ME: You end the book with what I think leadership is all about. That, in the end, it's is all personal -- how do you think leadership changed and challenged the people you interviewed?

UMESH: I think in most cases it humbled them. When you finally discover that the buck really stops with you, that almost every decision you make can't go anywhere else and that decision affects hundreds or thousands of other people. You feel that sense of responsibility.

You can find the full interview over on our podcasts blog.

* Jack wrote a Jack Covert Selects on the book last year.

Here's a passage from the excerpt:

It's easy to break a promise. It's even easier to forget the price of breaking it. After all, who can measure that price? Few would deny that a broken promise lowers the morale of your employees, but what's the real dollar cost--the bottom line impact? Or what is the payoff of keeping a promise? It should be simple to align your words and actions in a way that employees can see. But if it's so simple why do most employees say their managers do not do it? Maybe it is not so simple.

Consider how two executives described to me the benefit of an impeccable word--and the cost of lacking one:

Good leadership is, 'Whatever I say I'm going to do, I'm going to do.' That means I have to know what my limitations are and what I'm capable of delivering. As a leader if you don't fulfill your commitments, I can't think of anything that can hurt you more than that.

--Frank Guidara, President and CEO, Uno's Chicago Grill

If your staff see you cutting corners, then they're not going to take you seriously. And then they're not going to take the values that you're trying to instill seriously. Because you're not taking the values seriously.

--Deirdre Wallace, President, The Ambrose Group

Like these successful executives, you, too, most likely want be an honest and respected leader. But this book is about more than being respected. As its title says, it's about The Integrity Dividend--and why and how keeping your word as a leader pays off on the bottom line. One thing that sets this book apart from others that discuss the importance of integrity is that it tells how I have been able to accurately measure its positive dollar impact. As you will see more in later chapters, successful executives I talk to recognize the dividend, too, but until now it has not been well measured.

I am not asking you to be motivated by any intrinsic payoff, though I think there are several. Integrity, for me, is about being more effective, because people see you as consistently following through on your word and demonstrating the values you profess: more effective as a leader, because you more readily capture the hearts of your followers; as a communicator, because people know you mean what you say; as a partner, because you can be counted on; as a customer because you complete business transactions more efficiently; as a supplier, because buyers can know what they will get; and as a brand, because you keep your promises--and promises are all that a brand is. Integrity contributes hugely to executive effectiveness.

Check out the full excerpt here: 800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008504.html

1. Jack and I are going to be at the Tribes launch event next Wednesday in NYC. If you are going, drop us a note (todd at 800CEOREAD dot com) . We'd love to meet up.

2. There is an ebook that was written by a tribe of people Seth pulled together in advance of the books release. You can download it here and you should download it. At 228 pages, I guarantee there is something in there for you.

Seth wrote of the book on his blog today:

... I started to write a leadership book but discovered that I was actually writing a marketing book. (Either that, or I started to write a marketing book and ended up writing about leadership, I can't remember). Either way, what I discovered in writing it is this: The next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere.

As someone who was buying millions of dollars of magazine ads just 24 years ago, this is a lot of change to swallow. And it's also the biggest opportunity for good/meaning/success that I can imagine. More details are here.

Things have changed, far more dramatically than most people realize. Not just what marketers buy, but what the media does all day, and what marketers build, and what we get paid to do and what and where we pay attention...

Seth published a great manifesto about tribes in the 50th issue of ChangeThis, which you can find here, and has authored many other fine manifestos in the past.

He was recently interviewed by Hugh MacLeod at GapingVoid as well. You can find that interview here.

And finally, this is the last chance for you to get FREE tickets to Seth's Big Tribes Event in New York City on October 22nd. You can get them buy purchasing either a 3 Pack or 10 Pack of Tribes from our website. You're going to want to buy the book anyway, so if you're near the city, why not buy a copy for a friend, expand the tribe, and meet the man leading it.

