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The birth of a great enterprise

Imagine this:

The birth of a company stems from a dream to change the world. They dream of enriching the world through this company and bringing happiness, a sense of accomplishment and meaning to all relevant people.

A company is built on love and care, not pressure and fear. Team members are full of passion. They concentrate, cooperate and care for each other every day, and live a meaningful life while making a living.

An enterprise is deeply concerned about the welfare of customers, not just regarding customers as consumers. They are lucky to serve these lively people and will not mislead, abuse or ignore their customers.

An enterprise treats outsiders as insiders, invites suppliers into the family circle, and treats them in a caring way for customers and team members.

A company is full of care and loyalty to its community, committed to improving the lives of citizens, and constantly improving through various means.

An enterprise does not regard its competitors as mortal enemies, but as peer teachers who learn from them, or partners who jointly explore the journey of Excellence.

An enterprise really cares about the earth and all life on it, praises nature, transcends carbon-neutral thinking, and strives to cultivate self-repair ability, care for ecology and restore sustainable vitality.

Such enterprises are ambitious, caring, influential, inspiring, advocating equality, pursuing Excellence, being transparent and open, trustworthy, loved and respected, and being imitated ... They are not illusory entities in Utopia, but real ones.

Whole Foods Supermarket, Container Store Group, Patagonia, Eaton, Tata Group, Google, Panela Bread, Southwest Airlines, Bright Horizon, Starbucks, United Parcel Service (UPS), Costco, Vegheman, REI, Twitter, Posco Steel, outdoor products chain retail enterprises. ...

In the next few decades, such enterprises will change the world and promote human mental health, physical vitality and material prosperity to a new height.

Four principles of conscience enterprise

Conscience enterprise is a developing business paradigm, which creates financial, intellectual, material, ecological, social, cultural, emotional, ethical and even spiritual wealth for all stakeholders. This new commercial operation system is more harmonious with our spirit of the times and the constantly evolving biological essence.

Conscious enterprises are not moralizing or doing good deeds to make money, but a way of business thinking. They have a higher consciousness in thinking about the lofty goals of enterprises, the influence of enterprises on the world, and the relationship between enterprises and different communities and stakeholders. Have a deeper understanding of why enterprises exist and how to create more value.

Principle 1: lofty goal

A lofty goal is to become the starting point of a conscientious enterprise. There is a convincing goal that allows enterprises to pursue Excellence.

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said, "Choose a bigger mission than the enterprise."

? Principle 2: Stakeholder participation

In an enterprise, the manager's "conscience thinking" is to establish a system to keep all major stakeholders consistent with the organization's goals. All parties should become organs of the same institution.

When there are conflicts and trade-offs between major stakeholders, conscience enterprises will give full play to the infinite creativity of human beings and create win-win, win-win, win-win and win-win (referred to as six wins) solutions, which will transcend these potential conflicts and bring harmonious benefits to these interdependent stakeholders.

When all parties are consistent in the same direction, in the process of harmonious progress, the system friction will be the least, and the organization will flourish because of people's commitment and creativity.

? Principle 3: Conscience leader

Without a conscientious leader, there will be no conscientious enterprise. Without serious leadership, nothing else will help.

Conscience enterprises are usually led by emotionally and spiritually mature leaders. The main motivation of this kind of conscience leader is to serve the enterprise and its stakeholders, not to pursue power or personal wealth.

They train, motivate, guide and motivate employees and set an example. They are not military leaders or mercenary leaders, but missionary leaders. They embody Mahatma Gandhi's famous saying: "If you want to change the world, change yourself first."

? Principle 4: Conscious corporate culture and management style

Conscious corporate culture is a powerful force and a source of stability, ensuring that goals and core values will not change with the passage of time and the change of leadership.

Conscious corporate culture can naturally develop from corporate commitment to lofty goals, interdependent stakeholders and conscience leaders. This culture may be varied, and usually has many common characteristics, such as trust, responsibility, transparency, honesty, loyalty, equality, fairness, personal growth and care.

