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.

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.