Don’t touch their dials!

Knowledge workers cannot be controlled; they must be motivated. Such employees must see a purpose more meaningful than personal profit. When the game is only about money, disparities in society get worse as the favored grab the largest share. - Peter Drucker

Such a pithy statement, with meaning far beyond motivating employees.

But, let’s start with how do we create a purpose more meaningful than personal profit. Where do we start? How do we do it? What’s the cost? What’s the ROI?

David Zinger may be a good starting point. I found this quote on his blog. David’s the founder of the Employee Engagement online community. He's create a purpose more meaningful than profit for over 1600 people on this site. Their purpose is how to engage employees, how to help each other find ways to create meaning more purposeful than profit, engage employees, create powerful brands capable of being sustained by the meaning they bring to their employees and customers, as well as from their employees and customers.

He’ll be a guest on my radio show, Friday November 6 at 9:30 AM, Central. Come and listen. A complete strategy for creating engaged employees is beyond the scope of the show. But, perspective and a few tips and pointers will be shared. These should help will point you on your way.

Here are the listening options:

LIVE:

1) Listen in streaming on-demand at this link.

2) Call in during the show at 646-915-9212. This also allows you to raise your hand using the touchpad on your phone to ask a question.

>LATER:

1) Listen in streaming on-demand at this link.

In the meantime, get to know David, at these resources:

* Twitter

* His blog

* Employee Engagement community

9 Stories Main Stream Media Can Report to End this Recession.

Dog bites man isn’t news.
We’re in a recession isn’t news either.

What is newsworthy are the stories of all the companies who are not laying off their employees or see growth ahead in 2009. Most, if not all, of these companies are small businesses and startups.  That makes sense. Historically, recessions end when jobs are created. Jobs created generate spending. Spending drives an economy.

Who creates those jobs in a recession? Small business and startups.

What we need now are the stories of these small businesses who are not issuing pink slips. What we need are stories, profiles and case studies, of businesses and their leaders who are thriving...right now.

Mainstream media is desperate for readers, for an audience. These stories would be interesting. These stories would bring readers. And you would be doing a service for your community, if not our country, by sharing tips and tools, resources and profiles, of companies who remain successful right now.

Here’s 9 stories, that  mainstream media can report that will A. bring readers, avid and loyal, to your publication (that will help save your business); B. help save businesses in your community; C. their success will bring more jobs to your community; D. Collectively,  if enough stories like these are shared... speed the recovery of our economy.

1. Profile companies in your community that are growing.
2. Share tips and resources that help small businesses grow.
3. Provide a forum for business leaders to share their expertise in guest columns.
4. Host a live, in-person, community forum for business leaders, owners, members...to meet and share ideas and concerns.
5. Advocate for more funding for small businesses.
3. Write editorials pointing out how small business creates the jobs to drive an economy out of a recession.
6. Interview political leaders. Ask them why they're not providing more support, removing more barriers to small businesses and startups.
7. Allow guest columns from leaders in innovation. Innovation creates new products and markets that require new companies with new jobs.
8. Push for more transparency and accountability in any bailouts. Demand to see the jobs those funds will create.
9. Host job fairs. Maybe at this point, it's unemployment fairs, but get people together and talk and share ideas. (You're looking for reasons to bring people to your paper...)

Mainstream media: You're looking for readers. Your readers, and those in your community, are  looking for jobs and the companies that are creating them. We're all looking for solutions. I think there's a match, here.

Channel Conflict: ATT & iPhones

IPhones go on sale at the end of the month for ...$599? Yes, that's a bit pricey. But wait, there's more...as in more costs. Signs are that ATT Wireless, the exclusive provider partner with iPhones, will require a 2-year contract for data-transfers...

Hmmmm, yes. Makes sense. As wi-fi access continues to grow towards universal, at least ubiquitous (hey, we've got it here in rural Iowa...), it makes sense for a provider to require its customers to sign a 2-year contract chock full of penalties for early departure.

