Uncontainable by Kip Tindell

Uncontainable by Kip Tindell

Author:Kip Tindell [TINDELL, KIP/KEEGAN, PAUL/SHILLING, CASEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics / Management
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-10-07T00:00:00+00:00


Over the years, we’ve made sure everyone in the company knows it’s their responsibility to point out why we do this. And we expect them to reinforce and coach when their colleagues aren’t doing it. It does start with the leader of the organization doing it. That’s a core tenet of Conscious Capitalism—a conscious leader. But it can’t just be one person—everyone has to be doing it.

Even today, we’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to teach and reinforce our Foundation Principles. New employees learn about them from the very beginning, when they go to our website to apply for a job, then again at their job interview. They get a full week of “Foundation” training on our culture, Foundation Principles, Conscious Capitalism, and company philosophy and goals before ever setting foot on the sales floor. We’ve put our Foundation Principles on our shopping bags and T-shirts, and we even named conference rooms in our Dallas headquarters after them. We explain them to everyone we do business with and discuss them in nearly every communication with employees, and during the daily “huddle,” a morning meeting of the store staff before the doors open.

This constant reinforcement is necessary because sometimes a Foundation Principle can be misinterpreted and the new version can take on a life of its own—a mutation of the culture, I call it. Someone will thank a colleague for getting them coffee by saying, “Wow, you really filled my basket!” That, of course, misses the point that this principle is really about creatively crafting mutually beneficial relationships with our vendors. Or an employee will help a customer who locked herself out of her car and will say, “That was Man in the Desert!” That was a great gesture, and something we encourage, but it had nothing to do with selling products. We keep talking about the principles, over and over, so their true meaning is understood by all.

Our Foundation Principles reveal our higher purpose by motivating our employees to do whatever they can to help the company thrive. In that sense, the moral imperative of Man in the Desert Selling is about more than just helping the customer. It’s also about ensuring that a company that does so much good for so many people—from employees to vendors to customers to investors to the community nonprofits we support—can flourish and reach its full potential.

In recent years, as we began publicizing our Foundation Principles and what we stand for, we’ve been surprised by how much customers respond to them, too. That’s part of a larger trend of consumers increasingly insisting that brands reflect their own values and make a positive contribution to the world. They’re definitely voting with their pocketbooks. And that’s not just about donating to charities—though we do plenty of that, too. Consumers also want a company’s basic DNA, how it feels and operates, to be based on positive values.

So we began explaining our Foundation Principles to customers in our catalogs, on our website, via social media like Facebook and Twitter, even on the sales floor.



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