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To enter this contest, write a response of at least 200 words to one or more of Stan Slap’s five questions. Your entry must contain truthful accounts of your employee experiences – only legitimate stories will be considered. The use of real names and companies is requested; omission of real names can reduce the chances of being published. Everything you submit will remain confidential unless you provide permission to use it.

Here are the 5 questions.
1. When employees felt respected or disrespected by your company
2. When a new strategy was implemented well or badly
3. How your company responds to your feedback
4. When you’re passionate or bitter about your company
5. Whether your company lives by values

Click here to submit your story.

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The Hungry and the Hunted. How to create a brandable customer experience and the ultimate competitive edge.

A brand is the creation of faith in two groups that absolutely cannot be fooled: your employee culture and your customer culture. The reason branding strategies don’t work is they don’t look where these cultures look to decide whether to grant the leap of faith required to become branded. Branding is a tribute, not a verb. Your company can’t just claim or demand to be branded; it has to be given to you.

There is nothing you sell that a customer can’t choose to buy somewhere else or do without—except an intimate, values-based relationship between customer and company. That relationship can’t easily be deconstructed by your competition and competitors can’t use price, size, marketing or sales to bust it apart. To be a successful brand you must be branded not only for what you sell but for how you sell it.

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Bear Stearns was not “torpedoed”; “cratered”; “leveled and left as a trembling, anxious buyout candidate,” as numerous published analyses have stated. It was not “badly damaged by the nationwide credit crisis,” as Wikipedia has noted. All of this thinking is blaming the effect for the cause. Bear Stearns did the torpedoing and left itself quivering and vulnerable.

Nor was the company “hit by a terrible storm,” as its former absentee CEO complained. The subprime crisis was not some terrible and unpredictable force of nature that suddenly roared through the finance industry, flipping slow-moving cows and august investment houses into roadside ditches. It was manmade and preventable.

Bear Stearns was a victim of its own mismanagement, insatiable avarice and irresponsibility to both the future and to those currently depending on the company to operate with a native intelligence and ethical foundation greater than your average iguana. The company was regularly overstating its portfolio value. It collateralized billions to prop up its own funds. A couple of its key hedge fund managers were… what’s the term? — ah, yes — lying through their teeth. “Bear Stearns was noted for its addiction to leverage even at a time when Wall Street, which runs on debt, was drunk on the stuff,” commented USA Today.

The company was caught up in a greed cycle with other banks and mortgage lenders, governments, credit agencies, brokers and underwriters, large private investors and nouvelle-tycoon homeowners who yesterday couldn’t figure out how to string Christmas lights on their roof but suddenly could manage a string of roofs in elaborate real estate pyramid schemes. World without end, amen.

When this housing crisis is all over a whole lot of people will have gotten hurt. Those who inarguably deserve it mostly won’t. Those who arguably deserve it mostly will. Those who didn’t deserve it at all definitely will.

The Senate will preen itself in “hearings,” and some serious spanking of the banking industry will likely occur—this is too big to ignore without new regulations. But it won’t really be “over” unless lessons were learned. Lessons won’t really be learned until we act with integrity. We won’t really act with integrity unless we start with accountability.

Uh-oh.

Managers have elaborate excuses to explain why poor performance is rarely their own fault and is instead the result of forces far beyond their control. They quickly assign accountability to various Acts of God and major world events.

El Nino — no, wait! — La Nina! — no, wait — Katrina! Iran — no, wait — Iraq! — no, wait — Iran! The rise of technology — no, wait! — the fall of technology! — no, wait — the rise of technology! The lack of government interference –no, wait — government interference! The collapse of the Soviet Union — no wait — the return of the Soviet Union! Congress! — no, wait! — the president! — no, wait — Congress! Christmas is falling on a Monday! Easter is falling in April! The Kiwi crop has frozen in New Zealand! Those damn killer bees are back!

Those companies that aren’t well run have many excuses for the downturn in their business. They blame the economy. They blame market forces. They blame the competition. They blame their employees. They blame their customers. They blame everything and everyone—except themselves. A key distinction of successful companies is that they actively prohibit this type of powerless thinking amongst their management team. And these managers likewise delegate punishment-free accountability to their people.

Of course, most managers don’t really delegate. They have a switch with two positions: Control and Abandon. Delegation is the mythical third position. But if you can’t control the onset of a problem, don’t abandon hope. Control the process of solving the problem by respecting and supporting solution attempts at every level. (This process is known as “delegation.”)

An excuse mindset has to be stopped before it starts: A bias for solutions must be modeled by senior management and enforced through every layer of the organization. Otherwise, it becomes part of the culture, and once a management team is allowed to blame external circumstances for internal problems, all hope of creative answers departs and apathy, helplessness and blame set in.

Yes, you are managing in maddening times. But the first step to solving any problem is to accept your own accountability for it. The best managers hold themselves accountable for their failures as well as their successes. They don’t spend time validating all the reasons business is down. Who cares whether things suck? What’s important is what management does about it.