Couple this shortage with technology advancements nearing the speed of light, there are no sustainable competitive advantages anymore... except for your people. Engaging the hearts and minds of your team is the only sustainable advantage left in today's hyper-competitive world.

The bottom line - Leaders must engage their teams to win the talent war! It's the only winning strategy to get and keep your people long term.

For starters, leaders must see the person behind the employee to see universal human needs at work. There are three intellectual needs (Achievement, Autonomy, and Mastery) and three emotional needs (Purpose, Intimacy and Appreciation) that must be fulfilled. The mind and heart go hand in hand when it comes to igniting Passionate Performance. Engaging the mind builds performance. Engaging the hearts ignites passion. Only together can a leader create a passionately performing team.

Traditional competitive factors like product design, technology and distribution channels are harder to sustain in a super-fast, mega-networked world. In fact, the good old "Four P's of Marketing"--product, price, promotion and placement--are having much less impact for companies competing in today's world.

However, a fifth "P"--people--has become an increasingly important competitive factor. Consider this: About 70% of customers' buying decisions are based on positive human interactions with staff. Add to this the fact that 83% of the U.S. gross domestic product comes from services and information that are created and delivered by people. The bottom line is that people buy from people, not companies. So, your people--and the performance they deliver--are the defining competitive advantage for your organization.

After the jump, I will share how you can leverage the 5th P--your people--to create what I call Passionate Performance. Please let me hear what you are currently doing to create a selling situation where your customers are buying from your people, not your company.

WHERE ARE THE GREAT COMPANIES?
By Jim Champy

For years I have been searching for great companies. What I have found is that there are none. Greatness is an aspiration - a very honorable one. But no company is perfect, even if it performs well year after year.

Greatness, like, many objectives, is in the eye of the beholder. One simple test for greatness is how a company is experienced by its constituents - its customers, its associates, its owners, and business partners. In my most recent research, I looked at over a thousand high-growth companies and found many companies that are very good. They treat all of their constituents well and, in their own unique ways, aspire to greatness.

My search was driven by a desire to find companies that have new business models, delivering new products and services to customers and executing in new ways. I have written about my discoveries in OUTSMART!, my latest book. Although I could find no single formula for what creates a good - or great - company, I did find some shared characteristics.

Ambition: The leadership team of every good company has a great ambition for the company - usually one that addresses an unmet customer need. The ambition is not one of personal greed; it's about building a company that delivers on its promise and does it with a unique quality. My experience over the years is that it takes a great ambition to create even a good company. I was inspired in my research by a company called Minute Clinic, whose ambition is to change how healthcare is delivered, for the benefit of everyone involved in the healthcare system.

Customer: Every good company begins by meeting a customer need. That need is often deeply understood by the company's founder because they, themselves, experienced the need - and saw how that need was not being well met. Sometimes the founder hands off the leadership of the company to someone else who operationalizes the idea. But that wasn't the case in the example of Sonicbids, a company that saw the unmet needs of thousands of independent musicians and performers and whose founder has led the company to a unique position in the music business. This music business for independent performers is a 13 billion dollar a year market, that no one saw or had the appetite to organize until Sonic bids came along.

Focus: Good companies stay focused on what they know and can do well. When companies search for new ideas, they often drift into unknown territory and get in trouble. Good companies just keep growing and expanding into familiar territory. Shutterfly is a wonderful example of a company that's growing, but it grows by expanding within the social expressions business, helping communities of people share photographs in hundreds of ways. Niches can be very large markets.

Execution: Satisfying a customer requires relentless attention to execution. Building a company's capability to deliver makes the difference between turning a great idea into a business or failure. But execution is not just about delivering a product. It's also about service. Over the years, I have observed that technology companies are particularly bad at recognizing and responding to the service needs of their customers. Counter intuitively, high-tech requires a lot of high-touch. Partsearch is a company that knows what it's doing with customer service, helping customers find what they need in an ocean of millions of parts and accessories for consumer electronic products. Partsearch has tamed chaos in its industry.

