“Profit from the Core”
Chris Zook with James Allen
Harvard Business School Press, 2001
One way to view mergers and acquisitions that have, of late, become more frequent is to look at it from the seller’s end. Why is he selling a company that has been perceived to be raking in revenues and making profits? Or, why is the seller leaving an industry that is not even a dying one?
A respected group of companies is spinning off its food business. Its reason: “It is not within its core business.” A large American insurance firm has sold its Philippine and other Asian operations to a European company. Why? It has decided to focus on its domestic core business – meaning concentrate on its American market.
What is happening in the Philippines and the rest of Asia is happening everywhere. When managing boards review their sales, profits and shareholder values, they make strategic and monumental decisions: to spin off operations that are less profitable or that turn out to be pulling down the average growth rate of the entire company.
Viewed another way, those who have just acquired companies or invested into new ventures are paying close attention to their organization’s performance, the market’s response, and the new acquisition’s impact on their consolidated financial results – to find out early enough if such decision was wise. If not, they could go back to their core business.
Whatever point of view you are taking, you need a more systematic, logical and insightful approach – backed by careful study -- to evaluate a prospective deal: sell or acquire. Or, take a second look at a done deal – a buy-out, a merger, or a new venture. The objective: To find out if this action results or is resulting in sustained revenue and profit growth.
The book, “Profit from the Core,” takes a position on this subject, based on a study by Bain & Company’s Worldwide Strategy Practice: Ninety percent of all companies that invested outside their core business have failed to achieve sustained growth and failed to meet shareholder expectations.
The authors, emphasizing the virtue of staying within your core business, put it another way in a paradox: “From focus comes growth; by narrowing scope one creates expansion.”
The book gives you a mix of success and failure stories from among familiar global companies owning world-renowned brands to illuminate their findings in a number of studies. For example, Bausch & Lomb ventured beyond its highly successful soft contact lens business into electric toothbrushes (!), skin ointments (!) and hearing aids (!!). Result: Bausch & Lomb’s contact lens business “flattened out” and its $56 per share in 1991 plummeted to less than $33 per share.
After reacting with desperate measures, and after Johnson & Johnson entered the contact lens business with Vistakon, B & L returned posthaste to its original business. The book points out: “But precious ground, time, and capital have been lost. Even more important, new and strong competitors are now entrenched.”
Then the authors give this final word, a lament that could be shared by ill-advised straying away from the core business: “And it probably did not have to be this way.” Read about Amazon.com’s “all things to all people” policy, abandoning focus on books-on-demand from the Net, and how it incurred $1.2 billion in losses. Examples abound in the book, including the wise move of Pepsi to spin off its restaurant businesses to concentrate on beverage – and thus collide head-on with the leader, Coke.
It does not mean that a company remains at the core. The book reveals findings where “adjacency expansion”. This is the company’s move into related segments or businesses that utilize and, usually, reinforce the strength of its profitable core. “Building a profitable cushion around your core business can help to keep new invaders away or to block a sequence of a competitor’s moves that lead into your core,” the authors point out.
Equipped with tables and case histories, the book is a must-read for CEOs and corporate planners who have ventured into new projects, but who want to take a timely exit if need be; or who are about to respond to the “siren song” – as the authors put it – and be enchanted by a call to the unknown.
As global management consultants, the authors offer their advice to companies to, first of all, define their core business, then extract the utmost profit from it, and consider integration (backward and forward) – the old term for adjacent expansion – when industry turbulence dictates it or when competitors are posing a grave threat. This is easier said than done. The book provides insightful details.
Finally, to deliver the message even more powerfully, to forewarn companies about the seeming logic to stray away from their distinctive culture and competence in order to cash in on growth opportunities -- the authors give us this distilled wisdom:“Certainly, the world is full of paradoxes. To hit a golf ball farther, you hold the club looser. To make a plane lift off, you pull back on the throttle. To make the plant grow stronger and more quickly, you cut it back. To create the most organized economy in the world, you allow the free market to work its magic.”
Sunday, April 29, 2001
Sunday, April 22, 2001
Marketing rules have been radically changed!
“Max-e-Marketing in the Net Future”
Stan Rapp & Chuck Martin
McGraw-Hill, 2001
“The power to navigate the world at the click of a mouse is a force that is transforming our lives. And little will be the same,” Businessweek Online declared in its March 22, 1999 issue. More than a year after that statement, the transformation in the way we work, play and do business continues at the speed of light.
