If Cash is King, then Culture is Queen

Success or mediocrity of an individual is substantially dependent upon the paradigms or belief systems of the individual. Purposeful positive thinking is certainly part of the formula for success but it does take more. Success requires a perspective or vision of what is possible in life that is greater than the results which the person has generated to date. Also required is the persistence to continue to pursue this vision coupled with the flexibility to change plans as obstacles arise.

Managers must understand the dependency of individual paradigms on the success of their department or company. With a team of people who have a variety of beliefs and fears, team performance is often inconsistent and success is unsustainable. In essence, the team can only perform effectively when two situations combine.

First, managers must leverage the positive thinking, vision, persistence and flexibility of every individual. At the same time, managers must minimize the extent to which an individual’s ignorance, doubts, worries and fears are engaged. This is a difficult environment to maintain for a number of reasons. In my opinion, the most significant element of the environment is the employee.

Employees are not static. Their paradigms shift daily based upon what they absorb around them at work, in the news, or in their personal lives. Managers cannot expect to reach some state of nirvana where success is guaranteed. In a growing economy as employees see success, they begin to reset their reference points and eventually accept today’s success as the norm while expecting more success tomorrow. This impacts their paradigms and allows them to see a greater vision. The opposite happens in a declining economy. Employees find themselves expecting to lose what they have and fear causes them to contract. Their paradigms are reset to a survival mode to protect what they have. Thoughts of survival and thoughts of thriving cannot co-exist.

Sustainable success and growth in any organization requires that every employee develop a disciplined thinking process through which they can hold positive thoughts, see a vision of something greater than the results they have today, persistently pursue the vision and flexibly change tactics to continue to progress toward the goal. Few resources are available to assist management in developing this thinking. Over the last decade I have learned a number of principles and created a variety of exercises that support management by engaging every employee.

Several of these lessons have been used to create immediate results in contract negotiations, strategic organizational changes, and product or service development. One sales executive told me recently that he used one lesson I taught him to impact a negotiation with a channel partner. In the first four days of his sales campaign, he hit record numbers. The negotiated contract proved to be a win for everyone involved.

In a new program called, ProfiTornado, I have compiled thirty of the principles I learned over the last decade as I have led organizational change. In addition, I created exercises and a daily journal based on research from leading psychologists and neuroscientists. In less than an hour a day, you can dramatically change the paradigms of every employee in your organization. You will create more profitability—potentially a 20% to 50% increase—in spite of the economy. ProfiTornado is a thirty day web-based program that can be customized for the culture of a particular organization or the challenges of an industry.

When you are ready to change your organization’s culture, contact my firm. We will work with you to implement a new way of thinking that is shared by every employee and we will release the profits that your organization is capable of earning.