Casson began his career as a minister and ended it as an author. He was a Methodist turned socialist turned capitalist. He was one of the people featured in the book, 50 Key Figures in Management.

A capitalist with a better way to get rich

It was what he said about Henry Ford that caught our attention. Here are a few excerpts, written as a contemporary of Ford’s:

“Judging by results, Henry Ford is the most successful manufacturer in the world. He pays the highest wages. He makes the highest profits. He sells the cheapest goods.

Henry Ford is a complete answer to the silly Marxian theory that a capitalist can only make money by robbing his employees or the public.

Henry Ford robs nobody. He is not an exploiter of the proletariat.

He is a multi-millionaire, and every penny of his money is clean.

His enormous profits are only a part of what he saves the public; and he pays his workers far more than they could make if they were on their own.

Henry Ford is a capitalist, and he shows all capitalists a better way of getting rich.

Scoffing at Ford

After telling the story of Ford’s fascinating journey from farmer to entrepreneur, Casson continued:

“We may scoff at him if we like—if we are foolish enough; but it seems to me that he is the one who has the joke on the rest of us.

Henry Ford knows how. He has solved his business problems. He has shown us the one right way to handle men and produce goods and make profits without making enemies.

It would be better for all of us if we STUDIED Ford more and scoffed at him less. The more I find out about him the more I am impressed with his ability and his sense.

What the world needs is more Henry Fords; that is the truth, whether we like it or not.

If we had 1,000 Fords, we would have high wages, high profits, low prices and no labor troubles. We would have peace and prosperity.”

Ford and his employees

He goes on to discuss how Ford treated his employees:

Take, for instance, Ford’s methods as an EMPLOYER. In this respect he is most peculiar. He has followed a most unusual course, and he has made a great success of it.

The fact is, that Henry Ford seems to regard himself as a LABOR LEADER rather than an employer.

He gives his men MORE than they ask.

He gives them better working conditions than they had ever thought of.

He watches over them and protects them.

He has made his men the best-paid and most contented workers the world has ever seen.

He was one of the few leaders to hire convicts and people with disabilities. He treated all of his employees like people. Casson concludes:

“He has stopped the war between the workers and the management. He has established peace and goodwill.

He has shown every other employer what can be done.”

Entrepreneurial CEOs today can learn a lot from Ford. You can have it all. It just takes some ingenuity which begins with a mutual trust between you and your people. To paraphrase Ford, your people might become good customers, too…if you treat them well.

Source: Tips on Leadership or the Life Stories of Twenty Five Leaders

This book was written by Casson in 1929 and republished in 2003. We found it riveting so we highly recommend it to you.

Image in this post from sciencecontrol.com

Some time ago, an employee asked her supervisor to friend her. The supervisor accepted the request. Now they were Facebook friends.

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Everything was great, until the employee filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission citing discrimination.

The supervisor, afraid to inadvertently read a post related to the charge, removed the employee as a Facebook friend. DiBianca said that was a good idea. However, the employee added a charge of retaliation to the discrimination charge.

A vicious cycle

Employment-related lawsuits are up as a result of the economy. Social media is still relatively new. It takes a while for the law to catch up to technology.

It’s a vicious cycle – A lawsuit is filed. A company wastes resources defending itself. Profits aren’t what they expected. So they don’t hire. So fewer people have money to spend. So profits are even lower. And on and on it goes. So, we can only conclude that:

Facebook is killing our economy!

Or could social media help our economy?

We have a friend who heads up the Visual Merchandising Department in a store that’s part of a large chain. He told us recently about his firm’s social media policy for its employees.

Among other things, supervisors can’t “friend” subordinates. Our friend said, though, that the document was so long and so full of fine print, he decided to not even mess with it.

It’s a missed opportunity. Competition for dollars is fierce. Many areas of the country are still struggling.

We shop at our friend’s store. We always enjoy seeing the displays he puts together. He’s incredibly creative. We’d love to see photos of his displays online. It might tip us off to something we might buy.

For years, retailers have used their windows to draw attention to their merchandise and get people to come into their store. Now a store can have “windows” online, in numerous locations.

Is it unreasonable to expect these “windows” to drive traffic to their stores?

But our creative friend isn’t willing to risk his job over something as silly as Facebook. And who can blame him?

Setting the mood for growth

Companies need to avoid knee-jerk reactions. Sure, they need to clothe themselves in protection. But they also need to tip their hat to new opportunities to get a mannequin-leg up on the competition.

Even more importantly, our legal system needs to set the mood by protecting new technology while insuring that individual rights aren’t trampled on. It’s a delicate balance, but it’s necessary to keep the spotlight on jobs and growth.

What advice do you have for businesses trying to balance the risks and rewards inherent with social media?

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file | podcast:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00649-112310.mp3

(Image in today's post from plex)

Sally is the only person in the company who deals with Customer X, the firm’s biggest customer. She landed the account and knows all about their entire experience with the firm.

Jane was with the company when Policy Z was instituted. She remembers the employee who prompted this new policy. Of course, that employee is now long gone.

Lately the firm has experienced some serious challenges. It’s so serious, the entrepreneur founder isn’t sure the company is going to make it.

A new thing
The company was the first in its industry to use doohickeys. When Bob decided to implement the change, the company quickly gained a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, a new thing has come along. It’s better than doohickeys. Anytime anyone suggests the new thing, Bob goes on a passionate discourse about the importance of doohickeys to the firm.

A lost customer
Sally got sick. Collectively, the rest of the people in the company didn’t know as much about the customer as Sally did individually. The customer quickly expressed dissatisfaction. They said Sally gave them better service. It wasn’t long before the customer took their business elsewhere.  

