5 (Perfeito)

Mojo

Name: Small Giants
Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Author: Bo Burlingham

Anchor Brewing; CitiStorage; Clif Bar; ECCO; Hammerhead Productions; O. C. Tanner Co.; Reel Precision Manufacturing; Rhytm & Hues Studios; Righteous Babe Records; The Goltz Group; Union Square Hospitality Group; W. L. Butler Construction; Zingerman's Community of Businesses. "They're also interested in being great at what they do, creating a place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they live and work in, and finding great ways to lead their lives." "There was excitement, anticipation, a felling of movement, a sense of purpose and direction, of going somewhere. That happens, I think, when people find themselves totally in sync with their market, with the world around them, and with each other. Everything just seems to click." "Soul can;t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, 'Here's a value proposition that I believe in. Here's where I'm coming from. This is my point of view.' At first it's a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation." "They were highly accessible and absolutely committed to retaining the human dimension of the relationships." "Weinzweig and Saginaw would be able to grow the business, and to do it in a way that would let them preserve the attributes that had led them to start the company in the first place - close contact with a community, intimacy with customers, team spirit among employees, exceptional quality of food and service." "I look forward to coming to work even more now than I did in the beginning. I'm having more fun, and I'm more at peace with the realities of life, Success means you're going to have better problems. I'm very happy with the problems I have now." "There are people, after all, who are passionate about what they do and dedicated to pushing the boundaries of how well it can be done. Yet the more successful they are in achieving what they want, the more difficult it is for them to stay on course." "Because of their success, they find themselves faced with so many opportunities that it takes a conscious effort on their part to keep from heading off in the wrong direction." "Yet he finds himself in that position only because he resisted the pressures to expand in the early years before he was prepared to handle the challenge without sacrificing the soul." "These companies are searching for something indefinable, immeasurable, something that goes beyond the standard definitions of success in business, something that can easily be lost unless it's protected against the homogenizing influences brought to bear on every company. I call that quality mojo. If you are not involved in helping to generate mojo, you have nothing to contribute except, perhaps, capital, and the capital comes at too high a price." "So we sat down and did a lot of soul-searching. We asked what we did well, what kind of work did we get a better return on, what did we need to improve. And then we changed everything." "Indeed, you could argue that a small giant's mojo comes, in part, from an active appreciation of a business's potential to make a positive difference in the lives of the people it comes in contact with." "When you look closely at our small giants, one characteristic immediately jumps out at you. Like Righteous Babe, they are all so intimately connected to the place where they're located that it's hard to imagine them being anywhere else." "You're talking about something like what the French call terroir, he said. It has to do with the way that a soil and climate in a given region contribute to the flavor of the food." "Although new to their respective fields, they were unquestionably talented. As a result, the albums, catalogs, and marketing materials they produced were fresh and imaginative but hardly amateurish." "The company's owners and employees have a strong sense of who they are, and where they belong, and how they're making a difference to their neighbours, and others they touch." "his restaurants aim to provide what he calls enlightened hospitality." "What I've learned is that I have an intense, nearly neurotic interest in seeing people have a good time. Enlightened hospitality is his name for the process of making sure they do." "You can teach people to do all those things, and to do them well. Enlightened hospitality, on the other hand, is an emotional skill involving the ability to make customers feel that you're on their side. So he hires for those qualities and skills, the human skills; he trains for the others" "Evidently there was some other factor at work. The other factor, Meyer and his associates decided, was hospitality, which they then tried to define. In the end, they agreed that it came from their commitment to five core values: caring for each other; caring for guests; caring for the community; caring for suppliers; and caring for investors and profitability - in descending order of importance." "The group concluded that, among other things, the companies forgot about the emotional connection with the consumer.. and concentrated on the process of business." “They argued that, to be really successful, a company had to focus on providing one of three types of value to its customers: the best price, the best product, or the best overall solution.” “Transformation from a customer-friendly company into a customer-intimate one” “For