Customer-Focused and Employee-Centered Core Values

Xerox: A case in point

In 2000, Xerox was $17 billion in debt, and by 2001 the company’s stock price had dropped from a high of $63 to about $4. Xerox suffered seven straight losing quarters. The company also faced an accounting investigation by Securities and Exchange Commission into the way it accounted for customer leases on copiers.

Today the company has shifted its main business from small copiers to desktop copiers from offices and high-quality printers for publishers. Xerox has experienced a remarkable comeback. Fourth quarter net income for 2003 rose to $222 million or 22 cents a share in 2002. Recent stock prices have been in the $15 range and are expected to go higher. The company’s operations are guided by customer-focused and Employee-Centered Core Values…and the strategic involvement of Human Resource Management (HRM). (Xerox2004)

Implications in Business Operations

The value placed on people, customers and employees, is the defining brand of a business however the size is. Today, where globalization is no longer a strange business term and where customers are presented with a thousand options for a particular product, the human factor of the business creates the ultimate product differentiation.

Productivity and sales are high when Employees (Human Resource) are given their much-needed attention. Vis a vis, when customers’ needs, wants, and expectations are met, you will have a business that is likely to profit and grow. Xerox and other companies who shifted from a profit-focused business models to HR and customer focused models have experienced a positive turn-around. Your small business can do too.


Implications in ProBlogging

Subscribers, readers, and visitors are the probloggers’ primary assets. No amount of advertising, publicity, contests, social networking schemes, and other gimmicks can replace their loyalty. They will make or break your problogging efforts. Make them a center of your ‘problogging core values’ by:

• Writing posts that create or add values to their reading experience. Post to feed your audience, not the other way around;
  

• Developing and easily navigated blog lay-outs where they can easily find their needs and/or wants;
  

• Responding promptly and sensibly to comments;
  

• Lastly, lesser commercialization more blogging. Meaning, while making money out of your blog is your ultimate goal, do not make it so evident that it drives your readers and visitors away. Make blogging your first priority, the money will follow. This is what is meant by making people, not robots (name the implications –pun intended) your ‘core values.’

Now, have your say please.

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The Learning Organization

Just what constitutes a ‘learning organization is a matter of some debate. We explore some of the themes that have emerged in the literature and the contributions of key thinkers like Donald Schon and Peter Senge. Is it anything more than rhetoric? Can it be realized?

Many consultants and organizations have recognized the commercial significance of organizational learning – and the notion of the ‘learning organization’ has been a central orienting point in this. Writers have sought to identify templates, or ideal forms, ‘which real organizations could attempt to emulate’ (Easterby-Smith and Araujo 1999: 2). In this sense the learning organization is an ideal, ‘towards which organizations have to evolve in order to be able to respond to the various pressures [they face] (Finger and Brand 1999: 136). It is characterized by a recognition that ‘individual and collective learning are key’ (op. cit.).

Two important things result from this. First, while there has been a lot of talk about learning organizations it is very difficult to identify real-life examples. This might be because the vision is ‘too ideal’ or because it isn’t relevant to the requirements and dynamics of organizations. Second, the focus on creating a template and upon the need to present it in a form that is commercially attractive to the consultants and writers has led to a significant under-powering of the theoretical framework for the learning organization. Here there is a distinct contrast with the study of organizational learning.

Although theorists of learning organizations have often drawn on ideas from organizational learning, there has been little traffic in the reverse direction. Moreover, since the central concerns have been somewhat different, the two literatures have developed along divergent tracks. The literature on organizational learning has concentrated on the detached collection and analysis of the processes involved in individual and collective learning inside organizations; whereas the learning organizations literature has an action orientation, and is geared toward using specific diagnostic and evaluative methodological tools which can help to identify, promote and evaluate the quality of learning processes inside organizations. (Easterby-Smith and Araujo 1999: 2; see also Tsang 1997).

We could argue that organizational learning is the ‘activity and the process by which organizations eventually reach th[e] ideal of a learning organization’ (Finger and Brand 1999: 136).

On this page we examine the path-breaking work of Donald Schon on firms as learning systems and then go on to explore Peter Senge’s deeply influential treatment of the learning organization (and it’s focus on systemic thinking and dialogue). We finish with a brief exploration of the contribution of social capital to the functioning of organizations. (Read or download full article here: www.infed.org)

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Does Corporate Culture Contribute to Performance?

Abstract
This article explores connections between corporate cultures and corporate performance in various industries. First, it provides a brief background on the notion of "culture"; second, it sets out a brief typology of corporate culture. Third, it examines various corporate cultural types in relation to industry performance; and finally, some conclusions are drawn on the importance to corporate survival of organizational and cultural adaptation to competitive environments.

Introduction and Context
An expert on cross-cultural management, Geert Hofstede (1984, p.21) defines culture as "the collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes one human group from another ... Culture in this sense includes systems of values, and values are among the building blocks of culture." A few years later, his notion of culture broadened into "mental programming ... patterns of thinking and feeling, and potential acting" (Hofstede, 1991, p.4). Sociologists (Namenworth & Weber, 1987, p.8) see culture as a "system of ideas that constitute a design for living." For our purposes here, culture is viewed as a system of values, norms, and ideas, shared by a group of people, that when taken together provide a design for thinking, living and potential acting.

There are, however, many types of cultures, including national, country or regional (Hofstede, 1984, 1991; Schneider & Barsoux, 1997; Terpstra & David, 1991); global electronic (Targowski, 1990); ethnic; gender; generational; business, professional; occupational; and organizational, or corporate (Bloor & Dawson, 1994). While this paper draws from the international management literature, which has long acknowledged the importance of national cultural characteristics as determinants of management behavior (Farmer & Richmond, 1965; Schneider, 1988), it serves only to position the notion of corporate culture within a broader context. Read full article here by TheFreeLibrary.com

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Change Management Basics

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. ~Henri Bergson

These change management basics should help you implement organizational changes, consider:

• Deal with people involved in the change process with patience, gentle humor, grace, persistence, pragmatism, respect, understanding, and support.
  

• Take a long and broad view of change, and think about the impact of changes over one, three, and five years.
  

• Continue all of the behaviors and processes discussed in the articles below until change has the “opportunity to become anchored in the culture.” I am reminded of Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s emphasis on “constancy of purpose.”
  

• Set up changes so that people in you organization experience some early wins.
  

• Recognize that effective change is usually a realignment of the “world view,” rather than a program or flavor of the month.
  

• People involved in change will need to recognize that change is risky; change can be scary; change can often entail the real desire and need to slip back into the comfort zone.
  

• Effective change requires constant vigilance to resist slipping back into the old, comfortable ways of doing business.
  

• Finally, as much as employees need to celebrate new beginnings, you will need to provide opportunities for employees to mourn the past, to let go of familiar ways of doing work. Even as change is, hopefully, a gain for your organization, it is also always a loss.

People lose coworkers, comfortable work processes, known ways of doing things, communication networks, security and stability, or confidence in their own capability. Recognize their loss, and you will assist people to move more quickly with you into the brave new world.

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