Different people
Jane was fully behind implementing Policy Z. The change was really an overreaction to a single employee. It affected the whole work force. The people who work for the company today are different than the people who worked there back then. Things have changed. But the policy hasn’t changed to reflect it.  

Management by folklore
BIGG success is about entrepreneuring your life and your business. Many entrepreneurs resist systems.

So they default to managing by folklore.

Information isn’t documented and archived so people can access it. It’s all in somebody’s brain. The trick is finding that somebody.

To get the answer to a simple question, you have to bounce around from person to person. The old timers in the company know who knows. The new people waste time trying to find out who it is and then by having to track them down.

In addition to its inefficiency, there are at least three problems with management by folklore:

1. People get trapped in the fairy tale. They come to defend the indefensible.

2. People go away for one reason or another. When they leave, critical information walks out the door with them.

3. Things change – opportunities, markets, customers, people, environments and more. When folklore is allowed to rule, people often view things as static instead of dynamic. And subjectivity trumps objectivity instead of the other way around.

What problems have you encountered with management by folklore? 

(Image in today's post from commons.wikimedia.org)

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It’s an interesting concept – sending the CEO into the organization as an entry level worker.

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It made me think about visits from corporate managers when I worked in radio. When they rolled in, the red carpet was always rolled out!

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Hey, I made a lot of money from that red carpet! When I owned my carpet cleaning business, we were always getting called out to clean up because corporate was coming in.

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Well, there’s no cleaning up on Undercover Boss. That’s why we like the concept. If corporate managers never see the organization as it actually is, how can they understand what is really going on in their organization?

It’s management by walking around with blinders on!

That’s probably worse than not walking around at all – managers impede the very productivity they’re preaching about.

The people behind the productivity
It was inspiring to see such hard-working people. In an hour long show, you only see a handful but, in any successful organization of the size of those featured on this show, there are hundreds – or more likely thousands – of them.

The first show was with Larry O’Donnell, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Waste Management. It’s amazing what you can learn when you’re on the job.

Like when he rode in the garbage truck with a driver who was a woman. She had to pee in a can. (And it definitely wasn’t a very large can!) She said she couldn’t make all her required pickups if she left the route to go to the bathroom.

He saw again and again how his efforts to improve productivity affect the most important people in his organization – his employees and his customers.

Productivity is important but it’s the people behind the productivity that make the productivity possible. Policies and processes that forget the people impede productivity. 

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Ivory tower concepts often don’t translate well in the real world. Instead of creating value, they dampen its growth at best and destroy it altogether at worst.

No, you can’t create value from the executive suite. Value isn’t created in the board room. So where is it created?

Value is created on the front line.
Leaders have to take care of the people serving the customers. Obviously, there are the external customers.

But there are also internal customers. The next person in the process may be the customer. Every person in every organization has at least one customer. If they don’t, they aren’t necessary!

Value is created when executives choose to connect with their people. 

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When I worked in the corporate world, I remember corporate leaders blowing into town. Usually they only met with the local managers. That’s what I really like about this show – I like leaders who take time to talk with all of their people.

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Value is created when the person closest to the problem offers the solution.

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I’ve had a fair amount of success in my career with this. I found that – by encouraging people to offer solutions when they were presenting a problem – they often had much better ideas than I ever would have had!

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Value is created when you recognize ordinary people doing ordinary jobs extraordinarily.

Recognition goes further than just about anything in getting people on board and getting them involved in making the organization even better.

This is something you really notice on this show. It’s amazing how much people appreciate being told that they’ve done a great job. And that they’re appreciated. It’s golden!

You don’t have to go undercover to create value.
You can do it just by getting out from behind your desk. It all starts with a conversation!

Don’t stay undercover. Tell us what you think. We’d love to hear from you!

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(Image in today's post by Bubbels)

Under new management. A new owner bought an established firm. Like many small businesses, it wasn’t a perfect business. It was, however, a good business. Otherwise, why would he have bought it?

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Under new management. The new owner wanted to put his stamp on his newly purchased firm. He changed the logo of the business.

Under new management. The new owner changed the employees. The employees just didn’t do things the way the new owner wanted them done. He put his own people in place.

Under new management. The new owner threw out the systems and replaced them with his own. The old systems were out of date or unnecessary. He had his own ideas about how to structure the business.

Under new management. The new owner changed the name of the business because he noticed some complaints about the business. He wanted a fresh start.

Under new management. Employees left.

Under new management. Customers left.

Under new management. The business failed.

The new owner didn’t understand why. He blamed the economy. He blamed the old owner. He blamed circumstances. He blamed everybody but himself.

Change creates opportunity

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s what you may be thinking about our little story here. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to determine exactly what’s broke and what’s not.

Entrepreneuring has been described as the science of change. One thing that entrepreneurs recognize, explicitly or implicitly, is that change creates opportunity.

Fortunately for entrepreneurs, change these days happens frequently and quickly. Change is good but there’s another side to it.

The trick to keeping customers and employees

Because there is so much change constantly hitting us in the face, customers AND employees crave stability.

Create stability in their lives and they will be stick with you. If you change too much too quickly, you’ll lose customers and employees.

The two step

First meet their expectations by consistently delivering upon your promises. Then, and only then, can change enter the picture. Work to exceed their expectations by making changes incrementally.

Don’t just change for the sake of changing. Lead your customers and employees through productive changes for your bigg success!

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Here’s something that never changes … we’re grateful every time you read one of our posts. Thanks for doing so today!

Next time, we’ll discuss a bigg discovery. Please join us. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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