Note: The following article is an excerpt from the Center’s new e-Book, Making Values Meaningful: A Menu of Options for Senior Leaders. Download a free, full version of the e-Book at www.cvdl.org/menu. Landing a $2 million dollar contract is a big deal in a company the size of Syncroness, a Denver-based engineering consulting firm. CEO Mike
Last week our friends at the Small Giants Community examined the “business of happiness” at Blue Plate Catering, one of the companies we’ve studied as part of the Return on Values (ROV) project. Why did they feature Blue Plate? Because during the ROV interviews, our researchers noticed that no matter who they asked, almost every person from the dishwasher
A few years ago, Ace Hardware had about 3 percent of the U.S.’s market share for paint. It represented a significant part of the organization’s overall business, but the leadership of the corporation knew they could do better. So David Ziegler, Chairman of the Board for Ace Hardware Corporation, and his team issued a challenge:
“If you’re going to ask people to live in Fargo to work for your company, you have to really offer them something,” says Brent Teiken, CEO of the marketing and technology firm Sundog Interactive. Teiken and his partners believed they could offer their team members a strong, positive culture shaped by their commitment to work-life
To hire or not to hire (a CFO), that is the question A colleague of mine at the Center for Values-Driven Leadership was recently approached by some CEOs with the following question – When do you need to hire a CFO? My colleague turned to me for an answer since I was a CFO for
By all outward signs, business was booming at Blink UX, a Seattle-based user experience research and digital product design firm: 287 percent growth in three years, with 53% in 2013 alone as the industry picks up speed. But CEO Karen Clark Cole was beginning to hear rumblings of discontent. Like many small businesses (Blink has
Definition of success? I could lose everything and truly be okay with it. ~Tony Hsieh, billionaire and CEO of Zappos This idea of a metric for success was suggested by someone this past week on Facebook regarding our current political dilemma. I have to admit, I do wonder what our various senators and congressmen are
There is a lot of anecdotal information on what makes a value chain sustainable, but very little data. To change that, we partnered with ASQ, the Institute for Supply Management, and Deloitte, on a multi-year research study to identify proven management practices and cost-saving approaches, and the initial findings are out. The supply chain is
Dr. Rodney Ludema (left) makes last minute adjustments to a classroom presentation while brother Dr. Jim Ludema observes. White House Senior Economist Addresses Globalization, Instability, and Market Changes Dr. Rodney Ludema, a senior economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a professor at Georgetown, recently taught executive students at Benedictine’s doctoral program in values-driven