Inspiration: Smart companies engage all of their associates in building the business, from idea creation though delivery. Ideas don't just come tops-down; they also come bottoms-up and from every other direction. Everyone in the company feels that they own a piece of the action and are accountable for how the company performs. The inspiration for a company starts at the top, but good leadership drives that inspiration deep into the company by engaging people broadly in decision-making. People are more than mechanical parts of the enterprise, and the more they are allowed to see customers, the better their business sensibilities.

These are some of the behaviors that I have found in the good companies I have studied. My ultimate test of the quality of a company is whether I would like to work there. The good news: I see many high growth companies where I would work. They are smart companies, in multiple industries, that are operating quite brilliantly.

Author Bio
Jim Champy is one of the leading thinkers in business. His first book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, helped transform the corporate world. For more information, please visit www.jimchampy.com.

Check out Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can't!

From the publisher: "Men and women lead differently. Most businesspeople, from front line employees to CEOs, sense this at some level, but can't quite articulate the differences without falling into the trap of creating male and female stereotypes. In their new book, Leadership and the Sexes gender experts Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis show what the latest scientific studies reveal about male/female brain differences, and explain how these differences impact the ways that men and women negotiate, communicate, lead, and run meetings."

The excerpt we have posted is a good, lengthy, meaty one. It raises a lot of important points about biological differences between men and women, but it also prompts more questions and will have you curious to see how the authors address not only gender differences in leadership, but also societal issues surrounding socialization and gender stereotyping.

Here's a brief passage from the excerpt:

The human brain is hard-wired (genetically coded with) its gender. As gender is not one thing or type, but very diverse, you will find throughout this book that your brain's male/female coding fits somewhere on a wide gender/brain spectrum.

And here's a direct link to the chapter: 800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008408.html

: : : : : :

At a time when business decisions are more challenging than ever before, we set out to answer a simple question: How do the really successful leaders make the tough calls?

Our method was straightforward: Go to the source. We would find people who had made great decisions consistently--people like former American Express CEO Harvey Golub, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and The Blackstone Group chairman and CEO Stephen Schwarzman--and ask them how they did it. We figured that if we could ask enough successful and experienced leaders about their toughest decisions, surely the essence of decision making would emerge. As it turned out, our first inclination--Go to the Source--became our first principle, confirmed time and again by many of the 21 leaders we interviewed.

When it was all over we had distilled six core decision-making principles that have guided wise leaders across functions and industries and brought them through various crises. The six principles--Go to the Source, Fill a Room with Barbarians, Conquer the Fear of Risk, Make Vision Your Daily Guide, Listen with Purpose and Be Transparent--are the guiding lights by which the CEOs in our book, How the Wise Decide, drove the value of their companies up an average of 15 times the S&P 500 during their tenures. They are the basis for how four of our leaders became self-made billionaires, and two won the National Medal of Technology.

The principles sound deceptively simple. But when you read the book you will see, in the stories of how these leaders made their decisions, that executing the principles is the hard part. Following through on any single imperative with the dedication and drive that our wise leaders apply to it requires focus, effort and time. Doing it with all six might seem impossible. Don't worry. It isn't.

The principles we outline in How the Wise Decide are universal and timeless. But everyone's situation is different and there are probably some lessons that will be more useful or easier to execute in your present situation than others. Start there. As you master one principle, begin working on another. But keep all six in mind, perhaps written on an index card you carry in your pocket or purse, because there will always be opportunities to apply them to specific decisions. Even the most cursory use of the six principles will lead to better decisions.

How the Wise Decide isn't a book about business theories. Rather, it is a practical guide written for managers by managers that provides the advice we all need to make great decisions consistently. Our goal from the start has been to help accelerate you along the path to wise decision making and successful leadership. We believe that in these demanding times, when choosing the right decision is critical, the principles at the heart of How the Wise Decide can help you do just that. Please visit our website, www.wisedecide.com, to learn more.

