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Phil's blog

The 20 Best Companies For Leaders

According to The Hay Group and Chief Executive Magazine, these are the 2008 Best Companies for Leaders, with their 2007 positions in brackets.

1. 3M Company (15)
2. Procter & Gamble (2)
3. General Electric (1)
4. Coca-Cola (5)
5. HSBC Holdings (14)
6. ABB
7. Southwest Airlines
8. IBM
9. Hewlett-Packard (10)
10. PepsiCo (7)
11. Nokia
12. Accenture Ltd.
13. FedEx
14. Infosys Technologies Ltd.
15. McDonald’s Corporation (18)
16. Caterpillar
17. American Express
18. Cisco Systems
19. Oracle
20. Intel Corporation

Hat Tip: George Ambler’s blog The Practice of Leadership

PS And what do these great leaders do?
“When asked what organizations value the most in leaders, 83 percent of the best in class organizations said “execution.” “


Zappos Culture Book

I could have posted this in The Customer Blog just as easily. Zappo’s, the online shoe shop with the billion dollar turnover and the great reputation for customer service, publishes its own culture book once a year, written by its employees.

The HR guy, about halfway into this clip, which explains the book, says “What it says for Tony (Hsieh, CEO of Zappos) is that we are all leaders here. It’s not up to him to lead us. It’s about us leading each other.”

That’s Distributed Leadership my friends. It’s how you get to be a great company today. If you don’t understand it, watch the clip. You probably still won’t understand it completely, but it’s a start.


It’s about the experience, stupid

“Customers talk three times more about the service they experience than about the products they buy. Why? Because customers think more about the emotions they are feeling, and that comes from the people they interact with rather than the products they buy.”

– My shorthand notes from Tony Robbins talking at the North American Conference on Customer Management a couple of years ago.


Leaders who rap?

You have to admire the, er, energy of the top leaders at the Singapore Media Development Authority. Click on the triangular ‘play’ button, below, to see what I mean. But, be warned: if you listen to all four minutes of this you won’t get the tune out of your head.

If you are viewing at work and your employer’s policy is to block access to YouTube, you won’t see anything in the panel below. If so, copy and paste this link in an email to yourself and watch it at home or somewhere where YouTube isn’t blocked:


FREE HBR Papers from Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman, Marcus Buckingham

Microsoft are sponsoring Harvard Business Review so that you can download a number of free leadership papers that you would otherwise have to pay for.

They are classics and include:

Daniel Goleman on what makes a leader (EI, he says, not surprisingly)

Jim Collins on Level 5 Leadership

Managers and leaders: are they different? (Before you read this, beware that it’s a false polarity. You have to flip backward and forward between ‘managing’ and ‘leading’ many times every day if you are doing your job properly. You need to be both).

Why should anyone be led by you? (A damn good question)

Marcus Buckingham on What Great Managers Do

Here’s the link. You can download them but don’t share them, as that breaches copyright. Just point people at the link as I’ve done here: FREE HBR Papers, sponsored by Microsoft.


Tough Times Call For Uncertain Leaders

One of the (many) paradoxes of leadership is that, yes, a lot of people value certainty of direction in uncertain times and it’s a leader’s job to harness the collective will to a particular direction – core purpose, prime directive, whatever you want to call it. But (you saw that ‘but’ coming, didn’t you)…

Too many people in leadership positions think they therefore have to show certainty all the time – be a rock in uncertain, turbulent times. Sorry, wrong. Be uncertain. Openly uncertain. Often.

“Of all the qualities in a leader conducive to innovation and initiative, a degree of uncertainty may be the most powerful.”

That’s from a new clip in Hub TV from Jack Hayhow. The most creative organizations, he says, citing Ellen J Langer’s research, have leaders who are confident that the job will be done, but without any certainty about how it will get done.

You can view the 1 minute and 45 second clip on the Home Page here: www.theleadershiphub.com


Death to Selling (Part 3). Change the compensation system.

At Xerox, when new CEO Anne Mulcahey wanted to change the sales culture, she did this:

If you bring in a new customer, you get a bonus, as usual. No change there, then. If the customer chooses not to renew the contract after a year, you, the salesperson, lose three times the bonus you earnt for bringing them in. It’s taken away from you.

