Employee Centric Quotes

To paraphrase Einstein, insanity is expecting employees to do one thing while rewarding them for doing something else.

Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer. As he put it in his 1997 letter, “Obsess over Customers.” Each annual letter reinforces that mantra. “We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company,” he wrote the following year. “We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart.… But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.

Keep Plussing the Show: No Room for Excuses

The overall organizational health needs to be measured via employee engagement, culture readiness, business agility, and customer-centricity, etc.

Because these processes and practices are embedded in every meeting, document, decision, interview, and performance discussion, following them becomes second nature over time. And any employee who violates them draws attention to themselves like a person loudly scratching their fingernails across a chalkboard. If, for example, a person spoke up at a meeting and suggested an idea that was obviously geared toward short-term considerations and ignored significant longer-term ones, or proposed something that was competitor- rather than customer-centric, there would be an uncomfortable pause before someone pointed out what was on everyone else’s mind. While this practice may not be unique to Amazon, it is a defining element of its success.

SAS Institute has resisted going public because Jim Goodnight, the CEO, is concerned about the effects of public ownership on its employee-centric, family-oriented culture. So long as he holds all the cards, his workers’ loyalty is probably justified, but only so much as they can be certain that he’ll be in charge forever. Which

qualities and values every leader should strive to attain: crystal-clear direction plus an unwavering commitment and passion.

Training cannot be limited to ‘Here’s what you need to do, now go do it.’ That’s not good enough. Training needs to instill a spirit, a feeling, an emotional connection. Training means creating an environment of thinking and feeling.

Laughter is no enemy to learning.

The trouble with people is that we get hardening of the mental arteries, cirrhosis of the enthusiasm, and arthritis of the imagination, along with chronic and sometimes acute allergies to supervision, subordinates, the whole darned system. Is it possible that what we have gained through experience, we have lost through habit, and that what we have gained through organization, we have lost in enthusiasm? —

The trouble with people is that we get hardening of the mental arteries, cirrhosis of the enthusiasm, and arthritis of the imagination,

The best is never the best, and pay attention to the smallest details.

Realize that employees and the customers both have to be engaged, at the same time, to move your business forward for sustainable success.

In one such study, mentioned in Pink’s book, researchers at Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.

When YOU LEAD an employee-first customer-centric business, what goes for or is promised to the customer, must be relevant for the employee.

IT leaders need to think like the anthropologist for running a people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, and evolve business partners.