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You are here: Home / Archives for 5 - Industries / Business / Business Philosophy

TOMS Shoes

August 10, 2010 by Matt Perman

TOMS Shoes has a really good concept:

One for One
TOMS Shoes was founded on a simple premise: With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One. Using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good is what we’re all about. The TOMS One for One mission transforms our customers into benefactors, which allows us to grow a truly sustainable business rather than depending on fundraising for support.

Why Shoes?
Many children in developing countries grow up barefoot. Whether at play, doing chores or going to school, these children are at risk:

•A leading cause of disease in developing countries is soil-transmitted diseases, which can penetrate the skin through bare feet. Wearing shoes can help prevent these diseases, and the long-term physical and cognitive harm they cause.

•Wearing shoes also prevents feet from getting cuts and sores. Not only are these injuries painful, they also are dangerous when wounds become infected.

•Many times children can’t attend school barefoot because shoes are a required part of their uniform. If they don’t have shoes, they don’t go to school. If they don’t receive an education, they don’t have the opportunity to realize their potential.

They are worth checking out.

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

Apple's Basic Philosophy

April 30, 2010 by Matt Perman

Steve Jobs, from an article in Fortune a few years ago:

“We don’t think in terms of power,” says Jobs. “We think about creating new innovative products that will surprise and delight our customers. Happy and loyal customers are what give Apple its ‘power.’ At the heart of it, though, we simply try to make great products that we want for ourselves, and hope that customers will love them as much as we do. And I think after all these years we’ve gotten pretty decent at it.”

This is another example of the importance of beliefs in an organization. It is yet another illustration (with the results that follow) of what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras found in Built to Last:

…truly great organizations think of themselves in a fundamentally different way than mediocre enterprises. They have a guiding philosophy or a spirit about them, a reason for being that goes far beyond the mundane or the mercenary.

And while we’re at it, here’s another example from A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble, in Harvard Business Review:

I learned many things from Peter [Drucker] over the years, but far and away the most important were the simplest: “The purpose of a company is to create a customer” and “A business…is defined by the want the customer satisfies when he or she buys a product or a service. To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.”

At P&G we keep Peter’s words in mind with every decision. We declared that the consumer — not the CEO — is boss, and made it our purpose to touch more consumes and improve more of each consumer’s life. When we look at the business from the perspective of the consumer, we can see the need to win at two moments of truth: First, when she buys a P&G brand or product in a store, and second, when she or another family member uses that product in the home….By putting customers first, we’ve nearly doubled the number served, from 2 billion to 3.8 billion; doubled sales; and tripled P&G profits in the first nine years of the twenty-first century.

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

Drucker: The Essence of a Company is Making a Difference

April 30, 2010 by Matt Perman

Here is a very good summary of Peter Drucker’s thinking on “the essence of a company,” by Oscar Motomura in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review:

When I first met Peter Drucker, 15 years ago, he shared with me ideas that have deeply influenced my work ever since. Chief among them was that beyond just making a profit or creating wealth for stakeholders, the essence of a company is making a difference, being really useful, and creating something the world truly needs.

That higher purpose, Drucker pointed out, has to be something grand — like General Electric’s ambition to be, as he put it, “the leader in making science work for humanity” — and not superficial, like so many of the mission statements that companies have nowadays.

Why is such a creed so important? Because without a compelling raison d’etre, a company can’t hope to tap the full potential of its employees. “The number of people who are really motivated by money is very small,” Drucker told me. “Most people need to feel that they are here for a purpose, and unless an organization can connect to this need to leave something behind that makes this a better world, or at least a different one, it won’t be successful over time.”

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

Why Acknowledging Mistakes Increases Trust

March 2, 2010 by Matt Perman

From What Would Google Do?:

We are ashamed to make mistakes — as well we should be, yes? It’s our job to get things right, right? So when we make mistakes our instinct is to shrink into a ball and wish them away. Correcting errors, though necessary, is embarrassing.

But the truth about truth itself is counterintuitive: Corrections do not diminish credibility. Corrections enhance credibility. Standing up and admitting your errors makes you more believable; it gives your audience faith that you will right your future wrongs.

When companies apologize for bad performance — as JetBlue did after keeping passengers on tarmacs for hours — that tells us that they know their performance wasn’t up to their standard, and we have a better idea of the standard we should expect.

