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If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. Volume 6, Issue 8      In This Issue:   No satisfaction at Toyota   Create jobs, eliminate waste, preserve value   What’s next: The dashboard dilemma   The Outsider   Gift guide: Care package   The money connection – Understanding VC networks   Fixing executive options: The veil of ignorance   The quiet leader – and how to be one   What’s to be done about performance reviews?   How important is the quality of labor? And how is it achieved?   Smashing the clock   *!#@ the email. Can we talk?   Insiders with a curious edge   Photos: 2006’s (10) worst political mishaps   Are parents killing their kids careers?   Get fanatical about customer service   The call centers last line of defense   Surprisingly healthy foods   Eight ways big brands screw up search - A case study: Nike.com   CEO roundup: Agenda 2007   Five tough issues for CEOs and Boards   Where value hides   Are you built to last?   Best companies for leaders   Running the rapids No Satisfaction at Toyota Without any fanfare at all, Toyota is confounding, if not defying, conventional wisdom about the current state of the U.S. economy. In the Works - Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, assembly plant is its largest outside of Japan. It makes a half-million cars a year--one every 27 seconds. Toyota's sales gain in 2005 from three years before: 34% Its profit per car: $1,587 Share of cars it sells in North america that are made here: 60% What drives Toyota? The presumption of imperfection--and a distinctly American refusal to accept it. Deep inside Toyota's (NYSE:TM) car factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, is the paint shop, where naked steel car bodies arrive to receive layers of coatings and colors before returning to the assembly line to have their interiors and engines installed. Every day, 2,000 Camrys, Avalons, and Solaras glide in to be painted one of a dozen colors by carefully programmed robots. Georgetown's paint shop is vast and crowded, but in two places there are wide areas of open concrete floor, each the size of a basketball court. The story of how that floor space came to be cleared--tons of equipment dismantled and removed--is really the story of how Toyota has reshaped the U.S. car market. It's the story of Toyota's genius: an insatiable competitiveness that would seem un-American were it not for all the Americans making it happen. Toyota's competitiveness is quiet, internal, self-critical. It is rooted in an institutional obsession with improvement that Toyota manages to instill in each one of its workers, a pervasive lack of complacency with whatever was accomplished yesterday. The result is a startling contrast to the car business. At a time when the traditional Big Three are struggling, Toyota is thriving. Just this year, Ford (NYSE:F) and GM (NYSE:GM) have terminated 46,000 North American employees. Together, they have announced the closing of 26 North American factories over the next five years. Toyota has never closed a North American factory; it will open a new one in Texas this fall and another in Ontario in 2008. Detroit isn't being bested by imports: 60% of the cars Toyota sells in North America are made here... Read the article.  Back to top Create Jobs, Eliminate Waste, Preserve Value Hendricks believes almost anything can be salvaged. I ask him for reasons not to buy a company and he swats away the question. Those six words explain a lot: Why Ken Hendricks is worth $2.6 billion, how he came to be a walking textbook on identifying and exploiting business opportunities, how he manages to make (relatively) few enemies while treating Beloit, Wisconsin, like one vast fixer-upper--and why he is our Entrepreneur of the Year. The bronze eagle on Ken Hendricks's conference room table shares more with its owner than boundless patriotism. Captured in flight, the bird scours the earth with fierce eyes, talons extended to seize its prize. So Hendricks surveys the landscape, spying opportunities where others see nothing. He sees. He swoops.It is a raw September morning in Beloit, Wisconsin; from the conference room window I watch canoes scud across the Rock River in the rain. Hendricks, 65, sits near his avian counterpart and scans Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans, fresh from the Web. At No. 107, with a personal wealth estimated at $2.6 billion, Hendricks has moved up 100 places since 2005, and we are looking for big names he's beat out (last year Oprah memorably ate his dust). "Two point six billion," says Hendricks, shaking his head. Then he chuckles. "It's not even real," continues the CEO, chairman, and sole owner of ABC Supply. "The money doesn't mean a damn thing." From many people that sentiment would ring hollow. But not from Hendricks. While it would be disingenuous to claim he is still the same dirt-under-the-fingernails roofer who dropped out of high school in 1959, Hendricks remains within spitting distance of his psychic and geographic roots. Born in the town of Janesville, just north of Beloit, he lives in a 