Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Dan’s Biz Bookshelf: Firms of Endearment

Get ready to have your world rocked as I discuss this book, Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose. First, let’s start by how not to run your business and handle your employees:

“The most ridiculous thing you hear in the board room is stakeholders…the current theory is that a CEO has to take all these people into account in making decisions. Stakeholders! Whenever I hear that word I ask, 'How much did they pay for their stake?' Stakeholders don’t pay for their stake, shareholders do.” 

Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap
Dunlap personally laid off thousands of people and ruined every company he worked with while being raved about and applauded by Wall Street. But he was not the worst. Read this one “The only purpose of a company is to make a profit.” 

Milton Friedman
If you think these guys were right, you are in deep trouble today because people are leaving your company in droves, you cannot hire good ones, and the ones remaining are so full of resentment that they will not follow you across the street for a free buffet. Even worse, if a competing company opens across the street, your employees won’t just walk, they run with all their might to join the new company.

The days of treating employees like cattle is over. These guys are both dead and hopefully their theories are even deader. Good riddance. This book, written in 2014, is focused on great companies that we admire  and the approach they have taken with their stakeholders’ chainsaw.

The authors studied a number of successful companies from New Balance and Whole Foods to Hewlett Packard to find out how they have achieved such passion and purpose with their own people, while being financially successful.

The theme, “Happy employees means happy customers equals a successful company,” permeates through this book’s 281 pages.

If you think that that humanism in the workplace is simply a new fad, think again. Read this quote by someone from co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, David Packard who said:

“Many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so that they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately. They make a contribution to society. A phrase that sounds trite but is fundamental.”

As I started this piece, I warned you to be ready to have your world rocked by this book and I meant that. If you are having trouble finding or even keeping people, if you are having a hard time motivating them, then you absolutely have to read this book.

Study this book., Steal good ideas from the companies that are featured in this book and most of all learn from this book. This book is not just a book, it actually represents a movement that is gaining momentum in this country right now when we need it the most. I leave you with one last but important quote from the book:

“The innovative and humanistic practices that FOE’s (Firms of Endearment follow in dealing with employees, reflect a deep understanding of what people are looking for in their work lives today…A human being is a source not a resource as in Human Resources. A lump of coal is a resource. A source is like the sun, virtually inexhaustible and continually generating energy, light, and warmth. FOE’s consciously create conditions that energize and empower people and engage their best contributions in service of their personal passions and the firm’s noble higher purposes.”

For the sake of your company, for heaven’s sake, buy and reads this book!

Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose

Authors: By Rajendra Sisoda and David Wolfe et. Al. 

Copyright: 2014 Pearson Education

Price: Kindle $28.79

Pages: 281 with Appendices and Index

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.