How to Create Camaraderie in Your Family Business
How to Create Camaraderie in Your Family Business
Family Business Coach, Pete Walsh, encourages family businesses to get out of the office and create camaraderie. Go on a camping trip, spa weekend, golf trip or whatever you like to do.
“Conscious Capitalism” – Kip Tindell, Chairman & CEO, The Container Store
“Conscious Capitalism” – Kip Tindell, Chairman & CEO, The Container Store
Kip Tindell, Chairman and CEO of The Container Store, shares his perspectives on conscious capitalism and the relationship between business and society as he speaks to the Darden Leadership Speaker Series theme for this year, “What Does it Take?”. His visit is co-sponsored by, and served as the keynote kick-off for, the 2nd annual Business in Society Conference at Darden. Recorded 7 February 2013. For more information on the visions and values of The Container Store, visit http://standfor.containerstore.com/.
With Tindell at its helm for 34 years, Dallas-based The Container Store, the original storage and organization store, has 58 stores across the country. Stores average 25,000 square feet and are merchandised with more than 10,000 products designed to save space and time. Privately held, the retailer has posted a compounded annual growth rate of 24% since its inception. With 2012 fiscal year sales projected to reach $750 million, the originators of the storage and organization category of retailing remain the leaders in an industry that thrives.
With his focus on employees first, Tindell has nurtured a fierce loyalty to the company, which has an incredible number of employees who might never have dreamed of a career in retail. In fact, that employee-first culture has landed The Container Store on FORTUNE magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” 13 years in a row.
If You Need Something, Just Ask
If You Need Something, Just Ask
People tend to grossly underestimate how likely others are to agree to requests for help. And many don’t know how to ask for help. They also overestimate how many people will come to them for help. Francis Flynn presented at the “Small Steps, Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to Do the Right Thing” research briefing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, co-sponsored by the Center for Social Innovation.
Some Core Principles for Building a Legacy
To build a sustainable and positive family or business legacy, it is very important that the following key principles be incorporated into your dynastic planning process:
1) The entire family must be involved in planning and NOT just the wealth-holder or business owner. The goal for a successful multi-generational family/business legacy is to plan “with” your family and not “at” your family.
2) The agenda for each family or family business meeting must be open to include the needs and concerns of all family members who are affected by the financial, estate, business, or legacy plan.
3) Part of the common mission for each family and business plan should be the indisputable realization that family members are the real assets and NOT the money or business.
4) Communication expectations for everyone must be setup upfront. For example,
- Everyone has wisdom;
- We need everyone’s wisdom for the wisest results;
- All will hear and be heard;
- There are no wrong answers;
- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
5) The best legacy solution is one that considers the needs of future generations. A legacy plan should focus on the perspective of family wealth and the family business for at least the next seven generations.
6) A Family Constitution should be created to help with the Governance of the Legacy plan. The goal here is not to dictate the future to family members but to establish guidelines for dealing with conflicts, new opportunities, in-laws, extended family member dreams, and the future complexity involved with the growth of family members into the third generation onward.
7) Structures, and committees, must be put in place for dealing with, and implementing, the financial, estate, business, and legacy plans.
Remember that a wealthy family or a profitable business cannot create a strong family but a united family with a common mission can build wealth and a sustainable and profitable family business.
Steve Ballmer: CEO Can’t Delegate Business Culture
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s father thought he was “nuts” to tie his fortune to high tech. Recorded: March 15, 2007
Jack Welch: Create Candor in the Workplace
Jack Welch knows how to win. During his forty-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits.
Since Welch retired in 2001 as chairman and chief executive officer of GE, he has traveled the world, speaking to more than 250,000 people and answering their questions on dozens of wide-ranging topics.
Inspired by his audiences and their hunger for straightforward guidance, Welch has written both a philosophical and pragmatic book, which is destined to become the bible of business for generations to come. It clearly lays out the answers to the most difficult questions people face both on and off the job.
Welch’s objective is to speak to people at every level of an organization, in companies large and small. His audience is everyone from line workers to MBAs, from project managers to senior executives. His goal is to help everyone who has a passion for success.
Welch begins Winning with an introductory section called “Underneath It All,” which describes his business philosophy. He explores the importance of values, candor, differentiation, and voice and dignity for all.
The core of Winning is devoted to the real “stuff” of work. This main part of the book is split into three sections. The first looks inside the company, from leadership to picking winners to making change happen. The second section looks outside, at the competition, with chapters on strategy, mergers, and Six Sigma, to name just three. The next section of the book is about managing your career—from finding the right job to achieving work-life balance.
Welch’s optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set is riveting. Packed with personal anecdotes and written in Jack’s distinctive no b.s. voice, Winning offers deep insights, original thinking, and solutions to nuts-and-bolts problems that will change the way people think about work.
Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world
Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world.
Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications.
Why you should listen to him:
Clay Shirky’s work focuses on the rising usefulness of networks — using decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer sharing, wireless, software for social creation, and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.”
Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York Universityʼs graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named “Social Weather.” Heʼs the author of several books.
“Shirky is one of the handful of people with justifiable claim to the digerati moniker. He’s become a consistently prescient voice on networks, social software, and technology’s effects on society.” WIRED