3,200-square-foot house, drives a mud-spattered Jeep Cherokee, and answers his own phone--every 10 minutes or so. The night before publication of the 400-richest list, the billionaire treated me to a Stump Burger at Skip's Friendly Village, the neighborhood tavern where he and his wife, Diane, eat several times a week. ("Treat" isn't quite accurate: It was two-for-one burger night so technically I ate free.) He is also fervidly antielitist. If the Forbes list had yearbook-style categories, Hendricks would be voted Least Likely to Attend Davos.It's not that Hendricks doesn't enjoy being rich. But the mantle of tycoondom weighs heavy on a man who identifies intensely with the workers who built ABC into the nation's largest wholesale distributor of roofing, siding, and gutters. In Hendricks's worldview there are two unalloyed blessings: family and a good day's work for a good day's pay. "My whole life is about trying to treat the working man fairly and give him a good opportunity," he had said the day before while driving me past the packed parking lot at one of his plants. "If you've got a job you have pride. You can dream. You can go home and talk about your kids going to college." It is Hendricks's obsession with jobs that has brought me to Beloit, a pretty, well-kept city equidistant from Chicago and Milwaukee. We spoke for the first time in July when I was working on an article about former No. 1 companies on the Inc. 500. Having covered the requisite where-are-they-now territory, I had started to make concluding noises when Hendricks broke in with, "Hey, this is kind of a neat story you might want to hear." He went on to describe his crusade to restore 3,500 jobs lost in the bankruptcy of Beloit's major employer... Read the article.  Back to top What's Next: The Dashboard Dilemma Einstein kept a sign in his office that read, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Do you manage by the numbers? Be careful if you do: Your data may be playing tricks on you. When the Boston Red Sox reversed their curse in 2004 by vanquishing the Yankees and going on to take the World Series, many fans and pundits were quick to give much of the credit to management's decision to enlist sophisticated computerized analyses of player performance data to make staffing decisions. This year, the team's all-too-familiar collapse left these same observers wondering how the numbers could have led the Red Sox astray. Einstein kept a sign in his office that read, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Baseball fans are not the only ones being forced to consider that the best decisions aren't necessarily the ones based on analyzing reams of data. Companies of all sorts are setting themselves up for the same hard lesson, thanks to the growing excitement over technology's ability to place all manner of salient data at the fingertips of managers... Read the article.  Back to top The Outsider Want to learn the truth about your business? Hire a blogger. For BzzAgent, 2006 was shaping up to be an exciting year. The Boston-based word-of-mouth marketing agency had just landed $13.8 million in venture funding and a brand-new board of directors, and it was planning on nearly doubling its staff from 47 to 80. Making room for all those new hires meant moving into new, larger headquarters. Facing this barrage of change, many companies would lie low and wait for the dust to clear. BzzAgent chose a different path. Call it courageous corporate transparency or a temporary lack of judgment, but for president and founder Dave Balter, it seemed the perfect time to start a blog... Read the article.  Back to top Gift Guide: Care Package Send a client a well-chosen gift and kick off a new year of goodwill. We've got a wide range of shopping ideas that will help you say, "We value your business." Or at least, "Keep paying those invoices on time." Even better, all of the products are made by entrepreneurial companies. Taking care of the people who take care of you is always a smart move. Send a client a well-planned gift, and you could kick off a whole year of goodwill, especially if your prezzies deviate from the typical boring gift basket. No matter your price range, you'll find something to wow 'em in this selection of items made by entrepreneurial companies. (And because we're feeling generous, we've included a few gift ideas for you, too.)... Read the article.  Back to top The Money Connection—Understanding VC Networks “The fact that the world is connected through spanning ties has huge effects on the spread of all manner of things” “A market bubble can effectively rewire some of the links in the network” Most of us have experienced the power of networks. There's the job found through a friend's sister's boyfriend, or the lifelong partner met through a neighbor's cousin. But how do networks play into business—particularly the relationship-rich industry of venture capital? New this year to the HBS faculty, Toby Stuart studies networks and how they enable or impede certain organizational and entrepreneurial behaviors. In a working paper, "The Evolution of Venture Capital Investment Networks," he and coauthor Olav Sorenson of University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management examine the effects of geographic distance and a "hot" IPO market on the formation of networks in the venture capital industry... Read the article.  