Weinzweig, however, it’s also a means of connecting customers to the sources of their food, and the food suppliers to the food consumers, in a way that’s heartfelt and meaningful, reflecting - as it does - the individual passions and interests of everybody in the chain.” “For lack of better term, we might refer to the process as building a sense of community - that is, a sense of common cause between the company, its employees, its customers, and suppliers. That sense of community rests on three pillars. The first is integrity - the knowledge that the company is what it appears, and claims, to be. The second pillar is professionalism - the company does what it says it’s going to do. It can be counted on to make good on its commitments. The third pillar is the one we’ve been discussing - the direct, human connection, the effect of which is to create an emotional bond, based on mutual caring.” “People really believe in this idea of building an alternative, not just to giant record companies, but to the increasing corporatization of American culture. The values they run the business with are the values that guide their lives.” “It’s generally not the people at the top of the organization who create the intimate bonds. It’s the managers and employees who do the work of the business day in and day out.” “I’ve met in socially responsible companies that have been so focused on saving the world they neglected to do what was necessary to save themselves. Some of them were famous for their mojo early on, but they lost it, in part because they didn’t take care of the basics. That’s not to say that companies in this book don’t have management problems of their own, but they have mechanisms for bringing the problems to the surface and working them through.” “A lot of times, people will look at companies like ours and say, ‘it’s all because of their culture.’ That isn’t accurate. It takes well-designed, appropriate, and values-driven systems and processes to support and create the kind of cultures we’re all going after.” “additional tools were developed: the 5 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints, the 4 Steps to Order Accuracy, the 3 Steps to Great Finance, the 4 Steps to Productive Resolution of Differences, the 5 Steps to Bottom-Line Change, and on and on. At a certain point, you have to roll your eyes at the sheer number of them, but when you look closely, you realize that each one contains a nugget of management wisdom.” “What we look for is elegant simplicity.” “The first imperative involves articulating, demonstrating, and imbuing the company with a higher purpose. That purpose may relate to the work that the business does, or the way the business does it, or the good that comes from doing it, or some combination of the three. The second imperative for creating a culture of intimacy involves reminding people in unexpected ways how much the company cares about them. The third imperative concerns an attribute that, at first glance, you might think companies have little control over, namely, collegiality. I’m referring to feelings that employees have toward one another, the mutual trust and respect they feel, the enjoyment they get out of spending time together, their willingness to work through any conflicts that might arise, their collective pride in what they do, and their collective commitment to doing it well.” “In that sense, each company is its own version of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged - a haven for people who have a common vision of the kind of society in which they want to live and work.” “In a machining business, that sort of power lies with those who know how to lathe. The machinist, or the foreman, may tell you that something you want can’t be done.” “After all, most buyers will look at the company and immediately spot opportunities to increase its profitability. How? By consolidating, centralising, and cutting out some of the extra things the company does that are not essential to its viability and that don’t contribute directly to its bottom line - including many of the practices and activities that go into creating mojo.” “Robert K. Greenleaf” “Entrepreneurship, Bernie realised, was the means by which an economy continually renewed itself. Without it, a country would lose its vitality, its energy, and become impoverished - just as a culture would become impoverished without the ongoing creation of art.” “From that perspective, mojo is more or less the business equivalent of charisma. Leaders with charisma have a quality that makes people want to follow them. Companies with mojo have a quality that makes people want to be part of them.” “For people in companies with mojo, that process is inseparable from the business. It’s the business that allows them to pursue their passion, and they strive to ensure that the operation of the business enhances their ability to do so.” “Business are the building blocks, not just of an economy but of a whole way of life. What they do and how they do it have an impact that extends far beyond the economic sphere.” “They shape the communities we live in and the values we live by and the quality of the lives we lead. If businesses don’t hold themselves to a high standart, the entire society suffers.”

Small Giants - Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

Bo Burlingham

Mojo

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