Under the Hood

Book excerpt: You can't sell it outside if you can't sell it inside. You want maximum business performance? Look under the hood and you’ll find your employee culture: it is the power that drives the enterprise engine. To harness that rumbling power you’ve got to solve the mystery of what an employee culture actually is, how it operates and how to move it forward. These are the keys that this book will put right in your hands. Renowned business culture expert Stan Slap knows the difference between understanding your employees and understanding your employee culture. The distinction isn’t semantics; it’s the key to whether your strategies will succeed or fail. This myth-busting book reveals why an employee culture is an independent organism with its own rules, beliefs, and motivations—and the power to make or break any management plan (and any manager right along with it). Slap shows you how to get whatever you want from your employee culture, whether it’s improved accountability, innovation, flexibility, resilience, energy, loyalty, or trust. Along the way he solves mysteries that have puzzled managers since the first Mesopotamian farmer hired some help, including: Why does an employee culture really resist change? What does it care about more than money? Why does it respond to leadership differently than to management? How does it talk to itself, and what does it mean when it won’t talk to you? Why are company values the most dangerous threat to gaining its trust? If you have a wonderful employee culture, this book will help you scale it. If you have a troubled employee culture, this book will help you fix it. If you have an employee culture under pressure, this book will help you ease it. If you have a new employee culture, this book will help you shape it. And if you are investing in a company, this book will help you protect your greatest purchasable asset. Under the Hood is informed by immaculate research, including surveys of more than 15,000 employees from companies the world over. It’s packed with original tactics that have driven performance for many organizations and countless managers. And it includes jaw-dropping inside stories of employee cultures from the likes of Samsung, Oracle, Progressive, CNN during wartime, Paul McCartney’s band, and the Super Bowl film crew. It’s all delivered in classic Stan Slap style: profound and provocative, heartfelt and often hysterical. This is not simply a management book; it is the business case for humanity. Management advice doesn’t get realer or more important than this.