Back to top Fixing Executive Options: The Veil of Ignorance The latest corporate governance crisis is buried in the details of executive compensation contracts. Don't like the timing of the stock option grant you got or the strike price of the contract? No worries! It turns out that this is nothing an eraser can't fix. While the full scope of backdating option practices remains unknown, this most recent scandal has deepened the sense in many quarters that option contracts given to managers distort behavior in destructive ways. The ability to play with, and respond to, the many variables in an option contract—the timing of the grant, the strike price, the vesting period—appears to vitiate many of the benefits of incentive alignment. How might option compensation be refashioned to deliver the benefits without the distortions? Perhaps the answer to these problems can be found with... Read the article.  Back to top The Quiet Leader—and How to Be One If you look behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet, patient work themselves.           —Joseph L. Badaracco Jr It sounds almost paradoxical. A quiet leader? Yet quiet leaders—managers who apply modesty, restraint, and tenacity to solve particularly difficult problems—are more common than we think, says Harvard Business School professor Joseph L. Badaracco. In his new book Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing (HBS Press, 2002), he describes what quiet leaders do and how they make their workplace, and their world, a better place. Badaracco recently sat down with HBS Working Knowledge Senior Editor Martha Lagace to talk about quiet leaders... Read the article.  Back to top What's to Be Done About Performance Reviews? It's the season for many employee performance reviews. Why do they seem to rank alongside root canal dental work on our list of things we look forward to as managers and employees? And what are we doing about it? If we assume that the basic purpose of employee evaluations is to build better-performing organizations, then this has to be one of the most important things we do as managers. But if formal evaluations weren't required, would we even provide them? Much of this season's debate has centered around whether a forced ranking system works in such efforts... Read the article.  Back to top How Important Is Quality of Labor? And How Is It Achieved? Over the past thirty years, several of my colleagues and I have tried to figure out why a handful of organizations are able to achieve true excellence. One of several things they all do is hire for attitude and train for skills. By "attitude," they typically mean the ability to identify with and "live" core values of the organization such as respect for others, being customer-driven, etc. Their managements have concluded that it is too difficult and costly to try to change the attitudes of adults. As a result, they release those unable to work and manage according to the organization's values and replace them with those who can... Read the article.  Back to top Smashing The Clock No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace. One afternoon last year, Chap Achen, who oversees online orders at Best Buy Co. (BBY ), shut down his computer, stood up from his desk, and announced that he was leaving for the day. It was around 2 p.m., and most of Achen's staff were slumped over their keyboards, deep in a post-lunch, LCD-lit trance. "See you tomorrow," said Achen. "I'm going to a matinee." Under normal circumstances, an early-afternoon departure would have been totally un-Achen. After all, this was a 37-year-old corporate comer whose wife laughs in his face when he utters the words "work-life balance." But at Best Buy's Minneapolis headquarters, similar incidents of strangeness were breaking out all over the ultramodern campus. In employee relations, Steve Hance had suddenly started going hunting on workdays, a Remington 12-gauge in one hand, a Verizon LG (VZ ) in the other. In the retail training department, e-learning specialist Mark Wells was spending his days bombing around the country following rocker Dave Matthews. Single mother Kelly McDevitt, an online promotions manager, started leaving at 2:30 p.m. to pick up her 11-year-old son Calvin from school. Scott Jauman, a Six Sigma black belt, began spending a third of his time at his Northwoods cabin. At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours... Read the article.  Back to top *!