Lead Right for Your Company's Type: How to Connect Your Culture with Your Customer Promise

by William Schneider

Overview

Lead Right for Your Company’s Type will help you find the best strategies for success for your unique business.

Every year, businesses needlessly fail because they adapted the wrong strategies suited for their organization’s strengths. A mid-tier retail chain is derailed by leadership demands for superior products instead of reliably low prices. A software giant is brought to its knees by prioritizing profits over innovation. A small arts college is destabilized by top-down rules designed for a predictable and dependable company. There is no one-size-fits-all game plan for success when it comes to the wide array of businesses today. Success starts with knowing the kind of business you’re really in.

In Lead Right for Your Company’s Type, learn the four categories that every enterprise falls into, depending on their customer promise:

• customized (e.g., ad agency),
• predictable and dependable (e.g., utility company),
• benevolent (e.g., educational institution),
• and best in class (e.g., high-tech company like Apple).

Then follow a proven five-step process to help you in diagnosing your organization’s ills and stop them at their source. Apply the wrong practices and the mismatch pulls the enterprise apart. However, when leadership practices fit the customer promise and company type, the organization thrives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400246038
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	12/03/2024
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

William E. Schneider, Ph.D. is a consulting psychologist and co-owner of Corporate Development Group (CDG), a leadership and organizational development firm. He is the author of The Reengineering Alternative.

Read an Excerpt

When we promise a product or service to customers, we form an immediate interdependence with them. They are now "depending upon" us to deliver on our promise. Our promise connects them with our living people system. They are not "outside" our enterprise. Every enterprise exists to deliver on its promise to its cus-tomers. The four fundamental enterprises discussed in this book are each named by their customer promise—predictable and dependable, enrichment, best-in-class, and customized. Everything starts with your customer promise. Customer promise determines your culture and leadership approach. There is no one right culture or leadership approach. One size does not fit all.

Culture means how we hire, structure, deploy, compensate, and develop our employees to deliver on our customer promise. It establishes and underpins, among other factors, structure, membership criteria, conditions for judging effective performance, communication patterns, expectations and priorities, the nature of reward and compensation, the nature and use of power, decision-making practices, and teaming practices. It is about our community of employees. It is about how we do things in order to succeed. It is all about implementation. Over time, if we are more and more successful, culture becomes equivalent to our identity (e.g., the GE way, the Disney way, the Apple way). The more successful our enterprise is, the stronger our culture becomes. Culture is not a compilation of individual people's values. Culture is essentially formed by what it takes for your people to fully deliver on your enterprise's customer promise. It is driven by the nature of your business and what it takes for you to succeed in your marketplace.

Leadership means to set a direction for your enterprise based on customer promise, to mobilize commitment, and to build enterprise capability. It is where greater power exists in order to influence events within the enterprise. Leadership includes people who lack observable rank or title. The more versatile the leader, the more effective he or she is. Versatile leaders understand their core approach to leadership and adapt that approach to the strategic and cultural requirements inherent in their type of enterprise. They create conditions for their whole enterprise to fully deliver on its customer promise. At the end of the day, leadership is about creating unity and empowering people to live up to the enterprise's customer promise.

Excerpted from LEAD RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY'S TYPE: How to Connect Your Culture with Your Customer Promise by William E. Schneider. Copyright © 2017 by William E. Schneider. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword xi

Introduction: Your Enterprise Is a Living People System xv

SECTION I

THE FOUR LIVING ENTERPRISES 1

1. The Four Living Enterprises: Determining Your 
Organization's Type 3

2. The Predictable and Dependable Enterprise: Providing Basic 
and Dependable Products and Services 21

3. The Enrichment Enterprise: Elevating Customer's Lives 39

4. The Best-In-Class Enterprise: Creating and Delivering 
Distinctive Products and Services 57

5. The Customized Enterprise: Delivering a Tailored Solution 
for Each Unique Customer 75

6. The System-Centric Mind-set: Start and Stay with Your 
Living System 93

SECTION II

HOW TO CONNECT YOUR CUSTOMER PROMISE, 
CULTURE, AND LEADERSHIP 115

7. Focus: Establishing the Magnetic North for Your Enterprise 117

8. Configuration: Properly Connecting Core and Support 
Work Processes 129

9. Integration: Linking the Fifteen Drivers of Culture and the Three 
 Drivers of Leadership to Your Unique Customer Promise 139

10. Balance: Keeping Your Strengths from Becoming 
Weaknesses 153

11. Adaptation: Adapting to Environmental and Life Cycle 
Changes 165

12. Conclusion 177

Appendix Analytics

Using the Validated Assessments Available 
to You and Your Enterprise 181

The Enterprise-Level Assessments 182

Enterprise Customer Promise Indicator (ECPI)TM 182

Enterprise Culture Indicator (ECI)TM 183

Enterprise Leadership Team Indicator (ELTI)TM 183

The Individual-Level Assessments 183

Individual Leader Indicator (ILI)TM 183

Individual Contributor Indicator (ICI)TM 184

References 185

Index 195

Editorial Reviews

…straightforward, refreshing, and even entertaining clarity, and ensure that your enterprise is a living system that is ‘continually adapting, learning, and developing.’” –800ceoread

“…identifies four types of companies and how to lead and manage them…written the book in such a comprehensive way that it’s like having your own corporate psychologist.” –IConnect007

From the Publisher