Much has been written about e-commerce, and how it has transformed the way a corporation stores and retrieves information; the way it uses its resources, people and otherwise; and the way it is structured – from the stable hierarchical pyramid to quick response teams that are easily deployed.
Big corporations have published books to document their own responses to the new revolutionary demands of the net economy – one way to assure their stockholders that they have acquired a new agility and picked up speed in outsmarting competition and in responding to customer needs.
What you would have though is an inside view of a corporation in the process of transformation. Sometimes, you could relate to such changes; other times you couldn’t. However, if you are looking for models, these corporate biographies would really be valuable.
But, if you are looking for a wide-ranging view of what’s really happening in the marketplace, what the new rules of engagement are, what new trends have materialized at the quickly changing horizon, and which industry players have been successfully cresting the wave of change – there is one book you can begin with: “Max-e-Marketing in the Net Future: The Seven Imperatives for Outsmarting the Competition in the Net Economy.”
If old paradigms are not changed, they are enriched. It used to be, for example, that we distinguish between selling a “product” or a “service.” The book’s one imperative says: “Erase the line between product and service.” Brand equity has been the emphasis of many a global consumer firm. The authors recommend that you “add relationship equity to brand equity.” And here’s one that introduces a new dimension to Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message”: The “process is the message” – or, “the process is the product.” Look the book up for several options on how process surrounds, creates or adds to the product, with several success stories from renowned brands.
The book also dares violate certain rules. For instance, here is one recommendation that violates marketing – and even grammar – rules: Try “verb branding” – like “Amazoning,” which sells the process of ordering a book with one click, complete with a package tracking mechanism. This is actually antedated by “Sinclair It!” and “Xerox It” – but they refer to simple old 20th century tasks, like copying and painting. Nothing about surfing of the internet kind.
The book is organized according to the “seven imperatives” – and thus it is easy on the reader to choose which imperative takes his fancy first. If your present concern is outsourcing, your begin with Imperative 4: “Do as little as possible yourself – let others do the work for you.” Sounds like a recommendation to elevate job evasion to the level of art! Not really. Check that imperative.
Or, if you are reviewing your organizational structure to make it more marketing oriented, be surprised by this tip in Imperative 7: “Make business responsible for marketing and marketing responsible for business” – which is actually saying marketing will drive the entire enterprise.
Written by a tandem of a relationship marketing man and an online publisher/lecturer, the book gives two assurances to the reader. First, the analyses and insights in marketing come from an old hand in marketing and advertising, but who has acquired a new eye that makes sense of the information age.
Second, the environmental scan of the net economy and networked society is made by the unerring eye of one who has been tracking this “transformational force” since it strode into the scene before an unsuspecting and a largely unprepared corporate community.
Aside from overwhelming us with changes that gives you impression that you now live in a radically new world, the book gives valuable information – like a “walk through” of the evolution of the new marketing – from the 1970s to 2000s. (Yes, lifestyle-altering changes have happened in much less than 50 years!) Well, at the latter pages of the book is a URL Listing that will drive readers to lose no time in navigating the world – through the mouse.
Marketing gurus like Philip Kotler and Theodore Levitt might have equipped us with marketing principles, but they have not prepared us for this rapidly changing net economy where the rules have been turned upside down. The bad news is, if you are in marketing (and that means the entire business), what you don’t know can hurt you – real bad. Hang on then to the seven imperatives in this book. Your wish to get hold of this book might as well be a command.
Stan Rapp & Chuck Martin
McGraw-Hill, 2001
“The power to navigate the world at the click of a mouse is a force that is transforming our lives. And little will be the same,” Businessweek Online declared in its March 22, 1999 issue. More than a year after that statement, the transformation in the way we work, play and do business continues at the speed of light.
Much has been written about e-commerce, and how it has transformed the way a corporation stores and retrieves information; the way it uses its resources, people and otherwise; and the way it is structured – from the stable hierarchical pyramid to quick response teams that are easily deployed.
Big corporations have published books to document their own responses to the new revolutionary demands of the net economy – one way to assure their stockholders that they have acquired a new agility and picked up speed in outsmarting competition and in responding to customer needs.