#@ The E-Mail. Can We Talk? Face-to-face meetings can trump technology. Some companies call for "no e-mail Fridays" Scott A. Dockter knew things were bad when he found himself e-mailing his assistant seated a few feet away. But it was more than his own e-mail habit that prompted the CEO of PBD Worldwide Fulfillment Services in Alpharetta, Ga., to launch "no e-mail Fridays." He suspected that overdependence on e-mail at PBD, which offers services like call center management and distribution, was hurting productivity and perhaps sales. So in July, he instructed his 275 employees to pick up the phone or meet in person each Friday, and reduce e-mail use the rest of the time. That was tough to digest, especially for younger staffers and some senior managers. "We discovered a lot of introverts...who had drifted into a pattern of communicating by e-mail," Dockter says. But in less than four months, the simple directive has resulted in... Read the article.  Back to top Insiders with a Curious Edge How corporate executives seem to be violating the spirit, if not the letter, of a rule meant to prevent insider trading. The confusion over corporate executives trading on inside information never seems to go away. In 2000 the Securities & Exchange Commission came up with a way to remove the guesswork over when it's legal to trade and when it's not. But a raft of recent trades by executives suggests the plan might not be the cure-all that was hoped for. The SEC's solution was to create prearranged trading plans, known as 10b5-1 plans for the rule that authorized them. Launched six years ago, they were designed to remove discretion from executives' trades and provide a "safe harbor" from insider trading charges. The rules: Executives can't set up a plan when they possess material inside knowledge, and they must set the dates or prices of their trades in advance. But those are the only major stipulations. The SEC never addressed the number of shares sold or the possibility of stopping and starting plans or running multiple plans at once. As a result, executives have far more flexibility than is generally understood. Besides providing legal cover, the plans allow execs to trade around earnings announcements and other significant events. Normally insiders are prohibited from trading on these "blackout dates." Executives appear to be using their flexibility to the max... Read the article.  Back to top Photos: 2006's (10) worst political mishaps No 10: Representative Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) plays Mrs. Robinson with a college reporter. Soon-to-be-former Congresswoman Katherine Harris made a name for herself as Florida's Secretary of State during the controversial 2000 presidential election. Characterized by outlandish statements about religion, abrupt staff shakeups, tight-fitting shirts, and questionable colors of eyeshadow, Rep. Harris was considered a longshot indeed in her (unsuccessful) bid to unseat Democratic Senator Bill Nelson this year. But she never lost her campaign trail spirit--or her charm, as was evident when photographer Stephen Elliott snapped some photos of the Senate hopeful conversing intimately with a college newspaper reporter this past April. According to political blog Wonkette, Elliott recounted to Majority Report Radio that Rep. Harris "sat (the reporter) down, sat next to him, and her foot was brushing... Read the article.  Back to top Are Parents Killing Their Kids' Careers? As an executive recruiter for healthcare consultancy Stockamp and Associates, Kate Carson is used to talking to plenty of job applicants. What she’s not used to is talking to their parents. But that's exactly what she’s doing more of these days. Recently she received a call from the mother of a 24-year-old graduate student who wanted to know why her daughter didn't receive a job offer with the Oregon-based company. "I was a little taken aback," says Carson. And then there was another call from the parent of a college undergad who called Carson to let her know that her daughter was sick and wouldn’t be able to make her scheduled job interview. In some human resources circles, these over-involved moms and dads are known as helicopter parents. They've hovered around their children (the Millennial generation) their whole lives, over-scheduling their childhood and pushing them throughout college. With graduation comes the next step: the job search. Now, more than ever, career counselors and recruiters say parents attend job fairs, accompany their adult children to job interviews and even make their interview appointments. Rather than ridicule the behavior, companies like Merrill Lynch, Office Depot and others are... Read the article.  Back to top Get Fanatical About Customer Service In 2003, Sebastian Spada of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., bought a Fastsigns franchise. Fastsigns--now with nearly 500 locations in seven countries--specializes in designing, manufacturing and installing all types of interior and temporary signage. Before inking the deal, Spada did his due diligence. The business looked profitable, and more than 1,200 "active" customers had made a purchase within the last year, including Bank of America, Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, and the Florida Panthers hockey club. Far as Spada could tell, the franchise seemed perfectly healthy and poised for growth--and so he stuck to the previous owners' formula. Nine months later, however, things weren't as rosy as Spada had thought. Sales had leveled off, despite extra efforts to boost the top line. A big reason: Customer attrition clocked in at a woeful 25%--out of those 1,200 active customers, 300 became inactive in nine months. Making matters worse... Read the article.  