| Landscape Forms Recognized as one of the Top 15 Small Workplaces for 2008 by the Wall Street Journal and Winning Workplaces | |
Kalamazoo, MI - The Wall Street Journal has announced that Scanlon Leadership Network Member Landscape Forms is one of the Top 15 Small Workplaces for 2008, the second annual list of the best small workplaces in the U.S.
The Top Small Workplaces list, compiled in partnership with Winning Workplaces, a nonprofit whose mission is to help small and midsize organizations create better workplaces, showcases exceptional employers, including private, nonprofit and publicly held organizations that have built workplace environments that foster teamwork, flexibility, and professional growth while providing an atmosphere and benefits that encourage employee loyalty.
"These small businesses are leading innovators and role models for larger companies," said Larry Rout, editor of the Journal Reports, The Wall Street Journal. "At a time when most employers are cutting back on employee benefits it is important to recognize those organizations that are creating environments that encourage productive behavior and expanding programs to keep employees happy."
"The Top Small Workplaces have been in business an average of 42 years and have demonstrated that they can survive difficult economic times," said Ken Lehman, Winning Workplaces' founder and board chair. "By building strong cultures and gaining employee commitment to the success of the business, these organizations have thrived in good times and weathered bad ones. It is at times like these, with our nation facing almost unprecedented financial and economic challenges, that the real mettle of a strong workplace is demonstrated."
The Journal and Winning Workplaces began accepting nominations last fall, receiving 782 eligible nominations, which were pared down to 35 finalists. To select the 15 Top Small Workplace winners, a national panel of small business experts chosen by the Journal and Winning Workplaces judged the finalists based on specific metrics and qualitative assessments of their success in creating workplaces that nurture, challenge and reward employees.
News articles, slide shows and videos about the selection process and winners are available on wsj.com. As part of its continuing coverage of this year's Top Small Workplaces, the Journal will be interviewing leaders of the winning companies every week in coming weeks on "Independent Street," WSJ.com's small business blog.
 Bill Main, President of Landscape Forms (pictured) stated, "We are thrilled to receive this award, and developing our business according to the Scanlon Principles has helped us get here. But this is also a reflection of our incredible workforce. We've invested heavily in each other's success, and I think the results speak for themselves. All of us at Landscape Forms look forward to continue learning from this proven method of creating and conducting business."
Congratulations on this much deserved honor!
| | | Building a Winning Organization with The Leadership Roadmap | |
 "A powerful approach for building trust and a winning organization" Stephen M. Covey
The Leadership Roadmap, written by Dwane Baumgardner and Russ Scaffede*, is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The book lays out a "concise, coherent, and comprehensive plan for marshalling all available resources and using the best of the available wisdom to build organizations that succeed over the long term".
According to the authors, in any organization there are only 3 processes that really matter:
1. People
2. Lean
3. Innovation
Lean and an Innovative culture are essential to building capacity. However, the truly critical piece is People. People drive all innovation and lean processes. Without the ability to tap into the full energy and creativity of all employees, significant progress cannot be maintained over the long term. The Scanlon Principles provide the guidelines leaders need to fully unleash employees' power.
Integrating the leadership of innovation, lean and people processes is at the heart of achieving competitive advantage. The Leadership Roadmap helps you reach this goal with step-by-step plans, templates and tools.
Baumgardner/Scaffede have also created The Leadership Roadmap: Business Model Beliefs, a booklet that boils down the book's big ideas to their essence and separates them from the implementation tasks. This booklet would be appropriate to use as an introduction to the principles of lean, innovation and Scanlon to your employees. If you are interested in obtaining copies of this booklet, please contact the Network office at 517.332.8927 or majel@scanlonleader.org.
* Dwane Baumgardner is retired CEO of Magna Donnelly, President of the Scanlon Foundation, and a Scanlon Steward. Russ Scaffede is General Manager of Toyota Boshoku, former VP of Magna Donnelly, and a Shingo Prize winner. Together they have formed The Leadership Roadmap Institute. | | Two Scanlon Consultants to Speak on Innovation at Midwest's first
Entrepreneur Conference | |
The Ideas Enterprise (TiE) Detroit is hosting the first ever TiECon Midwest 2008, a two-day conference on Friday,  November 21st and Saturday, November 22nd at the Westin Southfield. TiE, formed in Silicon Valley, is the world's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to entrepreneurship, boasting 52 chapters in 11 countries. Paul Davis, Scanlon Steward and Consultant, and Approved Scanlon Consultant Praveen Gupta will sit on an Innovation panel.
The theme for the conference is "Succeeding in a Dynamic Global Market Place". With panels in 3 tracks on "IT", "Manufacturing" and "Emerging Industries", TiECon Midwest 2008 presents distinguished speakers from several reputed companies, all over the world.
Sponsored by MicroSoft, TiECon Midwest 2008 aims to encourage candid discussions on industry trends and opportunities, facilitate networking amongst focus groups, and motivate aspiring entrepreneurs. This is a great place to connect with some of the leading minds of our time. This event ensures that the talent of tomorrow meets the talent of today. TiECon Midwest 2008 is an extraordinary opportunity for entrepreneurs to gain knowledge, derive inspiration, and develop a valuable network. To network with luminaries, listen to expert, form partnerships, build and expand your business, don't miss out this grand occasion at Westin Southfield on Friday, November 21, 2008 and Saturday, November 22, 2008. The conference will feature several keynote addresses, panel sessions and focused networking receptions. The conference will also encompass a business plan competition and an awards banquet during which business and community leaders will be recognized. An entertainment filled gala will conclude the two-day conference. Register today at the TiECon web site! | | How Can We Address our Current Crisis of Collective Will? | |  by Jahn Ballard
The current economic and environmental crisis challenges us to initiate what will need to be the greatest explosion of creativity, innovation and cooperation in recorded history. As the actual status of the earth's climate and biological situation have become more revealed, we are seeing the beginning of the same dynamic as the actual facts of the economic situation, which has been moving in the same direction for years.
