Forbes Features Friends of the CVDL in New List In late January, Forbes magazine published it’s first list of the best small companies in the country. Explaining what makes these companies so great, Bo Burlingham, the Forbes contributor who organized the list and the original author of Small Giants – the book that inspired the
With a story straight out of a real-life spy thriller, Dr. Dave Smith (a 2014 graduate of the Ph.D./D.B.A. program in values-driven leadership) exposes the dangers of creating false signals within your company, in this short video. Leaders who create inconsistent cultures – who proclaim a culture of customer service, for example, despite behaviors that indicate
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on the blog of our partners, the Small Giants Community. A bowl of popcorn sat at the center of the conference room table, a gift from a colleague. It was filled with a Chicago delicacy—caramel, cheese, and butter popcorn mixed together in a tasty, caloric holiday mix. We made
The number one rule for any respectable camper? Leave the campsite better than you found it. When my children were young, family vacations were often spent at campgrounds within national parks, where one rule prevailed: leave the campsite better than you found it. The idea, of course, is to respect the natural environment by not
Culture Creators & Culture Sustainers NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Making Values Meaningful, a new e-book published by the Center for Values-Driven Leadership. Download your free copy at www.cvdl.org/menu. The first and most important thing you can do to create a values-driven organization is to make values and culture a central
BerylHealth, a healthcare call center, had its start with three employees and the phone line in a backroom. Between 1985 and 2012, founder and CEO Paul Spiegelman grew the company to 300 employees. The company earned multiple Inc. 500 and Best Places to Work awards for its impressive growth trajectory and strong, positive culture that
**NOTE: This article is republished with permission from the Return on Values Project.** Universally, the companies in our study have a “people first” approach that drives profitable growth. The equation is simple: great people practices lead to employee loyalty, which leads to customer loyalty, which leads to profitable business. BerylHealth, a healthcare call center company
Lieutenant Colonel Joe Ricciardi stood before his battalion of 1000 soldiers deployed with clearing roads of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan, and gave them one simple message: You need to love one another. A nervous energy moved through the room. “I got a few funny stares, I saw a few smirks,” Ricciardi recalls. “But
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
For the last 18 months, our Center for Values-Driven Leadership has partnered with the Small Giants Community and the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations on a three-year research initiative that asks the question, In small and mid-size businesses, what is the link between culture and profit? To date we’ve thoroughly examined the academic literature