Corporate Success Through People

In today's global economy, corporate managers are in the front-line when it comes to transforming management principles from an abstract vision into reality. This practical volume reveals how International Labour Standards (ILS) can be effective and powerful tools around which managers can build their corporate policies and practices --particularly during this era of rapid economic change. Increasing competition, changing customer demands and new structures of production and work have all altered the dynamics of the business environment. This book examines these issues and explores how incorporating ILS can help enterprises meet the challenges. It looks at the interrelationship between good management practices and ILS through numerous case studies and examples from both large and small companies from all over the world and demonstrates how implementing ILS in any company makes sound business sense.

The text is aimed at CEOs and all executive management, however the scope of the material will engage the entire organization. The authors identify the key ingredients of service excellence and show how leading companies have achieved success. Each chapter begins with a review of the key components of service excellence followed by two mini exemplar case studies that highlight how those companies have achieved success in that particular area. An introductory chapter proposes a framework based on the Unisys model that shows how companies can become customer centric, and a final chapter takes an integrative approach and features a case study from the overall winners of the Awards to highlight how this company has achieved success. An additional feature of the book is the service excellence questionnaire. Purchasers of the book are able to go online to complete the questionnaire and submit it to establish their competitive benchmark against other companies in both the same sector and across different sectors. A web site accompanies the book where updates on the category winners are featured to ensure that current information is always available.

In the UK, only one in three employees say they love their jobs and as many don’t give a damn. Sheila Parry, strategic communications consultant to some of the world's best-known brands, aims to change that. This book launches her PRIDE model, a methodology based around five key motivators: Purpose, Reputation, Integrity, Direction and Energy. Building pride at work delivers higher performance, improves brand reputation and strengthens customer loyalty. It also increases innovation, quality, productivity and profit. And those who are more fulfilled at work tend to achieve more and lead happier, healthier lives. Take Pride distills forty years of experience into a practical business philosophy: it is the perfect toolkit for leaders and influencers who have the imagination to think and desire to think differently about work.

Winning in Service Markets: Success through People, Technology, and Strategy is the first practitioner book in the market to cover the key aspects of services marketing and management based on sound academic evidence and knowledge. Derived from the globally leading textbook for Services Marketing by the same author, this book offers a comprehensive overview of extant knowledge on the topic. Accessible and practical, Winning in Service Markets bridges the gap between cutting-edge academic research and industry practitioners, and features best practices and latest trends on services marketing and management from around the world.

How to turn company values into competitive advantage We are inclined, for whatever reason, to treat values like works of art. We view them as nice to hang on the wall, and beautiful to look at, but we don’t act as though they truly mean much to us in the real world. In fact, the opposite is true. The best organizations understand their values, articulate them clearly, and hold them higher than any short-term concerns or short-cut methods. This does not put these companies at a competitive disadvantage. It is the source of their competitive advantage. If there's no clarity at the top about what values really mean, then there's no consistency at the management level or further down the organization. This means that there's no way to measure, coach, assess, promote or fire people in line with those values. Any organization that does not articulate its values concretely functions like a modern Tower of Babel. No one can be quite sure that they are speaking the same language at different levels or different locations within the organization. Decisions don't always make sense or feel right. Confusion reigns. No matter how compelling and inspirational the organization's vision may be, its aspirations fall far short in reality. Values are about achieving results in a way that is consistent with what an organization stands for. They provide a direct connection between the CEO, the factory worker and everyone in between; and form the basis of the organization's "brand" as understood by employees, customers, suppliers and even shareholders. When the work is done right, values provide an organizing principle, a directional compass that helps organizations succeed; they become a source of energy for an organization's vision, strategy and day-to-day efforts. Vision, strategy, market share, reputation and profits are all very important – but having a clear and consistent set of values is far more critical in predicting whether an organization will continue to succeed and grow as its people, markets, competitive landscape and technology change. People must make their contributions to an organization willingly and independently to bring passion, commitment, creativity and energy to a job. But they will do so only so long as they believe that what they are doing is authentic and meaningful, and is part of a code of commitment shared by the organization as a whole. Inside the Box focuses on values in a clear and practical way to understand what they are, where they come from and how they are transmitted from employee generation to generation. Inside the Box provides a roadmap for any leader or manager on how to identify the values that make an organization, department, team, or individual unique. It also shows how to measure whether an organization or individual is operating according to those values, and how managers can use values as the basis for all of their people decisions and drive superior performance as a result.

If you discovered a new market comprising 53% of the world’s population, would you act to invest in it? There are 1.3 billion people around the world who identify as having a disability. When you include friends and family, the disability market touches 53% of all consumers. It is the world’s largest emerging market. Unleash Different illustrates how companies like Google, PepsiCo, and Nordstrom are attracting people with disabilities as customers and as employees. Replacing “nice to do” with “return on investment” allows market forces to take over and the world’s leading brands to do what they do best: serve a market segment — in this case, the disability market. Business managers will come to understand how taking a charity-oriented approach to people with disabilities has failed, what action is required to capitalize on the world’s biggest emerging market, and how their organizations can grow revenue and cut costs by attracting people with disabilities as customers and talent. Rich gives the reader a peek into how he rose from a Canadian school for “crippled children” to manage $6 billion for one of Wall Street’s leading firms. He makes it easy to relate to the business goal of serving disability — because he has actually done it.

HR Strategy for the High Performing Business encourages companies to analyse the weak points in their business and focus HR on transforming these problem areas. A unique checklist to identify areas of corporate weakness demonstrates how to interpret the results and deliver HR strategies that will revolutionize performance. Depending on results defined by the checklist, it provides a tailored programme of robust and proven management strategies for improving business performance through targeted HR. Supported by a wealth of case studies showing how the approach has already been used to transform a number of leading businesses, this insightful book shows how to take a step back, assess business weaknesses and act with pinpoint accuracy to improve performance.

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.