What you would have though is an inside view of a corporation in the process of transformation. Sometimes, you could relate to such changes; other times you couldn’t. However, if you are looking for models, these corporate biographies would really be valuable.
But, if you are looking for a wide-ranging view of what’s really happening in the marketplace, what the new rules of engagement are, what new trends have materialized at the quickly changing horizon, and which industry players have been successfully cresting the wave of change – there is one book you can begin with: “Max-e-Marketing in the Net Future: The Seven Imperatives for Outsmarting the Competition in the Net Economy.”
If old paradigms are not changed, they are enriched. It used to be, for example, that we distinguish between selling a “product” or a “service.” The book’s one imperative says: “Erase the line between product and service.” Brand equity has been the emphasis of many a global consumer firm. The authors recommend that you “add relationship equity to brand equity.” And here’s one that introduces a new dimension to Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message”: The “process is the message” – or, “the process is the product.” Look the book up for several options on how process surrounds, creates or adds to the product, with several success stories from renowned brands.
The book also dares violate certain rules. For instance, here is one recommendation that violates marketing – and even grammar – rules: Try “verb branding” – like “Amazoning,” which sells the process of ordering a book with one click, complete with a package tracking mechanism. This is actually antedated by “Sinclair It!” and “Xerox It” – but they refer to simple old 20th century tasks, like copying and painting. Nothing about surfing of the internet kind.
The book is organized according to the “seven imperatives” – and thus it is easy on the reader to choose which imperative takes his fancy first. If your present concern is outsourcing, your begin with Imperative 4: “Do as little as possible yourself – let others do the work for you.” Sounds like a recommendation to elevate job evasion to the level of art! Not really. Check that imperative.
Or, if you are reviewing your organizational structure to make it more marketing oriented, be surprised by this tip in Imperative 7: “Make business responsible for marketing and marketing responsible for business” – which is actually saying marketing will drive the entire enterprise.
Written by a tandem of a relationship marketing man and an online publisher/lecturer, the book gives two assurances to the reader. First, the analyses and insights in marketing come from an old hand in marketing and advertising, but who has acquired a new eye that makes sense of the information age.
Second, the environmental scan of the net economy and networked society is made by the unerring eye of one who has been tracking this “transformational force” since it strode into the scene before an unsuspecting and a largely unprepared corporate community.
Aside from overwhelming us with changes that gives you impression that you now live in a radically new world, the book gives valuable information – like a “walk through” of the evolution of the new marketing – from the 1970s to 2000s. (Yes, lifestyle-altering changes have happened in much less than 50 years!) Well, at the latter pages of the book is a URL Listing that will drive readers to lose no time in navigating the world – through the mouse.
Marketing gurus like Philip Kotler and Theodore Levitt might have equipped us with marketing principles, but they have not prepared us for this rapidly changing net economy where the rules have been turned upside down. The bad news is, if you are in marketing (and that means the entire business), what you don’t know can hurt you – real bad. Hang on then to the seven imperatives in this book. Your wish to get hold of this book might as well be a command.
Sunday, April 15, 2001
Poetry should have a place in corporate board room
“Selected Poetry of Ogden Nash”
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Poetry was once defined as “best words in their best order.” If that is so, then poetry should have a place in the executive suites and in corporate board rooms.
We hear businessmen conclude their speeches with a line from Robert Frost … “miles to go before I sleep”. Our bag of phrases is also filled with Shakespearean lines like “To be or not to be; that is the question” to speak of a certain quandary. Or, when we give a gift we quote Thomas Gray with this: “Not what we give but what we share/ For the gift without the giver is bare.” Even some popular songs have been accorded the classification of poetry, especially some songs of the Beatles.
These tell us only one thing. We have uses for poetry to express something deeper than prose; to give “soul” to a piece; or to add intensity to a speech. What’s noticeable, though, is that our poetry collections date back to the Elizabethan Age and earlier ages.
The advent of free verse and the use of allusions (that only students of poetry understand), plus the loading of symbols (that cascade from a literary heritage of myths and imagery) – have turned off many of us. Poetry has become confined to those in the literary circle, and we are outside that circle.
