Stanford Executive Briefings: Corporate Culture

Getting the Best from Others

Not understanding what motivates each individual, managers offer incentives that are not meaningful, or "encouragement" that backfires and alienates their staff. Doug Harris explains the steps for reaching awareness, managing biases, and "doing unto others as they want to be done unto."

People-First Management

Daniel Amos follows two straightforward management principles: he sets clear expectations, and he listens to employee concerns. His focus is communication followed by action. Amos ensures that employees experience an evenhanded response to their input, and he provides a reward system that gives them a vested interest in the profitability of the company.

The People Side of Great Business

Great businesses are sustained only through the dedication and passion of great people. Libby Sartain advocates a healthy, high-performance culture based on an environment of loyalty and trust. She explains how to unleash the power of your company's foremost asset—its employees—to create lasting value.

Nurturing Innovation

In recent years, risk aversion has made "time to market" the highest good. Judy Estrin challenges this trend, asking the question, If your focus today is on short-term profits, where will your source of short-term profits be five years from now? Estrin describes how to create an environment in which innovation can flourish in companies large or small.

Building Personal Networks

Networks can be powerful career tools, helping to drive performance and build influence. But they benefit organizations as well, enhancing productivity and improving communication between disparate business units and functions. Professor James Baron offers concrete suggestions for building an effective and efficient personal network.

Billion-Dollar Lessons

While we are inspired by business success stories, we are educated by business failures. Chunka Mui and Paul Carroll researched 750 of the most significant business failures of the past quarter-century and found the Number 1 cause of failure was not sloppy execution, poor leadership or bad luck. It was, instead, misguided strategy. Mui gives examples of the seven most common strategic failure patterns: illusions of synergy, misjudged adjacencies, faulty financial engineering and others. He explains that each pattern has predictable red flags.

Building a Feedback-Positive Organization

An effective leader must be prepared to offer timely and honest feedback, both to employees and to other members of the management team. David Brady examines what it takes to have a "feedback-rich" organization, while Scott Brady relates how feedback propelled his own organization through tremendous growth.

Leading by Example

The foundation of George Zimmer's success is his company's corporate culture, centered on "servant leadership" values, which seek to involve others in decision making and enhance the personal growth of workers. Zimmer explains how his experience proves that a culture based on strong ethical values can succeed even within a competitive business environment.

Life Lessons from the Playing Field

Jim Thompson describes youth sports as an illustration of the teamwork and high achievement that every organization wants to see in its employees. He explains the right way—and the wrong way—to motivate individuals to do their very best, and shares ten valuable leadership lessons gleaned from his experience as a coach and crusader for young athletes.

Managing Communication in a Multicultural World

Everyone who speaks has an accent. The subtle but compelling conclusions people reach about you, based on the way you speak, result in profound economic consequences both for yourself and for your organization. Using American English as an example, Dr. John Baugh emphasizes the need to build tolerance of variations in dialect and language use.

The Enterprise of the Future

Jim Bramante distills the findings of IBM’s latest Global CEO Study, based on interviews with one thousand CEOs worldwide, to define the Enterprise of the Future.

Dealing with Crisis and Transition

Professor Charles O'Reilly explains the overwhelming power of culture within any organization, and why failure to understand culture leads to failure in implementing change. He describes aligning culture with strategy, and how to introduce control systems that will allow the organization to respond to ever-changing demands.

Doing Well and Doing Good

Jeffrey Swartz firmly believes in commerce, and that profits for Wall Street are necessary—but not sufficient. It's no longer enough to be solely focused on the bottom line. Timberland is proof that profit-minded companies can "do well" for shareholders and "do good" for communities.

The Power of Paranoia

Two decades of research on trust and cooperation in organizations have convinced Roderick Kramer that an appropriate amount of distrust can be beneficial in the workplace. Kramer argues for a moderate form of suspicion he calls "prudent paranoia," which can prove highly valuable to the distrustful organization—or individual.

Virtue in Business

Pam Lopker offers a CEO's perspective on the "three Rs" of business: reciprocation, relationships, and reputation. She questions whether legislation is the solution to the recent wave of corporate misbehavior, and argues that survival ultimately drives ethical business practices.

Managing for Both Bottom and Top Line Performance

Managers have spent the past few years in a bunker mentality, ruled by cost-cutting and bottom-line retrenchment. Now that headcount and expenses have been cut to the bone, attention to the top line must once again reign supreme. As Jeff Rodek explains, your goal must be a company-wide commitment to teamwork and accountability, with the belief that profit is the only effective test of performance.

Zero Time: Learning to Respond Instantly

What is it that successful companies "get" that others don't? In order to stay ahead, organizations must know how to react instantaneously. Zero Time success is founded on five disciplines: instant alignment of values, instant adaptation, instant learning, instant execution and instant involvement.

Competing on the Edge

Instead of focusing on where you want to go, today's uncertain future requires that you focus on how you're going to get there. The process you need is structured chaos--a few simple rules setting priorities and responsibilities, and total creative freedom for business units within that framework. The result is a strategy that morphs, dynamically re-matching portfolios to meet current opportunities.

Corporate Legends and Lore

Every organization has its own unique legends and lore that become part of the very fabric of its identity. These corporate stories have tremendous power to increase productivity, implement change, and motivate employees. One good story can accomplish more than a thousand memos.

Frontiers of Excellence

Conventional management wisdom says shareholder needs come first. Mr. Waterman challenges this assumption as he examines the success of companies that elevate the needs of their employees as well as the needs of customers. Organizational arrangement, not clever strategy, is their edge. Looking at some of America's most admired companies, Mr. Waterman shows how these organizational arrangements work and why America is the most productive nation in the world.

Tempered Radicals

"Tempered radicals" are people who want to succeed in their organization, yet also live by values or identities that might be at odds with their organization's primary culture. Such individuals do not fit neatly into an established structure, yet can be subtle agents for change in ways that ultimately benefit the corporation and make it more able to deal with today's diverse world.

Mobilizing Commitment in Your Organization

What do you consider the most important responsibility of a manager today? For Jennifer Kenny it is the dynamic concept of "mobilization." The world has changed radically and companies are recognizing that skills previously considered essential to the success of an organization, such as problem solving, goal setting, and operations management, are by themselves no longer sufficient. Kenny offers a reinterpretation of current and historical business breakdowns, seeing them instead as the result of lacking commitment, trust, and coordination.