"Soft stuff matters." (managing soft subjects such as corporate values, corporate culture, corporate philosophy) (Management Strategy)

• Author: Weston, Josh S.

What sets apart one good company from another? CEO Weston believes the answer lies in his 11 "soft" management principles.

Many people speak and write about management principles. Some are very good; others are just average. My management principles are a little different because all of my business career has been in line management; my ideas work for a line manager trying to produce results.

Almost every one of these principle deals with a soft subject--company values, company culture, company philosophy--not a digital subject. I believe that, in most businesses, if you have good associates, good technologists, good accountants, good statisticians, and good market researchers, the sum of the soft stuff makes one engine work more effectively than the others. Soft stuff matters.

Principle 1: Give your people top billing.

I doubt there is any letter to shareholders in any annual report that doesn't have as its last sentence, "We thank all of our employees, without whom we could not have produced these excellent results." While it's easy to print that line in a letter to shareholders, the results of an organization do indeed depend on its people and the corporate culture all year long. Many techniques account for a successful business--expert systems, artificial intelligence, TQM, robotics, LBOs--but these items can't be fully successful without turned-on, capable people helping the company succeed day in and day out.

Give the people in your organization top billing on your list of priorities. Each company must choose its own way to do this. At ADP, we go to great lengths to be an informal, non-political, loosely structured organization where employees talk up and down the tiering levels. We try to create a culture that's not stuffy, to make every employee feel that ADP executives are accessible.

And it's extremely important to begin with your people when you're developing or analyzing policies in your business. More than 10,000 ADP employees are now shareholders in the company. More than 2,000 managers participate in our stock-option plan. I try to be a part-time instructor for many incoming groups of new hires, and I try to meet many employees throughout the country. People matter.

Principle 2: Use full-time champions.

In our society, most managers gauge their importance by the size of the entity they're leading: How many employees are in my group? What's my sales or revenue level? How much profit am I responsible for? The better a person thinks he is, the more he wants to be responsible for something bigger than he was responsible for yesterday.

On the other hand, the best people should be working on the toughest projects. And one of the toughest projects is starting something new that is small. Often, a company will try to accomplish this without violating the "biggest desk" rule by tucking the new project under a very capable manager who aspires to an ever bigger project. But then the tough, new project has a part-time manager.

I believe full-time champions are absolutely necessary on your toughest jobs, and your toughest jobs usually aren't the ones with the most employees or the biggest revenue level. That's why at ADP we try very hard to make the best person accountable full time for the toughest job and to overcome the normal instinct to measure a person by how many additional employees he supervises as a result of a new assignment.

Principle 3: Communicate well and often.

In all companies, misinformation and rumors are rife. Circulating advisory memos isn't enough. In fact, with the printed word, often more becomes less.

At ADP, we're multimedia. We communicate via many mediums, from VCR tapes that run on screens in different parts of the company to audiocassette tapes people can listen to as they travel to and from work. We have both formal and informal meetings; some include breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Our rule...