Once in a rare while, a book of poetry comes along to beckon us to become interested again in verse – or versification, if you wish. This poetry collection -- subtitled “650 Rhymes, Verses, Lyrics, and Poems” – is one such book. Ogden Nash was called by literary critics as the “master of light verse,” but respected poet Archibald MacLeish takes issue with them saying, “light verse carries a demeaning connotation. It implies that the art of poetry has its Macy’s basement where a kind of second-rate excellence is the criterion.”
So, when we read Ogden Nash we get real poetry that we can identify with. MacLeish says, Nash used the light verse form to “enable him to examine the inanities of his time in a colloquial language most men understood.”
Writing about what we read in the papers, the poet says:
I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
there has never been an era when so many
things were going so right for so many of the
wrong persons.
He also has something to say about the banking industry’s policy of lending money to those who don’t need the money.
Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
And particularly because they observe one rule
which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money
to anybody unless they don’t need it.
If you want some witty one liners in verse, the book 682 of pages offers a treasure. For example, on “Common Sense,” Nash gives his astonishing insight about those who have mastered the art or evasion of blame throwing:
Why did the Lord give us agility
If not to evade responsibility?
We can also identify with him about our daily complaints in the workplace, especially those bosses we would rather not see:
When people aren’t asking questions
They’re making suggestions
And when they’re not doing one of those
They’re either looking over your shoulder
or stepping on your toes
And then as if that weren’t enough to annoy you
They employ you.
The poet, who worked as an advertising executive before he went full time versifying, also knows the value of small talk during cocktails:
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
Our library is full of books on management, marketing, production, strategic thinking, and business quotes. It’s time there is a book of poetry to serve as an oasis in a desert of prose. This one (which I bought at Page One in Rockwell Center) deserves to be there. You see, it also has witty lines on personal relationships, like this one:
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
There are long pieces and short ones. The pages are peppered with verses on lovable and not so lovable members of the Animal Kingdom. Like this one: The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks/Which practically conceal its sex./ I think it clever of the turtle/In such a fix to be so fertile.
Poetry has a way of perking up an otherwise prosaic existence in the business world. Why? The answer will require another piece of writing. Sometimes, we really cannot explain everything. Even Ogden Nash cannot explain the existence of this flying object: God in His wisdom made the fly/ And then forgot to tell us why.
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Poetry was once defined as “best words in their best order.” If that is so, then poetry should have a place in the executive suites and in corporate board rooms.
We hear businessmen conclude their speeches with a line from Robert Frost … “miles to go before I sleep”. Our bag of phrases is also filled with Shakespearean lines like “To be or not to be; that is the question” to speak of a certain quandary. Or, when we give a gift we quote Thomas Gray with this: “Not what we give but what we share/ For the gift without the giver is bare.” Even some popular songs have been accorded the classification of poetry, especially some songs of the Beatles.
These tell us only one thing. We have uses for poetry to express something deeper than prose; to give “soul” to a piece; or to add intensity to a speech. What’s noticeable, though, is that our poetry collections date back to the Elizabethan Age and earlier ages.
The advent of free verse and the use of allusions (that only students of poetry understand), plus the loading of symbols (that cascade from a literary heritage of myths and imagery) – have turned off many of us. Poetry has become confined to those in the literary circle, and we are outside that circle.
Once in a rare while, a book of poetry comes along to beckon us to become interested again in verse – or versification, if you wish. This poetry collection -- subtitled “650 Rhymes, Verses, Lyrics, and Poems” – is one such book. Ogden Nash was called by literary critics as the “master of light verse,” but respected poet Archibald MacLeish takes issue with them saying, “light verse carries a demeaning connotation. It implies that the art of poetry has its Macy’s basement where a kind of second-rate excellence is the criterion.”
So, when we read Ogden Nash we get real poetry that we can identify with. MacLeish says, Nash used the light verse form to “enable him to examine the inanities of his time in a colloquial language most men understood.”
Writing about what we read in the papers, the poet says:
I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
there has never been an era when so many
things were going so right for so many of the
wrong persons.
He also has something to say about the banking industry’s policy of lending money to those who don’t need the money.
Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
And particularly because they observe one rule
which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money
to anybody unless they don’t need it.
If you want some witty one liners in verse, the book 682 of pages offers a treasure. For example, on “Common Sense,” Nash gives his astonishing insight about those who have mastered the art or evasion of blame throwing:
Why did the Lord give us agility
If not to evade responsibility?