Find a lofty goal in the crisis

-Waste management companies

Garbage disposal is an ordinary but essential industry. Waste management is a leader in this industry in the United States, and its founders saw profitable market opportunities.

Founded in 1968, the company's development strategy is to acquire garbage stations all over the United States and "mop up" scattered garbage collection business. Its slogan is very pragmatic and unremarkable: help the world solve problems.

Financial analysts believe that the company's most valuable asset is its 27 1 landfill. If the current growth rate is maintained, these landfills will be enough to bury garbage for more than 40 years.

With the gradual acceleration of the sustainable development movement, waste management companies are facing major challenges: individuals and enterprises throw less and less garbage. For example, Wal-Mart promised to reduce the amount of garbage sent to landfills to zero. These changes threaten the core income sources of waste management companies.

Under the leadership of CEO David Steiner, waste management companies have turned these challenges into opportunities and found a lofty goal: to find innovative ways to extract value from waste.

The company has set up a consulting department to help companies such as Alcoa and Cate Catepillar reduce waste, which is actually eating into their own landfill business.

Waste management companies transfer capital investment from landfills to material recycling facilities, and use advanced technology to separate recyclable mixed materials.

The company has invested in more than 65,438+000 garbage energy projects, and the clean energy generated by these projects is enough to supply 65,438+065,438+million households, which is more than the energy generated by the entire solar energy industry in the United States.

The company believes that treating waste as a valuable asset, rather than burying it, has great potential for the next generation.

The company generates about $654.38+03 billion in revenue every year, but there is still a lot of intrinsic value in the garbage it handles, which is estimated to be about $654.38+00 billion.

Competitors usually have to pay to haul away garbage, and garbage management companies may soon start paying customers to collect certain kinds of garbage (such as organic garbage). Steiner said that the future of the company lies in participating in and leading the sustainable development movement.

Not surprisingly, financial analysts firmly adhere to the traditional garbage disposal business model and regard these innovations as inaction. Analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston downgraded the stock in 2009, saying that the waste management company "doesn't want to be a garbage disposal company, but a one-stop green service shop, and such a transformation requires great patience and a lot of capital".

The new slogan of waste management company is "green thinking", which calls itself "the leading integrated environmental solution provider in North America". This is a far cry from "dragging your garbage away so that you can't see it" It is conceivable that the employees of the company are more excited to go to work every morning than before.

Forget one's life.

-India Tata Group

Tata Group enjoys a high reputation in India, with a history of 65,438+044 years. It is also one of the most admirable and conscientious companies in the world. It has more than 65,438+000 branches in more than 80 countries. From 2065,438+00 to 2065,438+0, the total revenue was 84 billion US dollars, and there were more than 425,000 employees worldwide.

The real test for an individual or company is not when the wind goes well, but when it is in danger.

On June 5438+065438+ 10, 2008, a terrorist attack occurred in Mumbai, killing 164 people and injuring at least 308 others. In this incident, taj mahal hotel, the landmark building of Tata Group in the south of Mumbai, was the main target of terrorist attacks. Although 1 1 hotel employees were killed, more employees helped about 1500 guests escape.

During the whole attack, no hotel employee gave up his duties. Many people take their guests to a safe place again and again until they are shot by terrorists. Some people even stand in front of the guests and take bullets.

Karambir Singh Kang, the general manager of the hotel, is the most powerful testimony of the professionalism of the team members of Ji Qin Maha. He lives in an apartment in this hotel with his family. In the terrorist attack, Singh Kang calmly directed the evacuation of hundreds of trapped guests.

Ratan Tata, CEO of Tata Group, later told CNN that Singh Kang lost his wife and two sons in a hotel fire. I went over and told him how sorry I was.

Singh Constance said, "Sir, we will overcome these difficulties. We will restore the Taj Mahal Hotel to its original state. We want to stand with you. We will not let this incident kill us. "

▲ The event and the story that happened in the hotel were later made into movies?

