The realistic view by employees in all companies, in all industries:
(1) Why go the extra effort (attention to detail) when you are not fairly compensated as it is
(2) Means more work for me, so we’ll feign ignorancy (take responsibility)
(3) …
According to The Realist’s Guide to Moral Purpose (Winter edition of Strategy+Business), the main root of ill behaviors such as these is the lack of a clear moral purpose and the articulation of. To achieve great service, you have to look at your organization’s leadership. The task of leadership is to stimulate actions, reliably and continually, and the CEO/management team themselves need a bit of guidance. (If you think otherwise - the workings of the CEO has far more influence than moral purpose, scroll to the bottom.) They have learned how to deploy a conceptual tool that allows them to inspire and lead an organization toward creating sustained competitive advantage.
That conceptual tool is called moral purpose. A moral purpose
is a value that, when articulated, appeals to the innate sense held by some
individuals of what is right and what is worthwhile. For example, by all
accounts, Sam Walton was a tough businessman, but at the company he founded,
Wal-Mart, making money was secondary to another moral purpose: giving
customers a good deal. He made his “associates” (as he called employees)
feel that their work was worthwhile, by tapping into their natural good feelings
toward fellow human beings. This in turn led them to treat customers in a
friendly and helpful way, which (combined with his fierce pursuit of low prices)
established the kind of customer loyalty that has been the central competitive
advantage of his company. Mr. Walton could do this because he shared these
feelings himself and communicated them at every turn. Indeed, his altruistic
appreciation of his fellow human beings shines through his account of his own
motivations (in his 1992 autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America,
written with John Huey, published by Doubleday):
[Our associates] learn to stand up tall and look people in
the eye and speak to them, and they feel better about themselves…. Wal-Mart has
helped their pocketbooks and their self-esteem. There are certainly some union
folks and some middlemen out there who wouldn’t agree with me, but I believe
that millions of people are better off today than they would have been if
Wal-Mart had never existed.
The author notes that many outsiders may attribute Wal-Mart to be more ruthless and evil than other organizations, but “that does not affect the degree to which an ideal of service drove Sam Walton and his employees during his lifetime, and made possible Wal-Mart’s success.”
4 types of moral purposes:
(1) Discovery (”The New”: Sony, IBM, Intel)
(2) Excellence (”The Good”: Berkshire Hathaway, The Economist, BMW )
(3) Altruism (”The Helpful”: Wal-Mart, The Body Shop )
(4) Heroism (”The Effective”: Ford, Microsoft, ExxonMobil)
Moral purpose and today’s service businesses
Now if you look at all the businesses out there, there is a good number
who have lost empathy (and all connections to delivering what counts to
the customer) and the only meaning to its existence is its
bottomline/stockholder’s value
Turning idealism into real results can be seen in FoMoCo’s moral purpose: “Use machines to change the world.” Ford received 100% ROI (1903-1919) by mass production of cheap cars and changed the very way people lived their lives. Or Merck’s “Overcome disease”, which sponsored its heavy investment in research and enabled Merck to have 8% earnings growth (1980-2002).
When no such
moral purpose is present, a company acquires a de facto amoral purpose:
expediency. It becomes the kind of company that professes, “We are here
only to make money.” This can be successful in the short run, but these
companies cannot endure; they do not survive the changes they will
face in their markets or business environments. Even so, this type of
company is perferable to the company that pretends to follow a moral
purpose, such as excellence or altruism, but actually practices
expediency. This gap between real and professed moral purpose breeds
cynicism among employees, which means less empathy to the client, less
motivation to provide… These companies become paralyzed, precisely
because employees have inconsistent, even contradictory, guidance for
their decisions and cannot set priorities
The company’s success is attributed to its moral pupose rather than the characteristics of the CEO, or the workings of the top team because:
(1) Moral purpose is where the big money is. Most stories about wealth creation and success are far easier to understand when we recognize the part that moral purpose has played
(2) Moral purpose reveals the underlying human dynamics of the firm, the most fundamental issues involving motivation and behavior
(3) Moral purpose is all that successful CEOs want to talk about — although they do not put it in those terms
Link: Seth’s Blog: The two obvious secrets of every service business
But that still would not answer the critical need to take my work with me or atleast have it available when I needed it. I’d like to spread out my information as well as spread out the risks (due to hardware, software, environmental issues). Let’s hope