It's consistent with ATT's customer-centric approach.  Back in the day, back in the early 90's, when competition in the long distance market knocked on ATT's exclusive door...(by virtue of a court order) ATT's response was to contact their high-usage customers and lock them into 2 year contracts at fixed prices...Before their customers realized what competition in a monopoly can do for exorbitant prices...they were locked into a contract with ATT at prices 100% or more higher than prevailing market prices by the time the contracts expired.

Now, ATT's doing it again with their deal with iPhones.

The question's been raised if iPhone will boom or bust. If it busts, it'll be hard to tell if it wasn't the 2-year data contract with ATT that spelled its doom.

Link from Russell Shaw, ZDNet, Report: iPhone cool stuff access will require two-year data plan.

Happy Employees = Loyal Employees

Fortune lists 5 examples of companies who really make an effort to keep their stars happy. Here's one example:

Capital One. Future of Work program offers company laptops, blackberrys, ipods, and open-plan work space where  you could choose to plunk yourself down at a desk, in a booth, on a couch, or in a special "quiet zone" designed to eliminate distractions. Why iPods? They can and are used to download any of 10,000 different courses, many of them from Harvard and other top B-schools, as well as to tune in to internal company information like quarterly updates from the CFO. How cool is that? Pushing your content to your most important subscribers: your staff.

The other 4 corporate examples come from:

Quad/Graphics

Deloitte & Touche

Nike

First Horizon

(Warning: I found the pages loaded VERY slow at these links. I found...if I clicked them once...then clicked them a 2nd time, the page loaded immediately. )

It seems so obvious: Happy employees = loyal employees. Right? So, why does it seem so many companies go so out of their way, so often, so consistently, so thoroughly to create disloyal employees? Curious.

Small Business: What it takes and why

WHAT IT TAKES

Be Excellent blog (great blog: very consistent message, well-written, good links) offers a post on Small Business Success: What It Takes.  It's based on a post from Dave Lorenzo that lists core competencies required to be successful in starting (and running) a successful small business...

Skip Reardon/Be Excellent refers to them as personality traits. Among them are:

• Willingness to Sacrifice
• Service Orientation
• Leadership Ability
• Business Intelligence and Creativity
• Management Ability and Organization
• Optimism
• Persistence
• Competitive Nature
• Sales Orientation
• Confidence

Skip goes on to offer a bottomline and a bit of relief for me:

If one or more of these traits is not second nature to you, don’t fret...We’ll talk about ways to leverage your current skills, knowledge and experience to make up for a lack of strength.

Whew. Hope's on the horizon!

WHY

Seth Godin asks So, What's Wrong with Small Business and answers it with this:

The more I see both, the happier it appears that small business people are. They often make more money, take fewer risks, sleep better and build something for the ages, something they believe in and can polish and be proud of.

If you have what it takes, the rewards can be very acceptable. And if you don't, well then you have people like Skip Reardon/Be Excellent and Seth and John Jantsch and his merry band of bloggers...and WOMMA and Customer Evangelists and...Mike Sansone...Debbie Weil , among thousands of bloggers who can bring you the skills and the resources you may lack or perceive yourself to lack.

So, what are you waiting on?

Using Blogs and Wikis to Build Your Strategy

Being a small company, our strength is always on display. That's our human assets and their commitment to being flexible enough and smart enough and committed enough to find a personalized solution that bigger companies turn their nose up when considering. That's not a problem these days. Instead, the problem or the challenge is how to handle being pushed out of the boxes of our CRM and ECMs.

Jim Murphy at AMR Research blog talks about Wikis and Blogs, Part II: Make Room for Innovation.

Innovation and typical enterprise systems are at odds. Innovation requires thinking out of the box, and nothing seems quite as boxy as today’s structured, codified IT systems.

Enterprise applications like ERP and CRM tend to impose structure on information to automate processes. But innovation requires that actual human beings work together to share and develop new ideas.

And so between ECM’s [enterprise content management] rock and e-mail’s hard place, the emerging collaborative web, with tools like wikis, blogs, and social networking, enters the enterprise landscape (see the AMR Research Alert article “Wikis and Blogs, Part I: When Silly Words Means Serious Business” for definitions).