: : : : :

Many thanks Aaron and Bryn!

: : : : : : : :

The real challenge confronting Dermot Dunphy as he pursued his vision for Sealed Ait was how to keep the technological edge that allowed Sealed Air to charge premium prices. Dunphy knew from his own experience that R&D was essentially a joke among most packaging companies. They knew what was important: cutting costs so they could cut prices, then doing it all over again. Conventional marketing wisdom would see Bubble Wrap as a built-in advantage to get Sealed Air in the door among new customers. Then it could grab a bigger share of each customer's wallet by offering an expanded portfolio of more conventional products.

And then, of course, Sealed Air would be back in the thick of cutting costs in order to cut prices.

Again, Dunphy chose a different direction. He didn't want to compete with anyone in the commodity business. Instead, he saw Bubble Wrap as only the first of a full line of package protecting products that would emerge from vigorous R&D. Sealed Air would hire researchers in chemistry and mechanical engineering to develop products that didn't yet exist for customers who knew little or nothing about Sealed Air at that point. And like his decision about the sales force, this solution would be costly and time consuming. But Dunphy knew technology was the only thing that separated Sealed Air from the price cutters.

The combination of a sales force that understood that it sold a benefit rather than a product and a research and engineering team that applied creativity to what was otherwise a moribund business launched Sealed Air on a course from which it hasn't deviated in more than three decades.

"Every other company in the industry sent people out with catalogs saying 'How many bags do you need? Here's our price.' We sent people out with engineering studies who said 'Let us look at your back room, let us into your factory. We'll show you the economic benefits of adopting our thought processes, our designs, and, of course, our products."[i]

If Dunphy had used his vision's objectives selectively he might have hired the best sales force but skimped on product R&D, thus wasting the sales team's talents. Conversely, without smart sales people Sealed Air's technologically sophisticated products might have languished on warehouse shelves or been sold at unsustainably low prices. By applying his vision every time he made a call, Dunphy ensured that Sealed Air's decisions were coordinated.

Yet even someone as dedicated to following his vision as Dunphy found himself occasionally tempted to take a short cut. When a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that produced stretch film to wrap and anchor boxes on pallets came on the market, Dunphy wanted to take a look. He chartered a small jet to ferry the top management team from its New Jersey headquarters to visit the Tulsa company. On the ride home Dunphy reflected on the day, pleased with what he had seen, and began talking about the next steps to move forward with the deal to acquire what he described as a "decent, high-margin business."

Then Sealed Air's senior vice president in charge of international activities, a key executive in the company, spoiled Dunphy's reverie. He told Dunphy that their trip to Tulsa had confirmed what he already suspected: there was no cutting edge technology involved in stretch wrap. To acquire the company Sealed Air would have to deviate from its long-standing vision embodied in Dunphy's Seven Principles.

"He was slightly shocked that I was considering breaking away from our high standards," Dunphy recalls. "He half seriously, half amusingly, but rather bitingly accused me of trying to build a bigger company so that I could boast about it to Harvard Business School friends at my forthcoming reunion. That got the message across pretty clearly!" Needless to say, Sealed Air didn't make the purchase.

There may have been some short-term cost from following Dunphy's vision so relentlessly, but the long-term benefits were tremendous. By the time Dunphy retired in 2000 his relentless focus on making every decision according to his vision had paid huge dividends. Sealed Air had more than 350 employees in R&D labs scattered around the world and had developed an array of innovative new products in such diverse areas as food and medical packaging. The unprofitable little turnaround that he joined in 1971 had more than $225 million in net income on more than $3 billion in sales and was generating gross margins of 35 to 38 percent in an industry that typically saw returns in the low 20s.[ii,iii] The original investors who hired him saw their holdings rise 8,300 percent over the CEO's three decades of leadership.[iv] As we point out in How the Wise Decide, packaging may not be a glamorous business, but returns of 8,300 percent certainly are.

: : : : : :

More tomorrow from the authors of How the Wise Decide.