OK. In the readings there's some optional reading. One focused on UPS, the big public company; the United Parcel Service. Now I want to spend a moment on that, and maybe say a few things that we'll go look at it. It's a big company, 40,000 employees. It is world class at operational excellence. It's over 100 years old. The founder Jim Casey is passed away, but he actually is alive today in that company. If you read about that company you will see what I mean. The values that he build the company on live today. And what's interesting is, about UPS is, they get consistent high performance. They have highly engaged employees, low turn over, they promote from within, they have an anti-elitist culture, leaders are stewards, employees are free agents. That means you work in UPS you can apply for any other job you want. You don't need your manager's permission. You are a free agent to, to be all you can be. Every employee has training and development opportunities. In talking about measurements, the UPS saying is, in God we trust, everything else we measure. Now I went through that pretty fast for a reason. I mean this company is an excellent, operationally excellent company. But what's interesting is, their culture, their system. They have a three prong culture. It's a performance culture with mutual accountability up and down. The CEO is accountable to every employee, just like every employee is accountable to his or her teammates and the CEO. In fact, the CEO in UPS has a phone in his office, that every employee has the phone number to and can call and talk about any issue they want. Because the CEO is accountable to the employees. No corporate jets at UPS. No big fancy offices. Every officer has the same size office, not even on the top floor. They eat in the same cafeteria the employees do. In fact most of them started out as package delivery drivers. Promotion from within, mutual accountability, anti-elitist culture. They have constant improvement driven by constructive dissatisfaction. Everyone has a duty. To make suggestions how to better and we don't want to become complacent or arrogant. Constructive dissatisfaction, we can be better, we can be better. Don't be satisfied, don't become complacent. An employee centric ownership culture. And there a lot of them are owners of the company, have stock. But also, they own their careers. They're highly paid. They have great benefits. And the message is that we're all in this together and if we all do our part, we all, all will be rewarded. Again, they created a system. An internally aligned, seamless, consistent message center, sender which basically drives the behaviors. And in UPS what they want is excellence, operational excellence and constant improvement every day. Every day. And everyone feeling an accountability to each other. So peer pressure to be better, to learn. It's an interesting story. You can learn from stories. You can learn from stories. There are other good companies out there that you can learn. There are books on them. There's articles on them. Go on the internet and search. Look at WL Gore. Look at Zappos, Whole Foods, Starbucks. Look at Horst Schulze work when he created the Ritz Carlton Corporation. Danny Meyer restaurants in New York. Southwest Air, we talked about. Learn, in fact, I suggest to you, give articles or books to your employees. I'm convinced that the essence of excellence is learning. So why not in your huddles, ask people what did you learn yesterday? Why not make learning something that is necessary in order to be part of your business? Why not have your employees keep a journal? Yes, a journal. Where they write down everyday before they go home what'd you learn today, and you keep that. Because if people are learning, hopefully people are getting better. Hopefully, you will then see whether your message is coming through. Because, to build a great business okay, you've got to have other people emotionally engaged in the pursuit of excellence. And in the pursuit and execution of behaviors that evidence the values in the meaning that you want your business to stand for. And it doesn't matter whether you're selling paper, furniture, coats, technology, alright? Computers, services, it doesn't matter. The principles that we know from this whole area of high performance organizations, high employee engagement, the system aspect, the internally aligning, the principles go across industry. Across, in fact, across cultures, alright? And it's like okay, and what am I trying to do here? Sensitize you, make you aware. This is something you need to be aware of, cognizant of, take into account and spend time on. The bigger you grow, the more time you have to spend on this. Because the more people you have, and the more you're trying to get to consistent behaviors throughout your organization, and ultimately getting to a point where people understand the fundamental principles. The fundamental principles, and when people get put into new situations they will generally do the right thing because of those principles. Not because they pull out a rule book and it says rule 147 says do this. Do you think the customer is going to going to wait till you look up rule 147? I don't think so, okay? And how and what are those principals? And every business has them, and you don't need a lot of them. What you need is the right ones for your painting. You are an artist, ladies and gentleman, each of you. You have the opportunity to paint and create your own busniness. Think deeply about the picture you're painting, and make sure you spend time in huddles each day, and spend time each week in fire house time thinking about where are we. Where do I need to improve? Because you are going to be in chaos as you grow a business. Growing a business is chaotic. There is more than you can do, that's why you've got to prioritize everyday. What do I need to focus on that's mission critical today. You've got to prioritize the product or service you'll deliver to what customers. You gotta have processes, and you constantly cannot allow growth to basically out pace your people or your processes. The reason you have a system, is it's sort of the foundational. The system is sort of the, the rope, the life raft that brings employees back to the core and the essence and is the answer to your question. What is the purpose of my business? Or the answer to the question that customers have. Why should your business exist? Alright. Next week we're going to talk about the difficult issue of building a senior management team. And the interesting thing about my research is, my research found that it was very, very hard for entrepreneurs to build a senior management team that worked well together. There was two big difficulties. Hiring the right people, and then having them fit together and work together. And what was fascinating in my research, is CEOs as entrepreneurs grew their business, when they went to hire higher level senior managers with competencies either in finance, HR, sales, technology. That on average they made lots of mistakes. Some cases they had to basically go through two, and even as many as five different hires to get the right person that fit. Do you know how costly, emotionally draining, and disruptive to a business that is? And so we are going to talk about it in the last week. Building, the challenges of building a senior management team. Have a great week. Thank you for your engagement. I'll be working with you on office hours. I'll be watching the forums. Communicate with each other, engage with each other. Learn, think, process and have fun. Thank you.
