Silicon Valley leaders recognized the value of passion and continually try to evoke, rather than mute, people passions. Once evoked, the passion is tough to control. It can result in a series of twenty-hours workdays, fun and pranks. The passion to go well beyond the extra mile is what drives people to create insanely great products and services.

Topics related to "Showcase Companies"

Showcase: Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), United Kingdom

The Government introduced the Work-Life Balance campaign in 2000. The campaign was to help employers to recognize the benefits adopting policies and procedures to enable employees to adopt flexible working patterns. This would help staff to become better motivated and more productive because they were better able them to balance their work and other aspects of their lives.

Showcase: Izmocars

San Francisco-based Izmocars – a provider of Internet tools to the automotive industry – suffered through multiple customer relationship management (CRM) failures before undertaking a successful effort, which was based on Siebel's OnDemand hosted sales force automation software. Izmocars blamed a variety of technical and cultural problems for its failed CRM efforts. The documentation and user input are the key to successful use of the new CRM system. Many smaller companies don't document their sales processes.

Showcase: Infogrammes

Infogrames is a French company producing entertainment software games for CD-ROD, SEGA and Nintendo consoles etc. The company is driven by vision of opportunities, as well as the challenge of turning them into a reality. At Infogrames, there are a few key people who can create visions that employees, business partners and investors understand and find attractive. These shared visions knit many people in the Inforgames network together. They are without doubt a major motivational factor in the organization, pushing the limits of its capabilities, and optimizing performance.

Corporate culture: SynerGenics

Adapted from "Who Are We?" by Alise Lynn Booth

Burson-Marsteller, a world's largest public relations agency, created a company called "SynerGenics" that not only helps a company define its corporate culture but rolls up its sleeves with the company's executives to help them implement an "employee involvement" program.

Geoffrey Nightingale, creator of B-M's highly successful Creative Services Department, looked into how to make a company "values-driven." Working with a psychologist/management expert, Nightingale researched the question for two years. He concluded that employees of a values-driven company understand the company's vision and values clearly and feel a "market affiliation." The result is a company where all employees feel "a sense of wholeness." The employees feel that they own the company.

"One reason we differ from the traditional management consultant is our own emphasis on market-driven communications," said Nightingale. "Market affiliation means a sense of kinship between employees at all levels and the marketplace... The central problem in employee involvement is communication. When top management says to us, `We want a company that behaves differently,' we know the solution lies with communications."

The "SynerGenics" program, used by such corporations as Gillette Corp., Signode Industries, Flying Tigers, and Digital Equipment, begins with the Market Affiliation Climate Study (MACS), a four-to six week process that reaches employees at all levels of the client company, as well as key customers, with interviews, questionnaires, and focus groups. During the SWOT analysis phase, MACS reveals where the organization has strengths, weaknesses, and barriers in ten key areas. Then SynerGenics designs a program to keep the strengths and eliminate the barriers and weaknesses.

SynerGenics taps all of Burson-Marsteller's resources and hires industrial trainers and employee- relations experts. Together they develop and implement programs to drive the vision through the organization and make each employee feel that "he owns the store." They get a response all the way down the line. This this process is the most important part of the program. Burson-Marsteller creates posters, videos, exhibits, and other visual aides. Experts in team building and conflict resolution are also brought in when the situation calls for such remedies.

Corporate culture: Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines expends a lot of energy in maintaining its workplace culture. It has a good reputation as an employer.

The Mission of Southwest Airlines
The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit.

To Our Employees
We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all, Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer.

Herb Kelleher, former Southwest's CEO, indicated how Southwest maintained its culture:

"Well, first of all, it starts with hiring. We are zealous about hiring. We are looking for a particular type of person, regardless of which job category it is. We are looking for attitudes that are positive and for people who can lend themselves to causes. We want folks who have a good sense of humor and people who are interested in performing as a team and take joy in team results instead of individual accomplishments."

"If you start with the type of person you want to hire, presumably you can build a work force that is prepared for the culture you desire."

"Another important thing is to spend a lot of time with your people and to communicate with them in a variety of ways. And a large part of it is demeanor. Sometimes we tend to lose sight of the fact that demeanor – the way you appear and the way you act – is a form of communication. We want our people to feel fulfilled and to be happy, and we want our management to radiate the demeanor that we are proud of our people, we are interested in them as individuals and we are interested in them outside the work force, including the good and bad things that happen to them as individuals."

Knowledge management: Siemens

ShareNet is an innovative ArsDigita's knowledge management system (KMS) used by Siemens. ShareNet attempts to capture the knowledge and experience of Siemen's many dispersed sales and marketing units around the globe, making it available to all.

ArsDigita's knowledge management system (KMS) provides a structure in which Siemens' employees can record valuable information for use by other employees. Opening both formal and informal communication channels, the KMS has proven itself as a robust, scalable system.

Siemens needed information on ShareNet to be presented in context. Having other users' feedback on a piece of information can make all the difference in determining if it will be useful in another situation. This type of information does not usually fit in traditional form fields. ArsDigita's professional services developers overcame this by leveraging ready-made KMS features such as discussion forums and chat rooms. The developers also made extensive use of the KMS general commenting function, which allows you to add comments to any piece of data in the system, or to reference related data. This provides searchers with a tight grid of results which they can evaluate based on related items and other users' comments.

By providing information as a mixture of both formal data and informal commentary, the ArsDigita KMS made ShareNet into a powerful service - central to Siemens ICN global business operations. ShareNet won the American Productivity and Quality Council's "Best Global Knowledge Management Network" award in 1999, and today, Siemens is expanding the use of ShareNet into its other business divisions as well.

Progroup's various sources of knowledge

Progroup is a US corporation that focuses on workplace diversity. It not only has its own knowledge specialists who build knowledge bases, but also has arranged with various corporations from whom it obtains knowledge to supplement its own efforts.

One type of arrangement involves buying specialized knowledge bases from other companies. This involves negotiating formally with the intention of purchasing an intellectual property right. Another arrangement involves the mutual sharing of knowledge by like-minded companies. These less formal arrangements have yielded a synergy that has proved extremely helpful to both the concerned companies over the long run. The arrangement has worked for both partnering companies because each one has been as committed to the success of the other as to itself. Thus the nature of the mutual-trust relationship that exists between both the partners has been important. Investing in a quality relationship takes time and effort but has proved worth this time and effort for Progroup.

Team building & teamwork: National Basketball Association (NBA)

High-performing teams do not carry underperforming C players for long. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), 20% of players are traded every year.

Managing cross-cultural differences: DuPont

A US-based multicultural team at DuPont gained around US$45 million in new business by changing the way decorating materials are developed and marketed. The changes included new colors that team members new, from their experience within other cultures, would appeal more to their overseas customers.

Managing cross-cultural differences: Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is believed to have assumed both social and business leadership roles throughout its history. To ensure that the company continues to support diversity in the future, Doug Daft, Coca-Cola's CEO from 1999 to 2004, linked executive pay, including his own, to meeting diversity goals. He committed to holding executives accountable for making progress in reaching company diversity goals. To further ensure progress in this area, Daft established a new position called Vice President and Director of Diversity Strategies, which reported directly to CEO.