The authors focus on the importance of business goals and an employee-friendly organizational culture to gain and maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly challenging business world.
What’s Inside?
Using BlackRock as their main example, the authors examine how a company’s culture can assist it in gaining and maintaining a business advantage despite an evolving and challenging economic landscape. Successful companies ensure clear communication of business goals throughout the organization, adopt an adaptive approach, and build a superior and highly motivated work force by ensuring a high-performance culture, emphasizing leadership techniques that matter, developing employees, and providing networking and collaboration tools. At the same time, these companies ensure that accountability and efficiency are integral parts of the work culture.
How Is This Article Useful to Practitioners?
In the race to maximize corporate profitability or in a bid to survive business downturns, an organization’s focus on employee development and motivation is sometimes compromised. “Game-changing” companies, however, realize that both surviving and having a competitive edge depend on a motivated and goal-driven work force alongside an efficient operational setup.
Successful cultures are (1) purpose driven, (2) performance oriented, and (3) led by principles. The authors highlight such critical factors as an inclusive, collective, and information-sharing culture; accountability; and standards of high performance. These factors are maintained through continuous assessment of the company’s leaders regarding their focus on talent management and skill building, transparency in terms of business and employee strategies, and development of collective passion to achieve organizational goals, among others.
A passionate and motivated work force ensures superior delivery to customers. It is perhaps the differentiating factor between the business leaders and the rest of the world.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
It is a company’s people who ultimately drive it to success or failure. An organizational culture that has clarity with its business goals and can motivate, compensate, train, challenge, and develop its employees accordingly will undoubtedly have a better chance of survival and of ultimately exceeding its clients’ expectations.