Hotel Mumbai

In fact, in order to protest against the terrorist attacks, the hotel reopened only 2 1 day after the attacks, although two-thirds of the facilities were seriously damaged. Although it took another two years for the rest of the hotel to be repaired and reopened, none of the team members were fired during this period.

Ratan Tata and other senior managers attended the funeral of 1 1 injured employees and visited the families of 80 injured or dead employees. Within 20 days, Tata Group established a new trust fund to provide assistance to the injured and the families of the victims.

Tata Group has set up a mental rehabilitation center and cooperated with Tata Institute of Social Sciences to provide advice to those in need. They walked out of the center to provide food, water, medical services, first aid and consulting services to team members and others in the southern community of Mumbai.

The company assigns a mentor to each affected team member and establishes one-on-one contact to ensure that the victims get all the help they need. For team members who live alone in the city, the company will fly their families from other places to Mumbai and stay in the President Hotel of Tata Group for up to three weeks.

Tata Group provided pensions to the families of each employee who died, ranging from $8,000 to $65,438+$0.87 million. In addition, Tata Group has also done the following work:

Ensure that the houses of the employees killed are provided for their families to live in.

Regardless of the amount, all loans and advance loans are exempted.

Promise to pay employees the last salary for life.

Bear the education expenses of the victim's children until the university stage.

Provide lifelong medical care and health insurance for all family members.

Provide lifelong counseling for everyone.

Tata even provided relief and assistance to the families of the victims near the hotel and at the train station a few kilometers away. For Tata, these people are neighbors and the company has a responsibility to help them. For these railway employees, police officers, street vendors and pedestrians who have nothing to do with Tata, the company provides them with assistance of Rs 10000 (about US$ 200) for six months.

The 4-year-old granddaughter of a street vendor was hit by four bullets in the attack. She was later transferred from the government hospital to Yumai Hospital. The Tata family spent hundreds of thousands of rupees on her treatment. Even the employees of competing hotels are taken care of by the Tata family.

When the human resources director of the company reported the plan to Ratan Tata, Ratan Tata's reaction was not: "How much is this? Can we afford it? Have we set a bad precedent? " Instead, he asked, "Have we done enough? What else can we do? "

Tata knows that they need to spend millions of dollars to rebuild the hotel. How can they not further help people rebuild their lives, especially those who sacrificed their lives to keep their guests alive?

As Singh Kang said, "Every team member at the Taj Mahal Hotel feels that his home is under attack. What will you do when your home is attacked? No matter who is at home, you will defend your home.

Family values that we all firmly believe in are also part of Tata corporate culture. Tata group really shows that it is an organization with a soul. I am deeply proud to have the opportunity to work for this organization. "

Handle layoffs in a caring way

-Whole Foods Supermarket

John mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Supermarket, talked about the layoffs he had to face:

▲? John mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Supermarket, is the author of Four Key Principles of Great Enterprises.

At the end of 2008, Whole Foods Supermarket was severely hit by the bad economic situation, and was forced to streamline its global support team, dismissing less than 0. 1% of its team members (48 of the nearly 50,000 team members).

As same-store sales begin to decline for the first time in history, it is necessary for the company to slow down the development of new stores to save capital, and at the same time reduce the total number of employees to keep expenses in line with sales.

We believe that if we want to continue to create long-term value for all stakeholders, the company will have to lay off employees. But how can we deal with this situation in a caring way?

When a company is forced to lay off employees, the first strategy an organization should use is to be as honest and transparent as possible and tell the whole organization about the difficulties that are happening. The message may be like this:

"?

Many of you know that the company has been struggling for the past few months. Sales are weak, and profits and cash flow have fallen sharply. We believe that the decline in sales is mainly due to the bad economic environment we are all experiencing.

In order to maintain the vitality of the company, we must reduce the total number of employees from X to Y before Z day. We must achieve this goal in some way. We know that the normal loss of team members will also reduce the number of employees, and we can also transfer some team members to other vacant positions in the company.

