The second generation of “Mastering the SCO Mindset” share many things in common with those mentioned in our first article. They are all believers in their cause, they know how to communicate those beliefs in such a way as to inspire others and they are great leaders. The difference is that the second generation did not lead armies or countries but instead lead (or led) organizations.
The organizations such as FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Go Fly, Virgin Group, Ryan Air, Google and Apple are good examples of the results achieved by these second generation masters. An interesting commonality, besides the obvious one about focussing on successful customer outcomes, is that they all placed a strong emphasis on people.
All of them realized very early on in their development that the happier their staffs were then the happier they would make their customers. A correlation that seems to be borne out in our personal experience of travelling around the globe too. Barbara Cassini former CEO of GO, knew that she wanted to make sure that her staff really bought in to the different values they wanted for the company and for her the best example of surveying and motivating staff came from Richer Sounds, the retail store in the USA.
All of the new low cost airlines give credit to Southwest for developing the business model for them, but is interesting to see that they have still not captured the magic created by the people skills of Colleen Barratt in really making everyone feel part of the family.
Fred Smith of FedEx had in mind creating an organization that wanted to serve its customers right from the start and over the years FedEx has institutionalized such actions and behaviours to the extent that everyone in the organization knows who the customer is and how what they do relates to serving the customers.
Over at Google the whole idea of the Googleplex is to make employees happy so that they work harder to serve their customers, and judging by the share price it is working pretty well! Apple meanwhile has certainly had its ups and downs but few could argue that during the periods with the charismatic Steve Jobs at the helm it has mainly been ups.
These second generation masters are consummate leaders, they tend not to work in the vain of the archetypal Harvard business manager. But instead focus on communication, shared vision and shared values to lead their people and their organizations.
Just as with the greats we mentioned in our first article, these people have the power to make a real difference and that is something that people want to follow in the footsteps of. Herb Kellher former CEO of Southwest Airlines noticed one day that despite all the efforts of everyone it appeared that morale was dropping and harmony was being disrupted in the company. He sat back, talked to others and then came to the realization that for many years the people were almost working as an army against a foe. He then realized that the morale and harmony issue was because they no longer had a common enemy, a cause to fight for, so he created one! Just as army tribal leaders have done for generations before him.
The lesson here is that for organizations to be truly successful they need to be led by leaders not managed by managers. Indeed all the leaders and organizations discussed are out performing their peers by considerable margins, These leaders understand people and emotion and are not be afraid to bring emotion to work, they spend more time learning about communication and language, than they will about numbers and spreadsheets. And finally they make their organizations into places where people like us want to work!
About the Author
Steve Towers, Co-founder and Chair of BP Group (www.bpgroup.org), is an expert on process and performance transformation. Steve founded the first community focused on business process management in 1992.
Steve has bases in Europe (UK), New York and Colorado.