We can also identify with him about our daily complaints in the workplace, especially those bosses we would rather not see:
When people aren’t asking questions
They’re making suggestions
And when they’re not doing one of those
They’re either looking over your shoulder
or stepping on your toes
And then as if that weren’t enough to annoy you
They employ you.
The poet, who worked as an advertising executive before he went full time versifying, also knows the value of small talk during cocktails:
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
Our library is full of books on management, marketing, production, strategic thinking, and business quotes. It’s time there is a book of poetry to serve as an oasis in a desert of prose. This one (which I bought at Page One in Rockwell Center) deserves to be there. You see, it also has witty lines on personal relationships, like this one:
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
There are long pieces and short ones. The pages are peppered with verses on lovable and not so lovable members of the Animal Kingdom. Like this one: The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks/Which practically conceal its sex./ I think it clever of the turtle/In such a fix to be so fertile.
Poetry has a way of perking up an otherwise prosaic existence in the business world. Why? The answer will require another piece of writing. Sometimes, we really cannot explain everything. Even Ogden Nash cannot explain the existence of this flying object: God in His wisdom made the fly/ And then forgot to tell us why.
Sunday, April 01, 2001
If a firm has the smartest people, why isn't it yielding the best gains?
“Hidden Value”
Charles A. O’Reilly III
& Jeffrey Pfeffer
Harvard Business School Press, 2000
Almost every one calls this generation the age of “human capital” or “intellectual capital” – replacing our traditional notions of capital in terms of materials resources, like land and money. As early as over a decade ago, Alvin Toffler shocked us then with his book, “Future Shock,” announcing the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the information age. Peter Drucker introduced the new factor in the business world, the “knowledge worker.”
This fact has already been settled. Our business vocabulary has been enriched by phrases preceded by “information” – information technology, information highway, information explosion. Executive positions have also gone through a radical transformation – since we now have information managers, IT professionals and, yes, CIOs -- short for chief information officers, joining the ranks of CFOs and CMOs (chief finance officers and chief marketing officers).
Fittingly enough, people have replaced machines as the most important factor in the growth and viability of corporations. The greater impact of human effort, over machine time, has been demonstrated over and over again in a broad spectrum of industries. It was no longer financial capital alone;l neither is it technology alone. The one factor that provides competitive edge to companies is people.
This explains why companies recruit the best executive, managerial and professional talents in the job market. The result is fierce competition for “the best and the brightest” from available candidates. The result is the increasing use of executive search firms to separate the outstanding and the average.
But the authors of the book, “Hidden Value,” ask a disturbing question: Why is it that even if a firm hires the smartest people, it does not logically lead to the company’s outstanding performance?
The book sets the stage: “In a world in which there is a war for talent and in which knowledge work is increasingly important, being able to attract, retain and energize people seems like an obvious recipe for success.” Is this the book’’s premise? No. Read on:
“But, like many mysteries, the issue isn’t whodunit but uncovering how they did it.” The book’s premise is this: Outstanding performance belongs to companies that have successfully created a culture and systems that enable even ordinary people deliver extraordinary results.
The book invites the reader to discover this truth for himself by reading the happy cases of eight outstanding companies. Southwest Airlines is featured and how it has beaten competition in short haul air transport. Cisco Systems, a $12 billion high technology stealth company, whose growth is faster than that of Microsoft, on account of its aggressive acquisition strategy. Men’s Wearhouse is a happy case of a firm entering mature and low growth industry, and yet generating outstanding results for a market made up of men who hate shopping.
Five more firms – SAS Institute, PSS World Medical, AES, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. and Cypress Semiconductor – underscore the central message of this book: Smart individuals do not achieve great corporate performance; only corporations who successfully harness their people and effectively align to corporate strategy deliver admirable results.
Some sample revolutionary moves:
Southwest Airlines threw away the 300-page corporate handbook and then brought in new people with marketing background.
Cisco Systems primes its people to address customer needs, even if requires killing technologies.
Men’s Wearhouse, ever aware of men’s loathing for shopping, uses the strategy of running only one promotional event a year.
The SAS Institute is the expression of a high-tech company with a high-touch culture. “Its business strategy is built on relationships,” the book says.
