Jim Clemmer's Leader Letter

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
- Author Unknown

"An essential factor in leadership is the ability to influence and organize meaning for the members of the organization."
- Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis and Joan Goldsmith

"But now we have results from a range of industries that link leadership to climate and to business performance, making it possible to quantify the hard difference for business performance made by something as soft as the ‘feel' of a company."
- Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee

"Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening."
- Barbara Tober

"One more myth must bite the dust: At its core, corporate culture is never – never – an organizational phenomenon, the kind that has been played up by dozens of CEOs. In reality the culture of an organization is a multifaceted entity, with as many identities and variations as there are managers and work groups. That's right: Each manager and work group has its own culture."
- Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential, Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina

"Throughout our research, we were continually reminded of the 'hardiness' research studies done by the International Committee for the Study of Victimization. These studies looked at people who had suffered serious adversity – cancer patients, prisoners of war, accident victims, and so forth – and survived. They found that people fell generally into three categories; those who were permanently dispirited by the event, those who got their life back to normal, and those who used the experience as a defining event that made them stronger. The good-to-great companies were like those in the third group, with the 'hardiness factor.'"
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't, Jim Collins

September's most popular Improvements Points (quotes plus articles) were:

"People in organizations are natural mimics. They act like their leaders despite all attempts to train and develop them otherwise."
- from "How to Get Beyond Poor Lip Service" (www.clemmer.net/excerpts/beyond_lip.shtml)

"Get the people whose motivation and morale you're concerned about to identify their biggest barriers. One company tackled this task through a "dumb rules and forms" committee. Led by a vice-president, the group's mission was to search out and destroy all the demeaning and useless bureaucratic busywork that complicated the organization and turned people off."
- from "Morale Problem? Look in the Mirror" (www.clemmer.net/excerpts/morale_problem.shtml)

"A young boy came home and told his Dad that the other kids kept stealing his pencils at school. The father stomped off to the school to complain. "It's not a matter of the pencils," he bellowed to his son's teacher, "I get plenty of those from work. It's the principle of the thing that bothers me most." An environment that doesn't ring true with honesty, integrity, and trust is an environment that drains energy."
- from "Creating High Energy Environments" (www.clemmer.net/excerpts/creating_high.shtml)

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