Back to top A Call Center's Last Line Of Defense Irate customers are nothing new for banks or subscription-based businesses like cable TV operators and telecommunications providers. Indeed, many companies have created specialized call centers--known as save desks--to help retain customers who wish to cancel. A McKinsey study suggests that few save desks achieve their full potential. By following the practices of top-performing ones, companies could lower their churn rates, boost their profitability and even develop new products. Our study of 14 save desks operating in five industries across 11 countries found significant differences between the best performers--those with the highest save rates and incremental profit per customer saved--and the worst in the way these companies staffed and trained agents and managed their performance. Four save desks stood out for their success in the total number of customers they managed to retain and in the preservation of customer value. When it came to hiring, most save desks sought out... Read the article.  Back to top Surprisingly Healthy Foods What you didn't know might help you. Eating healthy may be virtuous, but it just doesn't seem like that much fun. Truth is, most of us prefer the taste of French fries over that of oat bran. A glass of Burgundy sounds more tantalizing than a cup of wheat grass juice. And while a nice piece of fruit is no punishment, chocolate is exceedingly more tempting. The good news: Not all of those seemingly unhealthy choices actually are... Read the article.  Back to top Eight ways Big Brands Screw up Search—A Case Study: Nike.com After posting a blog entry on our site titled "How big brands screw up search," I got to thinking... let me pick out one such company and give a live example. Today, I am picking on Nike (sorry, guys). I did a search on Nike as a keyword, and just that word alone came back with over 2.5 million searches performed last month according to the SEObook.com tool, which uses Overture's keyword suggestion tool. This does not include the long-tail terms like Nike football cleats, Nike air force one, Nike sports bra, Nike golf balls and the millions of other searches done with the word Nike in it somehow. I wouldn't be surprised if the branded Nike search volume were in the 15 million range. Then think about all the unbranded search terms where Nike could get people to consider its brand... terms like golf shoes, golf gifts, golf clubs, footballs, football cleats, off-road running shoes, running shoes. You can just imagine that the number of searches done for these terms could dwarf the search volume for Nike's branded terms. (Not to mention that an iProspect study found that roughly 36% of people associate ranking higher with being a better brand.) OK, so now we know the potential, let's uncover how Nike is missing the boat and how it could right the ship with a slightly more focused effort on SEO and by improving the customer experience of customers coming from search engines... Read the article.  Back to top CEO Round Up : Agenda 2007 Their voices span industries and the United States; their ideas cover the hot topics facing all corporate leaders today. CEOs from a wide range of industries, including home improvement, media, financial services and supply logistics shared their viewpoints and perspectives with Chief Executive as they look to 2007 and beyond. [Read thoughts from these corporate leaders]: Gregory C. Case, president and CEO Aon, Chicago, III. Eric W. Schrier, president and CEO The Reader's Digest Association, Pleasentville, N.Y Daniel R. Hesse, chairman and CEO Embarq, Overland Park, Kan. Mike Eskew, chairman and CEO United Parcel Service, Atlanta, Ga. William V. Hickey, president and CEO Sealed Air, Elmwood Park, N.J. Robert L. Nardelli, chairman and CEO The Home Depot, Atlanta, Ga. Sandy Weill, former chairman and chief executive Citigroup, New York Andrew N. Liveris, president, CEO and chairman The Dow Chemical Company, Midland, Mich. E. Neville Isdell, chairman and CEO The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Ga. Carol Evans, CEO Working Mother Media, New York James Rogers, president and CEO Duke Energy, Charlotte, N.C. Read the article.  Back to top Five Tough Issues for CEOs and Boards For a brief moment, U.S. corporations seemed to have weathered the storm. Then came the options backdating scandals, the boardroom train wreck at Hewlett-Packard and the continuing tide of CEO firings. Now it’s tough to make predictions about the coming year—but we can make some educated guesses about five major issues that every CEO and board should think about as we enter 2007... Read the article.  