Also: “Being willing to be wrong is key to innovation.”

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

More on the Importance of Beliefs in an Organization

February 22, 2010 by Matt Perman

“…truly great organizations think of themselves in a fundamentally different way than mediocre enterprises. They have a guiding philosophy or a spirit about them, a reason for being that goes far beyond the mundane or the mercenary.” — Built to Last

It is eye-opening to realize the critical role that beliefs play in organizations. For we typically think of beliefs mostly at the individual level. But it is the shared beliefs and values in an organization that play the biggest role in making the organization effective and meaningful, and a place where people want to contribute.

Filed Under: 4 - Management, Business Philosophy

The Importance of a Basic Philosophy to Every Organization

February 22, 2010 by Matt Perman

“The basic philosophy of an organization has far more to do with its achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.” — Thomas Watson, Jr.

Who was Thomas Watson, Jr.? From Wikipedia: “Thomas John Watson, Jr. (January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was the president of IBM from 1952 to 1971 and the eldest son of Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president. He was listed as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.”

Filed Under: 4 - Management, Business Philosophy

I'm Putting This in My Tickler File

January 25, 2010 by Matt Perman

Tom Peters, in Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

To my 30-year-old readers: I hereby wager that when you’re my age, Wal-mart and Dell will be either dead or irrelevant.

I’m not positive on that — I think they can last. But that doesn’t mean they will. Will be interesting to see.

(Tom Peters, by the way, was I think around 60 when he wrote this. So I’m putting this in my tickler file for about 2036.)

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

Why Pixar's Movies are So Good: Company Culture

January 14, 2010 by Matt Perman

A great post at 37 Signals from a while back. Here’s the first paragraph:

More on why Pixar’s movies are so much better than the competition: According to “Pixar Rules — Secrets of a Blockbuster Company,” the company has created an incredible work environment that keeps employees happy and fulfilled. The result: “A tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production.”

Filed Under: 4 - Management, Business Philosophy

The Universal Requirements for a Visionary Company

October 1, 2009 by Matt Perman

From Jim Collins’ Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies:

A company must have a core ideology [core purpose plus core values] to become a visionary company. It must also have an unrelenting drive for progress. And finally, it must be well designed as an organization to preserve the core and stimulate progress, with all the key pieces working in alignment.

These are universal requirements for visionary companies. They distinguished visionary companies a hundred years ago. They distinguish visionary companies today. And they will distinguish visionary companies int he twenty-first century.

However, the specific methods visionary companies use to preserve the core and stimulate progress will undoubtedly change and improve. BHAGs [huge, audacious goals], cult-like cultures, evolution through experimentation, home-grown management, and continuous self-improvement — these are all proven methods of preserving the core and stimulating progress. But they are not the only effective methods that can be invented.

Companies will invent new methods to complement these time-tested ones. The visionary companies of tomorrow are already out there today experimenting with new and better methods. They’re undoubtedly already doing things that their competitors might find odd or unusual, but that will someday become common practice.

And that’s exactly what you should be doing in the corporations [and organizations] you work with — that is, if you want them to enter the elite league of visionary companies. It doesn’t matter whether you are an entrepreneur, manager, CEO, board member, or consultant. You should be working to implement as many methods as you can think of to preserve a cherished core ideology that guides and inspires people at all levels. And you should be working to create mechanisms that create dissatisfaction with the status quo and stimulate change, improvement, innovation, and renewal — mechanisms, in short, that infect people with the spirit of progress…. Use the proven methods and create new methods. Do both.

Filed Under: b Vision, Business Philosophy

What is a Great Organization?

September 23, 2009 by Matt Perman

Jim Collins gives a very helpful, succinct, and profound definition of a great organization in Good to Great and the Social Sectors:

A great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time.

So there are three characteristics of a great organization. They are:

  1. Superior performance
  2. Distinctive impact
  3. Lasting endurance

I think we ought to aim to build great organizations, and so it is helpful to have a good outline of what that means. It’s not enough to just say “we should seek to make our organizations great.” We need to know what that means. This is a good start.

Having this before us, though, also leads to more questions — such as “Why should you try to build something great?” and “How do you assess how your organization is doing on these qualities, especially when they are hard to measure?” I’ll address these questions in upcoming posts.

Filed Under: 3 - Leadership, Business Philosophy

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What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

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About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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