{"id":5085,"date":"2013-12-13T05:06:06","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T12:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/corevalues.com\/?p=5085"},"modified":"2013-12-13T05:06:06","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T12:06:06","slug":"leadership-and-team-building-satisfy-short-term-quarterly-goals-or-plan-for-long-term-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/2013\/12\/13\/leadership-and-team-building-satisfy-short-term-quarterly-goals-or-plan-for-long-term-sustainability\/","title":{"rendered":"Leadership and Team Building: Satisfy Short-Term Quarterly Goals or Plan for Long-term Sustainability?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"good<\/a>The need for instant gratification and to show a profit no matter the cost to employees, society, or an organization\u2019s welfare seems to be the motto in today\u2019s business culture. Yet there are those few stellar organizations\u2026and they are not all Fortune 500\u2019s\u2026.that beg to differ. These companies invest in team building ideas<\/a> that value employee contributions and are in business for the long haul. They don\u2019t follow traditional business protocols and often shirk the methods of the publicly traded \u201cbig boys.\u201d Will these organizations survive in today\u2019s cutthroat business environment or be swallowed up?<\/p>\n

Shareholder primacy\u00a0as a management principle is without basis in law and has neither benefited shareholders nor society at large. Such is Steven Pearlstein’s argument in a recent Washington Post column –\u00a0How the cult of shareholder value wrecked American business<\/i><\/a>. Pearlstein posits that the relentless drive to meet quarterly expectations erodes incentives for firms to “do the right thing.” Options that bolster firms’ long-term health \u2013 including investments in workers \u2013 become secondary as a result.<\/p>\n

All good points to consider – but here’s the rub: With over 6 million firms in the US, only 4,600 are publicly traded. A disproportionate emphasis on publicly traded firms distorts our view of what is actually happening in the economy. While publicly traded firms are under the greatest pressure to demonstrate quarterly gains, some do resist. Moreover, the other 5.9 million private companies often behave differently. Many can and do take a longer-term approach to business value. They present an array of management and organizational strategies that are testimony to the resilience and ingenuity of American business. These private companies are responsible for over 2\/3rds of all jobs in the US.<\/p>\n

Why then do we overlook the lion’s share of our economy when we talk about business? Just as the Federal government is not all government, public firms are not all firms. As Justice Brandeis observed that states can serve as laboratories of democracy, so too can private companies be the laboratories of capitalism.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, The Hitachi Foundation experienced the diversity of experimentation. Hitachi joined over 400 firms for the\u00a0largest open book management conference in the country.\u00a0The Great Game of Business, an organization in St. Louis, promotes\u00a0Open-Book Management, an approach in which all workers have a voice in how the company is run and a stake in the financial outcome. Open-Book Management requires significant investments in team building training and management that can produce tremendous returns.\u00a0Springfield Remanufacturing Center, which invented Open-Book Management, has seen its stock price increase over 1000% in the past three decades, and its revenues rise from $16 million to over $400 million. Open-Book practices have also proven effective for both small and large firms, including Whole Foods Market\u00a0and\u00a0Starbucks.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, the Hitachi Foundation released\u00a0Doing Well and Doing Good,<\/i>\u00a0a new report chronicling firms that have succeed by integrating product, process, and workforce innovations. Business leaders in industries as varied as farming, auto parts, clinics, and convenience stores are experimenting with management structures and business models that paint a more nuanced and even hopeful portrait. These laboratories are sources of innovation that should not be overlooked. If short-termism is a wrecking ball, these may provide the building blocks for the 21st century alternative.<\/p>\n

Following 20th<\/sup> century \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d methodologies, focusing solely on shareholder expectations, and under utilizing employee talent is a business model in dire need of updating. When business leaders invest in their employees and companies for the long term versus short-term profitability, they reap ROIs well beyond the financial. Organizations who practice 21st<\/sup> century corporate team building<\/a> methods take a longer term approach and use an array of management and organizational strategies to uphold viable business values.<\/p>\n

Copyright TIGERS Success Series by Dianne Crampton<\/p>\n

\"TIGERS<\/a>About TIGERS Success Series<\/h3>\n

TIGERS Success Series is a team development consulting company that helps leaders build high levels of employee engagement and commitment buy developing group norms and processes that support trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success.\u00a0 TIGERS offers team building certification to HR professionals in the use of work culture and team diagnostics and tools that build and track high performance teams.<\/p>\n

Learn more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The need for instant gratification and to show a profit no matter the cost to employees, society, or an organization\u2019s welfare seems to be the motto in today\u2019s business culture. Yet there are those few stellar organizations\u2026and they are not all Fortune 500\u2019s\u2026.that beg to differ. These companies invest in team building ideas that value […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[286,330,255,312,367,405,186,265,387,314,545,273,26],"tags":[59,49,347,242,243,315,62,60,73],"class_list":["post-5085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability","category-best-places-to-work","category-business","category-business-ethics","category-corporate-greed","category-economic-projections","category-employee-motivation-2","category-employee-motivation","category-employee-recognition","category-ethics","category-hr-transformation","category-team-culture","category-team-cultures","tag-business-culture","tag-corporate-teambuilding","tag-economic-recovery","tag-employee-engagement","tag-employee-motivation-3","tag-ethics","tag-leadership","tag-team-culture","tag-work-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corevalues.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}