Back to top Where Value Hides Faced with profitable growth as a primary goal, most executives are aware that value may be hiding somewhere on the competitive landscape just waiting to be discovered and appropriated, but the challenge is identifying where that value exists. High-performing and value-creating companies have learned how to tie together the principles of customer preference, producer economics and corporate finance so that they understand where and how expanded operations and increased market share pay off—and don’t pay off—for their business. In short, they have learned how to find strategic value and capture it by achieving an effective strategic market position, or SMP. When it comes to operating a successful business, conventional wisdom holds that bigger is better. However, insisting on being No. 1 or No. 2 in your market—without first having a very clear understanding of what definition of market share really drives profitability—can take some interesting opportunities off the table. Organizations that fail to recognize and act on their strategic market position may be at risk because their definition of market share often does not correlate with company returns, profitability and strategic growth potential. In addition to defining market share precisely and accurately, understanding the impact of different approaches to penetrating and growing market share in chosen segments is critical. By deploying investments in carefully selected segments, where (among other things) they are potentially poorly served by the dominant players, companies can position themselves in their industries strategically and allocate more assets in fewer, carefully selected ways. As a result, these companies can achieve much higher market shares in their chosen segments. Three Steps to Strategic Market Positioning... Read the article.  Back to top Are You Built to Last? With an average CEO tenure of 48 months, the chances that you will survive a two-decade run—as Jack Welch did at GE—are slim. To find out what makes leaders last, I teamed up with Stanford’s Jerry Porras, co-author of Success Built to Last, to conduct two major studies focused on individuals who had achieved success for more than 20 years. The project included a quantitative World Success Survey launched at The Wharton School, along with hundreds of personal interviews with business leaders, including Andy Grove, Bill George and Patricia Russo to Dick Kovacevich, Jack Welch, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Herb Kelleher and Warren Staley. What we discovered were a dozen key principles that enduringly successful leaders have in common. While we can’t guarantee you 20 years as CEO, here are three issues you must consider if you want to last more than the first 100 days in the top job... Read the article.  Back to top Best Companies for Leaders GE eclipses P & G for the Top spot in 2006. Growth requires more than a good strategy these days. Everyone has a decent strategy, but how many have leaders at all levels of the organization who have the understanding, drive and skills to execute it in ways others cannot? When Peter Drucker presciently introduced the idea of identifying leaders of “the future that has already happened,” he underscored the hallmark of any effective organization: The best institutionalize leadership development. The Hay Group, in partnership with Chief Executive, has conducted a second yearlong study that attempts to shed light on this urgent need. By identifying the top companies that develop leaders systematically in ways that others acknowledge as productive of top talent, one can understand what works, what doesn’t and what should be avoided. The study, which considered 1,279 companies with at least $8 billion in annual revenues from around the world, focused on what top performers did differently with high potential future leaders, since that is the group that will, in Drucker’s phrase, shape the future, a future that has already happened. Of these, 564 provided sufficient data for comparisons. This year GE narrowly edged out Procter & Gamble, last year’s top ranked company. (See [below article link for] rankings for 2006 and 2005 .)…... Read the article.  Back to top Running the Rapids In a punishing and unforgiving world for CEO performance, long-term planning is a luxury. Not long ago, CEOs could operate like commanders of great ships on ocean journeys. They could plan far ahead, chart a course and delegate execution to their able management team. Course corrections were made on an annual budgeting cycle. But the environment has changed. Today, successful CEOs operate more like they are running whitewater rapids than sailing a great ship across the ocean. They must intensely focus on executing in the face of constant change. They continuously monitor and quickly adapt to opportunities and threats knowing that the consequences of even small errors or a lapse of attention come swiftly. Successful teams are still very strategic, but they have evolved to embrace strategies that are pragmatic and highly focused on execution. That shift is why for the first time, managing risk—rather than workforce improvement—ranked as the top priority for senior executives worldwide in an annual Accenture study. To mitigate the myriads of risks in this churning environment, successful CEOs focus on five critical areas... 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