a handful of mini case studies illustrating the relationship between the practices of culture--the artifacts, so to speak--and how they enable companies to outstrip their competitors.
The White-Paper-Bag Job Application. Remember the challenge Amy Miller faced? Used to be, market niches were safe. All you needed was the best location. Or a distinctive product. Or a capability that no one else had. Today there are no safe niches. Make a little money doing something, and you can bet that competitors--often competitors with deeper pockets than your own--will show up looking for a piece of the action. That's what might have happened to Miller. She started Amy's Ice Creams in 1984. It wasn't long before national companies such as Baskin-Robbins and Steve's were setting up shop close by.
The thing is, as we've said, Miller wasn't just selling ice cream. Anyone can sell ice cream. She was selling entertainment. All that crazy stuff her employees do--the theme nights, the impromptu musical comedies, the costumes, games, and jokes--keeps customers coming back for more. And it keeps Amy's Ice Creams (now at $2.2 million) growing about 20% a year.
Miller sends her cultural message to employees--this is what we value above all, this is what makes us different--from the day they show up looking for a job. Instead of a formal application form, they get a plain white paper bag along with the instructions to do anything they want with it and bring it back in a week. Those who just jot down a phone number will find that "Amy's isn't really for them," says Miller. But an applicant who produces "something unusual from a white paper bag tends to be an amusing person who would fit in with our environment."
Unusual, indeed. Applicants use the bags to create cartoons, board games, works of art, and elaborate parodies ("The Amysburg Address"). One job seeker turned his into an elaborate pop-up jack-in-the-box--and became a scooper at the Westbank Market store. That store's former manager painted an intricate green-and-blue sphere resembling the earth atop a waffle cone on his bag. Later he could be found passing out $5 gift certificates to customers willing to do their best animal impression or otherwise act up in ways that, among the Amy's staff, pass for normal. Like any performers, employees of Amy's can't rest on their laurels. The half a dozen or so white paper bags that applicants turn in during busy weeks remind them that there are plenty of creative people out there--and that creativity, not just ice cream, is what their boss really puts a premium on.
The War Room. Customers used to be less demanding, too. Now their expectations have ratcheted up several notches. Manufacturers have to deliver near-perfect quality. Service companies have to--well, almost set up housekeeping with their customers. Because what the customers expect in today's market isn't just a service, it's a solution to their problems. That's why travel agents have started to offer full travel-management capabilities along with plane tickets and hotel reservations. It's why distributors have begun running clients' inventories instead of just shipping them parts.
And in advertising, as Roy Spence and his colleagues have figured out, it's why agencies can't just dream up clever ads and do the media buys. Clients don't want advertising. They want to increase market share. They want to better their margins. They want marketing effectiveness, as measured by the attainment of specific, well-defined objectives.
Spence's agency, GSD&M--also in Austin, as it happens--is a monument to that realization. The agency's billings have grown nearly sixfold in the past decade. It counts blue-chippers such as Wal-Mart Stores and Southwest Airlines among its 22 clients and boasts a 90% client-retention rate. Part of GSD&M's pitches to prospects: measurable goals. Goals are a subject of discussion at the start of a campaign. ("Clients let us know how they definewinning," says one staffer.) Progress toward them is scrutinized carefully as the campaign progresses. The agency hands out bonuses when clients achieve their goals, not when GSD&M achieves its own.
The artifact that reinforces the culture of pure client-centeredness is called a war room, and GSD&M invented it six years ago. "We were working with a client and really needed to concentrate," explains Spence. "So we just took over an empty office and started posting urgent information on the wall."
Today the war rooms have evolved into a kind of command central. They're often painted in the client's colors. Red phones, exclusively for calls to and from the client, dot the tables. Up on the wall are the client's (and sometimes its competitors') earnings reports, stock price, newspaper clippings, competitive analyses, and weekly sales figures; along shelves are products, industry paraphernalia, and personal items that the client's customers might possess. In the war rooms, agency staffers prepare pitches or repositioning initiatives. They conduct conference calls, look at reels of past commercials, brainstorm, and debate. "War rooms raise the intensity level and give us a mental edge," says Spence. "They remind us to keep our eye on the prize," the prize being the client's success. Forget your office, the rooms broadcast to employees, this isn't about you. It's about the needs of the people who've hired us.
