The first copies of "The Employee Satisfaction Revolution" are here

These copies were rushed off the printing press. The release date is still November 1 - but this is flat out exciting.

Transforming "the" work into "my" work

Adam Hibbert posted this great comment over at
The EMployee Engagement Ning:

It's a useful way to look at the issue from the other end of the telescope - hopefully will help us get the engagement debate out of the old carrot/stick mindset, which I try to remind my colleagues is truly only appropriate for Donkey work. But let's not mistake that for a fundamentally different theory.

The point is, the stereotypical old Theory X organisation had one value for employees - pay. In keeping with that mode of relationship, they just brought their labour time in, and kind of acquiesced while the organisation figured out ways to pump it out of them. The model Theory Y organisation we're all in this place to create has many values for employees, which ideally combine to stimulate and satisfy our creative urges and help us make ourselves more useful, as a willed choice (btw, a self-enriching experience).

Primary among these values, I'd argue, is having our skills and experience recognised by seeing how we're able to contribute to the decisions of the organisation - that value transforms "the" work into "my" work, at which point you can expect me to engage all of myself with it.

Must Read NYT Editorial

Bob Herbet's NYT editorial attacks the most pernicious and damaging political & economic myth of the past 20 years - that if we work to enrich the wealthy, that wealth will " trickle down" to the benefit of working Americans. He begins...

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

Read the whole thing.

What's Your Company's ES (Employee Satisfaction) IQ?

Take the test by clicking here and cut and paste the results in the comments section here.

Don't Ditch Your Mission & Change Your Culture (even if your customers want you to)

Wow. Here is an interesting story about Business Week Magazine going under.

Magazine for sale!

Times are tough when an iconic magazine like BusinessWeek is up for sale. After reporting on business for nearly 80 years, you’d think they would know enough to turn it around. Kind of ironic.

Here’s an interesting video from Bruce Nussbaum, editor of Nussbaum on Design, for BusinessWeek. As an insider, he says it was the culture that took BusinessWeek down. Not the internet. Not declining advertising. Not the financial collapse. But culture. That's interesting stuff, considering the year we just had.

He points out that the shift in culture happened when they instituted customer surveys to better meet the needs of the BusinessWeek reader. A good example of why surveys can be dangerous. The editors at BusinessWeek broadened their scope to include more topics the readers wanted. This was a fundamental shift in culture from a specialist with indepth coverage on a few important topics to a generalist approach with less coverage, on a wider variety of topics.

In an attempt to broaden their audience they changed their culture and lost what made them valuable to a loyal band of readers. BusinessWeek lost what separated them from the pack, what made them unique.

This doesn’t make good business sense, any week.

From a Courtney & Company newsletter.

Spoiler Alert

Here is a graph from the back of the book.



We surveyed two groups of customers on two occasions and got very similar results each time.