Excuses are irrelevant; it’s the job of management to bring good answers to bad circumstances. “Whining” isn’t a strategy. “Victim” isn’t a job description. “Everyone else is in trouble, too” isn’t management information.

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Papercuts to the Soul: Morals, Values, and Ethics Video Blog 4 by Stan Slap from Slap Company on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, what any company wants most from its managers is the one thing it most stops its managers from giving.  So it’s time for some fierce truths about management.  Let me tell you first of all that the neuro biological source of emotional commitment in a human being is not a mystery.  The source is the ability to live your own values in whatever relationship or environment you’re involved in.

Now, there are a lot of experts about human relationships.  I mean, deep ‑‑ not talking about women are from Bloomingdale’s, men are from big chief auto parts.  Not that stuff.  I’m talking about deep expertise in human relationships.  Regardless of their point of view, they’ll all tell you the same thing as a fundamental tenet.  If you want an emotional committed relationship between human beings or groups of human beings, everybody involved in that relationship has got to be free to bring the best of who they are into the relationship.  Unchecked, unvarnished, unhesitatingly.

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Fund manager Zhao Danyang is paying $2.1 million to eat lunch at an overrated steak restaurant in New York with Warren Buffett and seven people he’s desperate to impress. In consideration of what $2.1 million will buy the disenfranchised in today’s world, including in Hong Kong where Danyang is based, this is an obnoxious use of funds.

Danyang manages money at a company called Pure Heart China Growth Fund. Perhaps there is some other meaning of the term “pure heart,” since a perusal of their website promotes no desire to operate with one, cherish one or protect one in others. In all fairness, Danyang might have bid to win the lunch because he knew Buffett was giving the money to a small charity in San Francisco. But not in all probability: A Pure Heart spokesperson claims Danyang’s motivation to be “he’s a big fan” — presumably of Buffett, not the charity. So while the money is being inarguably well directed, it seems more of a marketing decision than a moral one. This is what separates Buffett from those he’s going to have lunch with.

Fortunately, the recipient is Glide Foundation, part of Glide Memorial Church, which is everything a church really should be. It operates without regard to religious, racial or sexual designation, dispensing dogmatic-free unconditional love to those who’ve long endured unconditional despair. It feeds people, it repairs and builds lives, it advocates on behalf of those who have no voice. It is an organization that operates with a tender empathy for the individual impact of its work and it never holds itself above those it serves. It could reasonably call itself The Glide Pure Heart Church. I’m proud to have been a member for many years.

Along these same lines, I just returned from a branding conference in Europe yesterday, where I was on a panel with Neville Isdell, Chairman of Coke, and Rita Clifton, Chairman of Interbrand in London—two intelligent, decent and delightful people. After the conference we adjourned to dinner and were joined by a few folks, including the CEO of one multibillion international company in particular.

Talk at dinner turned to the high degree of cynicism from the conference audience. Many had assailed Neville and Rita about the socially evil impact of large brands on developing countries. The aforementioned CEO proceeded to dismiss those audience concerns as naïve and arrogant and went on to pontificate about how his shareholders expect him to be able to “make marketing decisions, not moral decisions.” He was smugly proud of his ability to distinguish between priority issues and negligible ones.

When small men cast large shadows, you know the sun is setting.

Naïveté and arrogance are rarely a winning combination, and accusing others of them when you are displaying them yourself is even more of a losing strategy. Given this type of sniffingly disdainful condescension it’s hard to fault people for suspecting corporate motives and believing large companies to be amoral, self-serving, predatory beasts.

This isn’t the case with any company that has truly become branded, though. Becoming branded is a rare accomplishment for a company. It requires earning faith from consumers that the company will operate in the right way — with an ethical foundation that attempts to avoid harming the world and a use of its power as a force for good. Brands make us all feel safer because they show that a large organization of humans can be counted on to do the right thing despite constant financial temptation not to. Brands confirm what is possible from companies and help set the example of what is possible in communities, families and individual relationships.

Brands make moral decisions that drive marketing decisions. And brands return most heavily on shareholder investment.

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For any number of reasons, Zhao Danyang may have a difficult time impressing Warren Buffett at lunch. I’ve had dinner with Warren, about a year ago. Paid nothing special for it. He and I ate at an upscale hotel in Seattle. Warren rolled his eyes as the first of the nouvelle hors de oeuvres were put in front of him and declared, “I never eat anything they don’t serve at McDonald’s.” “Oh, come on,” I chided, whereupon he whipped out his wallet to show me a heavily worn lifetime free pass given to him by the McDonald’s Omaha franchisees. “Clinton doesn’t have one of these,” he boasted. “Gee, that’s pretty cool, Warren,” I said. “That’s nothing!” he exclaimed and whipped out a heavily worn lifetime free Hooters card.

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