And is it any surprise that clients like the war rooms, too? (Think of the message sent about where GSD&M's attention is.) When the agency moves into new quarters later this year, there will be eight war rooms as opposed to the three in its current facilities. Says Spence, GSD&M's president, "Clients see that we're 100% focused. And as we build their business, they build ours."
Open-Book Wallpaper. Customer expectations aren't just higher; sometimes they change character completely. And that kind of marketplace volatility presents a challenge of its own: sometimes you have to turn your company on a strategic dime. Pat Kelly, CEO of Physician Sales & Service (PSS), based in Jacksonville, Fla., found himself in just such a situation a couple of years ago. Kelly built PSS into a leading distributor of supplies for doctors' offices mostly on the basis of top-level service. Surveys showed that was what his customers wanted. And the extraordinary service allowed him to charge a premium. When the Clintons took office, however, health-care reform was in the air, and suddenly doctors were worried about costs. In just a matter of months, price went from last to first on their list of concerns.
So Kelly decided that PSS had to become a low-cost supplier, even while maintaining its service levels. He launched some innovative strategic moves, such as setting up a frequent buyers' club. He also had to tell his salespeople and employees that commissions and bonuses would likely take a hit.
Companies rarely make that kind of change easily. Employees grumble. They quit. The work doesn't get done the way it once did. At PSS, the opposite happened. No one was exactly overjoyed--but no one left. The company made the move, experienced a tough year, and rebounded quickly. PSS continued its breakneck growth and is now the national leader in its industry.
The difference? PSS has a share-the-wealth, share-the-information culture of a sort rarely found in American business. Every employee is a shareholder; some have more than a million dollars' worth in their accounts. Every PSS branch meets monthly to review its profit-and-loss statement. But it isn't just the P&L that gets employees' attention. Branches seem to paper a sizable portion of their walls with financial information: What salespeople X, Y, and Z sold yesterday. How much gross margin each of them realized. How the branch is doing, week by week and month by month, against plan. The wallpaper sends a strong message to everybody, every day: There are no secrets here. Nobody will ever try to put one over on you.
In an environment like that, it's impossible for employees to be cynical about the management's motives or actions. When Kelly told the PSS rank and file why a strategic shift was needed and what it would entail, employees believed him. Remember--and this is important to note--he hadn't just opened his books all of a sudden, when the crisis came; he'd had them open all along. He'd earned his employees' trust. He knew that the power of culture comes in part from its consistency. It has to seem as natural as the air employees breathe. That's the way we do things around here.
As a result of PSS's culture, Kelly could ask for--and get--the extraordinary cooperation and commitment needed to make a painful change. And PSS could convert short-term pain into long-term gain.
Different as they are, the cultural artifacts at Amy's, GSD&M, and PSS all belie the stubborn notion that the point of corporate culture is to accommodate employees' wishes--to make employees comfortable at the expense of their employer's competitive health. (Although comfort is occasionally the means to a competitive end: Born Information Services Group, a $36-million information-technology consulting firm in Wayzata, Minn., maintains lakefront vacation homes for employees' use--the better to keep turnover negligible in an industry in which it's the number one problem.) Contrary to the stereotype, high-culture organizations tend to be both tough and practical. The artifacts that animate their cultures emerge not from abstract theory but from clever yet simple responses to a business threat or opportunity.
For example, at Direct Tire and Auto Services, a Greater Boston tire retailer, the tactical desire to make a notoriously low-rent industry more professional inspired the construction of a now-renowned customer waiting room--which reminds employees how different their company is, and how differently they should perform for it, every day. At Pentagram Design, a small, internationally esteemed design firm with offices around the world, the constellation-like organizational chart defines and lastingly reaffirms the company's unique-in-the-industry network of 14 autonomous yet interdependent partners. (Pentagram's resulting competitive advantage: the ability to operate like a big company and a small one at the same time.) And at Zingerman's Delicatessen, in Ann Arbor, Mich., cofounder Ari Weinzweig writes an internal newsletter to spread the company's service-is-everything gospel. Filled with super-service war stories, letters from grateful customers, service contests, and profiles of employees who win service awards, it helps propagate Weinzweig's zeal now that the $9-million company is too big for him to convey his message directly to everyone. "Culture spreads because one hourly person tells the next hourly person," he says. The newsletter places his voice in that conversation among frontline sandwich makers.