Only now is it being seen for the instability and destructiveness that has actually present for some time. One part of it, rarely mentioned in the commentaries, that helped put things over the edge, were the changes in bankruptcy law. Pushed through by the money-center banks in 2005, over the virtually unanimous objection of every bankruptcy judge in the country, this lead to even more risky credit card and mortgage activity. This is described in the forthcoming book from Bob Booth and Ed Morler, Good People, Bad Credit.
As the events that led to the bank bailout become more unpacked, the role of poor to terrible transparency should emerge front and center as a key driver of their risk management failure. In fact, this recognition is essential, if a real conversation about positive change in objective economic reality is going to start. Within organizations, the almost universally absent transparency is how behavior and decisions create financial results. This is destructive across the board, perniciously undermining almost everything people are trying to accomplish at every level. This situation tends to be invisible to many, from the boardroom to operations team meetings, because it is a function of absence, not presence.
In many cases, the story could be written as 'Good Companies, Bad Numbers'. This is a situation that Joe Scanlon addressed directly in his day, and with which Scanlon companies still struggle today.
The pivotal fact, that standard financial data is fragmented and incomplete, means the objective facts of property and contract cannot be included in the thinking by all parties. In business conversations, and in the creative process of problem solving, not having an accessible and common-sense shared language often hampers optimal outcomes. This missing overall 'score' should be something that everyone can glance at as often as needed for an impersonal reference point to the discussions at hand. Doing business without that is akin to attempting to play championship football on a round field with no 50-yard line or yard markers, and goal posts that tend to move for no particular reason. Bowling through a curtain in front of the pins is a common metaphor used to describe the impact of current accounting and finance practice. All the participants on both the professional and the customer sides are unknowing victims of a divisive system they had no part in creating.
It can be demonstrated with guaranteed predictability that a transformation of this invisible and incalculably destructive pattern of missing organizational practice and behavior can be launched in one day with an intact senior leadership group. Improbable as it may sound, providing a simple and scalable model of the economic reality everyone can understand will release unlimited enthusiasm and collaboration that has been blocked heretofore. Thankfully, all the information required to execute on the finance side is already imbedded in the existing data, and simply requires using the 50 years of resources that already exist to support the full implementation and use of Financial Accounting Standards Board regulation 95. With full linkage of the bank account to the accrual statements, it then becomes possible to employ the scientific method as a tool for collaborative maturing of the entire measurement system; so all stakeholders can support the base business model to evolve.
According to Jim Huntzinger, founding thought leader of Lean Accounting (See Fresh Ideas: Accountants as Change Agents in the February E-Zine), the base business model is a crucial element in this situation. "I have found that a so-so executed "flow" business model will significantly outperform a very well executed "batch" business model. I have actually witnessed this from a plant/operation level. But to take the business model to its needed level, the leadership has to not just be on board; but understand functionally, and execute to the better business model. Very, very few realize this, let alone have the experience and knowledge to achieve this". This is especially true due to the issue Scanlon so directly addressed; the people doing the work have crucial insight that leadership does not know how to use. Jim's insights are now being demonstrated in both the service and public sectors as well. These non-manufacturing cases are now beginning to be chronicled in The Assocation. for Manufacturing Excellence's Target Magazine.
The current-practice absence of a common sense, usable picture of financial reality, and evolving measurement maturity then contributes a fundamental instability to attempting genuine and sustained collaboration at virtually every level of the private sector, civil society and public institutions. Ever wonder why meetings tend to be so painful and unproductive so much of the time? There are two basic reasons. One is the absence of the impersonal and objective facts of the money, with the behaviors that are creating it, presented with relevant and practical transparency. The second is absence of virtually any collaboration on the design and execution of meetings by the people in them, to actually achieve consistently outstanding results with optimum use of the available wisdom and very efficient use of time.
Any meeting or conference can be a direct experience of group genius, using a fusion of methodologies drawn primarily from the Technology Participation and Integral Operations Finance, plus use of World Café, Open Space Technology and the Collaborative Operation System, and with thorough pre-planning. A meeting can capture in writing all the available wisdom in the room, especially people's strategic insight and tactical clarity, ending with real-time documentation completed and available almost immediately. Unless and until meetings and conferences become collaboration exercises that deliver a directly felt experience by every participant of fully giving their gifts, not wasting their time, and receiving the gifts of everyone else's experience, effective and sustained development and execution of collective will will continue to elude us.
We in the Performance Management Institute's network and at The Commons call for the further development and market-wide adoption of an Integrated Business and Institutional Leadership Structure. One that builds on the foundation Scanlon laid. One that provides a fundamental framework to address the twin challenges of practical transparency and sustained collaboration, and capacity to quickly transfer ability to execute to CEOs and their teams. This is an opportunity for the United States to resume its centuries-old role as the driver of new and unlimited possibilities for human beings to pursue their own destinies as they also steward the larger society of which they are part.
We declare our willingness to use our Intellectual Property in collaboration with any individual or group that practices the values of Asset Stewardship on behalf of themselves and the whole society, along with a Fundamental and Behaved Respect for the ability of all human beings to engage their spirit in service to their enterprises, loved ones, the greater community and the whole.
All power to those who care,
Jahn Ballard
James Carse, in his profound book, Finite and Infinite Games, challenges us to distinguish and choose the games we create and play.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
The finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
The rules of the finite game may not change;
the rules of an infinite game must change.
The rules of an infinite game are changed
to prevent anyone from winning the game
and to bring as many persons as possible into the play."
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