At Cypress, “hiring is a process, not an event,” the book points out. But it’s a fast process. “When we make an offer, the offer comes in person, in writing, and ready for the candidate’s signature on the spot.” Getting the person to sign an offer letter is often the beginning of the process, not the end.
The book makes the eight companies as a showcase – complete with organizational insights, tables showing dramatic growth in revenues and incomes, and innovative practices to unleash the human potential.
One practice underlies the ability of these companies to “unlock the hidden value” of their teams: They make work fun, enriching and challenging. Most of all, they don’t call them human resources, anymore. They call them “people.” This constitutes the triumph of humanity artists and writers have being talking about. It’s happening in the business world. You can make it happen in your firm.
Charles A. O’Reilly III
& Jeffrey Pfeffer
Harvard Business School Press, 2000
Almost every one calls this generation the age of “human capital” or “intellectual capital” – replacing our traditional notions of capital in terms of materials resources, like land and money. As early as over a decade ago, Alvin Toffler shocked us then with his book, “Future Shock,” announcing the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the information age. Peter Drucker introduced the new factor in the business world, the “knowledge worker.”
This fact has already been settled. Our business vocabulary has been enriched by phrases preceded by “information” – information technology, information highway, information explosion. Executive positions have also gone through a radical transformation – since we now have information managers, IT professionals and, yes, CIOs -- short for chief information officers, joining the ranks of CFOs and CMOs (chief finance officers and chief marketing officers).
Fittingly enough, people have replaced machines as the most important factor in the growth and viability of corporations. The greater impact of human effort, over machine time, has been demonstrated over and over again in a broad spectrum of industries. It was no longer financial capital alone;l neither is it technology alone. The one factor that provides competitive edge to companies is people.
This explains why companies recruit the best executive, managerial and professional talents in the job market. The result is fierce competition for “the best and the brightest” from available candidates. The result is the increasing use of executive search firms to separate the outstanding and the average.
But the authors of the book, “Hidden Value,” ask a disturbing question: Why is it that even if a firm hires the smartest people, it does not logically lead to the company’s outstanding performance?
The book sets the stage: “In a world in which there is a war for talent and in which knowledge work is increasingly important, being able to attract, retain and energize people seems like an obvious recipe for success.” Is this the book’’s premise? No. Read on:
“But, like many mysteries, the issue isn’t whodunit but uncovering how they did it.” The book’s premise is this: Outstanding performance belongs to companies that have successfully created a culture and systems that enable even ordinary people deliver extraordinary results.
The book invites the reader to discover this truth for himself by reading the happy cases of eight outstanding companies. Southwest Airlines is featured and how it has beaten competition in short haul air transport. Cisco Systems, a $12 billion high technology stealth company, whose growth is faster than that of Microsoft, on account of its aggressive acquisition strategy. Men’s Wearhouse is a happy case of a firm entering mature and low growth industry, and yet generating outstanding results for a market made up of men who hate shopping.
Five more firms – SAS Institute, PSS World Medical, AES, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. and Cypress Semiconductor – underscore the central message of this book: Smart individuals do not achieve great corporate performance; only corporations who successfully harness their people and effectively align to corporate strategy deliver admirable results.
Some sample revolutionary moves:
Southwest Airlines threw away the 300-page corporate handbook and then brought in new people with marketing background.
Cisco Systems primes its people to address customer needs, even if requires killing technologies.
Men’s Wearhouse, ever aware of men’s loathing for shopping, uses the strategy of running only one promotional event a year.
The SAS Institute is the expression of a high-tech company with a high-touch culture. “Its business strategy is built on relationships,” the book says.
At Cypress, “hiring is a process, not an event,” the book points out. But it’s a fast process. “When we make an offer, the offer comes in person, in writing, and ready for the candidate’s signature on the spot.” Getting the person to sign an offer letter is often the beginning of the process, not the end.
The book makes the eight companies as a showcase – complete with organizational insights, tables showing dramatic growth in revenues and incomes, and innovative practices to unleash the human potential.
One practice underlies the ability of these companies to “unlock the hidden value” of their teams: They make work fun, enriching and challenging. Most of all, they don’t call them human resources, anymore. They call them “people.” This constitutes the triumph of humanity artists and writers have being talking about. It’s happening in the business world. You can make it happen in your firm.
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