We will also implement a temporary employment freeze to protect as many existing jobs as possible. In addition, some teams may vote to voluntarily reduce the weekly working hours to keep their jobs, but each team member can vote to decide whether he likes this option or not.

However, on the Z day, we need to reduce the total number of employees to Y. If we don't achieve our goal by then, we will have to take other types of layoffs instead of voluntarily reducing the total number of employees. We will be very, very sorry if we have to do this. We welcome any serious suggestions and alternatives.

"

Conscience enterprises will conduct this discussion honestly and transparently, and invite team members to make suggestions on how to solve the problem. This is not a management problem, nor a team member problem, but a company problem. Team members usually have ideas and suggestions to help solve problems.

For example, a team can collectively decide to reduce the working hours of all team members so as not to lose anyone in the team. It would be better if team members voted collectively to decide that this is the action they want to take. Forcing everyone to reduce working hours may cause resentment.

If employees don't respect their leaders, they may say, "Company leaders are just afraid of making hard choices. In the past, their bad decisions got the company into trouble, but now they make us take the blame. Because they don't want to let some poor players go, now everyone suffers. That's unfair. "

The second effective layoff strategy is to provide strong incentives for team members who voluntarily leave.

In every organization, there will always be some team members considering leaving their jobs in the near future for various reasons. If a company can provide these team members with wages for several months at a time, many people may be willing to leave the company quickly. The salary policy can continue to be improved until enough employees in the organization voluntarily leave their jobs to achieve the goal of layoffs. This is similar to the way airlines handle oversold flights.

They will ask passengers to cancel their flights voluntarily in exchange for travel tickets worth hundreds of dollars. They kept increasing the amount of travel vouchers until enough passengers volunteered to book a later flight.

Obviously, layoffs will damage the morale of the organization. When people are laid off, leaders will bring panic to the organization. Even if the way of layoffs is professional and considerate, employees will inevitably start to worry that they will be laid off next.

When employees wait for the other shoe to land, their anxiety will accumulate and their attention and participation will be affected. Instead of gradually reducing the scale, it is better to cut it in place at one time and make it clear that there will be no layoffs in the future.

Therefore, when laying off employees, we must be in place to prevent possible mistakes. If the company finds that there are too many layoffs, there is always a way to invite people back. Once you start to lay off employees and promise not to lay off employees in the future, employees will start to relax and release their fears, and the morale of the organization will gradually recover.

Layoffs can also be seen by leaders as opportunities for the organization, which can consciously make the team better and more capable. There are always some people in every organization who don't adapt very well, or don't make the same contribution as everyone else, so if you can consciously deal with layoffs, it may also be an opportunity to improve the quality of the overall team members.

Layoffs should not happen frequently. This has only happened twice in the 32-year history of Whole Foods Supermarket. We believe that if the company lets people leave, it is also the responsibility of the company to try to help them find jobs elsewhere.

In the only two necessary layoffs, we invested a lot of money and time to help laid-off employees find other jobs. Most of the people we laid off actually chose to leave voluntarily. We encourage them to leave with generous severance pay.

We also try our best to transfer employees to vacant positions within the company, especially those who are willing and able to transfer to another city. For those employees who can't do it, we will help them find other positions outside the company.

Awaken the power of business

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, a great jurist, said, "I don't think complexity is trivial on the surface, but I am willing to devote my life to the bottom of complexity."

We can no longer be satisfied with the simple way of treating work, enterprises and market economy. This way is not only useless to us, in fact, it is eroding our community structure and dulling our souls. This way requires too many annoying choices and brings unhappiness and pain to too many people.

We must take action to go to the other side of the complexity of enterprise and market economy, because there we will find peace and prosperity, joy and justice, love and care, money and meaning.

Title: Four Key Principles of Great Enterprises

Authors: john mackey, Rajendra Sisodia?

Translator: Shi Jianming

Press: Zhan Lu Culture

Release date: July 20 19

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Typesetting: Qiao Han