How effective do you think that was in switching the sales team’s focus from ‘hit and run’ to customer retention?


A Time to Laugh

Do people laugh at you? At work, I mean, rather than point and titter as you walk past in the street.

You don’t have to follow cricket to appreciate this story: The new captain of the England cricket team was giving a press conference this morning and kept stumbling over the word ‘shipshape’. There were gales of laughter from three people at the back of the room.

The three cricketers who couldn’t control themselves included the previous captain who had been ousted, and with whom it was widely predicted the new captain would have a hard time. Also, one other former captain was among the gigglers, a precocious talent who sometimes saves the day, sometimes doesn’t, depending, apparently on how motivated he feels.

Things must be fine in the England camp, said the commentator in passing. They are laughing at the captain.

Herb Kelleher, when he was CEO of Southwest Airlines, said “I love it when people make fun of me.” Take the job seriously but not yourself is a pretty good rule of thumb for leaders to follow.

In case you think that doesn’t make him a serious CEO, under Kelleher’s watch (and, just as important, after he handed over to Colleen Barrett, too) Southwest Airlines was and is the most consistently profitable airline in US aviation history and, for a large part of its existence, has been worth more than the stock market value of every other domestic US airline added together. That’s serious business.

With people losing jobs and worried about the future, this isn’t the time for comedians. But, this IS a time to forge closer relationships and a sense of purpose. And nothing does that like laughing together.

Don’t forget Victor Borge’s memorable line, stolen by Primal Leadership author Daniel Goleman

Q: What’s the shortest distance between two people?
A: Laughter


Leaders are Givers, not Takers

I can’t help myself. I like Dr. Alan Zimmerman’s Tuesday Tips. Even though I don’t know what he’s a ‘Dr’ in and he hard sells to me in between the interesting bits.

I’m a bit late, but this is an example from last week, with a link to his site at the end:

From Alan Zimmerman’s Tuesday Tip

“No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.” – Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. President

I’ve noticed that people fall into one of two categories: givers and takers.

I’ve also noticed that the takers are the unhappiest people on Earth. And it’s no wonder. When their entire focus is on “What’s In It For Me,” they’re bound to offend their coworkers, customers, friends, and family members and have problems with them.

By contrast, those who experience the most success in their businesses, their teams, and their families are givers.

So I ask you … “Are you a giver or a taker?”

Abigail Van Buren, the syndicated columnist, gives a great way to answer that question. She said,

“The best index to a person’s character is:
a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and
b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.”

A taker ONLY treats people well when he’s out to get something from them. A giver treats people well ALL the time.

To be a bit more specific …

1. Takers seldom think about others

They’re self-absorbed … with their interests, their desires, their wants, and their needs.

They’re kind of like the father who was asked by a young man if he could marry his daughter. The father asked, “Can you support a family?”

The young man said,”Yes.”

“Good,” replied the father. “There’s six of us.”

Alan then goes on to look at leadership styles – givers or takers. Here’s the link:

Givers or takers – Alan Zimmerman’s Tuesday Tip, January 27 2009


Be Different, not Better: Lessons from the pharmacy counter

Be different instead of (or, more accurately, as well as) better, because better is easier to copy and stands out less in your customers’ minds.

Being different doesn’t have to be highly imaginative and creative. Sometimes the most different things come with a slap to your own head and a ‘Duh: why didn’t anyone else do that before?’ feeling. Here’s one:

At most pharmacy/chemists counters, you have a public conversation, admittedly in a lowered voice usually, while other people waiting in line behind you either conspicuously look the other way or strain their ears to hear, depending on their level of discretion or nosiness.

At London Drugs (ironically not in London at all, but in the US) the pharmacist takes you into a private room to discuss the prescription you are getting filled. And why not? Does the doctor have a public conversation with you in front of other patients in the waiting room when you go to the doctor? Of course not. It’s private.

What can you do to stand out in your customers’ minds by being conspicuously different, in a way that is driven by customer need, of course. Your best starting point for this kind of thinking is, as Richard Branson always says, to be the customer yourself and think of what annoys you about current industry practise in your sector. Then change it.