More examples of practices that began as simple management moves and evolved into cultural symbols:
The Stump-the-CEO Contest. AGI Inc., a Melrose Park, Ill., designer and printer of nontraditional packaging for cosmetics, compact discs, and multimedia software, has grown to $97 million by outinventing its competitors. Its culture, CEO Richard Block explains, maintains that creative edge by promoting open debate and the combustive rub of ideas--"an environment that is for experimentation and that urges you to take responsibility for a problem instead of working at concealing it." To underscore that principle, Block submits to lively interrogation at a monthly companywide meeting--and rewards his toughest questioner with a prize. The message: Nothing is sacred. Questions are good. We're all--the CEO included--accountable to one another.
The Barroom Production Meeting. Visual In-Seitz, in Rochester, N.Y., creates business presentations for companies such as Xerox and Kodak. "Timelines are very short and client demands very high," says CEO Charles Engler, "which equals stress." How to vent it? Hold Thursday-afternoon production meetings off-site--at a bar. Employees share problems and tips, track performance, and voice complaints that (they hope) clients will never, ever hear. The message: we see the pressure you're under, and we value how you handle it; let's devote time to fixing snafus here, so our customers never experience them.
The Customers-Only Hiring Policy. How does Black Diamond Equipment, in Salt Lake City, keep ahead of its rivals in the trendy rock-climbing-equipment industry? By filling its workforce with the sport's enthusiasts--the users of its products--and capitalizing on their passion. "We breathe it, live it, think about it constantly," says human-resources vice-president Meredith Saarinen, "which makes the whole company a marketing and design resource. It kills complacency." The messages: 1) What we do here makes possible a sport so devotion-worthy that people build their lives around it; what work could be more important? 2) You and your coworkers are our ideal customers, so satisfy one another and yourselves. "It's not that our employees can make suggestions," adds Saarinen, "but that they have the duty to make them."
Saarinen's insistence may come as close as any comment yet to describing the business condition that makes company culture more important today than ever. At Black Diamond, where competitive advantage depends on every employee's doing product research and development; at Zingerman's, where frontline service will make or break the business; at GSD&M, where small teams must hoist customers to their goals; and throughout the new economy at businesses both high-culture and low-, real responsibility for company success has been spread to every employee in the organization.
Confronted by today's unprecedented customer expectations of perfect quality, errorless service, and tailored-to-their-needs relationships, every employee is making key judgment calls--whether when moving a product down an assembly line or handling a client's complaint. Whole companies are only as strong as their weakest links. Employees in networks, teams, or flat organizations (remember, all the middle managers were fired) must make good choices on the fly, without being told how. They need help, and it can't come from supervisors. They need a set of overarching beliefs that serve as powerful guides for everyday action. They need a culture.
Companies with such strong corporate cultures have an almost unfair competitive head start. The work they do is invested with meaning. Their employees have reasons to care about how they perform. Even the challenges presented by mind-bending change--whether imposed by the marketplace or necessitated by internal growth--are easier to handle because a stable culture begets a fast-moving, flexible company.
Companies these days have to change all the time. They find new customers, develop new product lines, enter new markets, introduce new technology. Employees in conventional companies find all those moves unsettling, even unnerving. They worry about their jobs and about their futures. A strong, distinctive culture, however, offers a fixed reference point--and means that change is that much less threatening. "A strong culture is sort of an anchor for letting people loose to create a lot of change," not to impede it, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School.
AGI's Richard Block and his peers already know that. Better still, they know that culture has made their companies the kind that every CEO dreams of growing: the kind nobody wants to compete with. "If you were a customer and you came here," he says, "and then you went to all your other suppliers, I guarantee you that the place you'd enjoy most--the place you'd want to do business with--is this one. Just because of how it feels.
"And though that's a competitive advantage that isn't patentable," he adds, "it's also one that nobody can steal."
Vera Gibbons, Phaedra Hise, and Mike Hofman contributed to the reporting of this article.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19961101/1861.html
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