Here the web is nearing its potential as a true collaboration platform: a place to foster participation of the masses, allowing people to subscribe to the information they’re most interested in.

If there's ever some text that describes our company's daily dialogue it's this. We're blessed with great people: they're talented and fun and flexible and committed, honest and open, positive, results-driven, kind. We all play together well as we share and develop new ideas.

And they've driven our growth that's pushing us outside our current boxes of ERPS and CRMs.

Now we read from  Ross Mayfield where a company chooses to:

publish the CEO’s strategy as a wiki and—believe it or not—allow employees to edit and alter the document freely.

We were pushed to do just that starting 4-5 months ago. We use the BaseCamp product from 37signals not only for our projects but also to discuss and edit and modify our strategies and tactics. It's been hugely successful for us. The communication is smoother, easier and faster. The collaboration is greater. And everyone's always on the same page. There was some rustling when learning new skills and habits and routines. But...everyone's learning the benefit of working with an open collaboration tool. Nothing like open communication to keep everyone participating. Honestly, I love being validated as much as anyone.

One sign you're a calcified, decaying corporation

Wanna know how to recognize a company's tipping past maturity and into decline? Look at how they handle employee reviews.

In the early days, the growth days, the reviews are informal. It's in the form of day-to-day interactions with peers and direct managers. It's obvious who's performing and who's not.

Then regular, more formal reviews, are scheduled. Twice a year, for documentation purposes, while at the same time...the informal reviews happen regularly.

Then...the company tips past growth, teeters past maturity and into reviews from a

supposedly meritocratic system under which employees get ranked on a bell curve [that's] taken over by managers who try to protect their friends...

And their turf and their budgets and perks and influence in the company. From there the company's mission becomes defending its turf not wowing their employees and customers, making something remarkable and giving them a solution to their needs worth talking about.

I saw this happen several times with the usual outcome: the company goes under. What started as a fresh, passionate, open and honest working environment that spread to create passionate and loyal customers becomes a never ending battle over anything but enabling the employees to create a product worth remarking on by the customers. It seems it's a trend that's as guaranteed as taxes and death and lobbyist influence...barring the influence of a 2nd element.

Now we read where Microsoft is showing signs it's reached this phase of life. Employees of the Redmond Giant have reported to WashTech.org that their reviews aren't based on performance, unless that performance determines their friendship with their bosses. The article reports :

According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers “fight” for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale.

Now the imminent demise of Microsoft has been reported numerous times. It's run by smart people, continues to attract smart people. But...once a company starts alienating not only their key human assets, but rank and file human assets as well...and when that company competes in an arena where it's the quality of their human assets that sets it apart...then it's a sign it's reached the tipping point into decline. Not today, not tomorrow, and certainly not for a long time given Microsoft's size. But, barring, a major paradigm shift Microsoft's facing some unpleasant days ahead.

Links:

Washington Tech.

FSB Newsletter

The Ultimate Question, excerpts from

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth is a delight.  Smooth, clear writing style; excellent presentation of data AND company profiles. Here's an excerpt that caught my eye; it's from page 144:

The superior pay is a powerful magnet that helps attract and retain top talent, and top talent on the front line yields a mighty advantage in the battle for customer relationships. But how do these companies provide such generous rewards and still deliver good value to customers and shareholders? One answer is that they make a strategic investment in employee training and development which unleashes breakthrough levels of productivity, creativity and service quality. As HomeBanc CEO Pat Flood puts it, "Investing in our employees is our core strategy. We believe that the only sustainable advantage in business is world-class service."

Bolding the text was my idea. It always, always, always, amazes me how demoralizing colleagues is throught to be competitive advantage. Of course, companies don't say that explicitly, except in every way they neglect, ignore, dishonor, disrespect, demotivate every member of their company, employees AND customers.

This book profiles so many companies who've shown that good profits AND true growth, growth that's sustainable, is so possible and so rewarding when you use the same approach from this excerpt.