Do you work at a business with a strong and positive corporate culture? Answer this question first.
When I think of "corporate culture" at work, I first think of:
(a) That green stuff lurking in the back of the company refrigerator.
(b) How the Dilbert comic strip is the story of my life.
(c) An atmosphere that encourages innovation, hard work, accountability and reward, and reaching long-term goals.
If you picked (a) or (b), you are either very honest - or very cynical and probably in need of a new job. If you answered (c), you're lucky.
More than 400 Tampa Bay area business folks battled heavy rain Tuesday morning to reach the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and hear the insights of the top executives of two of the nation's most admired companies, and two business school leaders.
Their mission? To explain why it really does matter for companies to have corporate cultures. After the endless coverage of all that is wrong with corporations and CEOs - from Michael Eisner's recent no-confidence vote of Walt Disney shareholders to the pending sentencing of Martha Stewart and the up-the-corporate-ladder prosecutions at Enron - it's about time to hear about some companies that at least seem to be doing some things right.
As tough as it is to build a good corporate culture, it is also difficult to communicate what it is and how it works. Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said it well 40 years ago when trying to describe obscenity: He could not define it, "but I know when I see it."
August Busch III, chairman of publicly traded Anheuser-Busch Cos. in St. Louis, said his company embraces 10 core values that range from quality, planning and discipline to communications, common sense and humility to help drive and direct the business.
Busch especially saluted two other values. Simplicity means a Busch employee must come to a meeting with all his or her data, experience and arguments boiled down to a single piece of paper with no more than five bulleted points. Another value the chairman holds in high esteem: having fun. Without it, Busch said, "you get old and you get stale."
Does it work? Anheuser-Busch, whose products range from Budweiser beer to Tampa's Busch Gardens and SeaWorld theme parks, employs more than 23,000 people and had 2003 sales near $16-billion. The company, started 150 years ago and led by Adolphus Busch, has outperformed the S&P stock market in each of the past periods of five, 10, 15 and 20 years.
More is at work here than superior stock numbers. In the March 8 issue of Fortune, in which the magazine ranked the nation's "most admired" companies, Anheuser-Busch ranked No. 1 in the beverage industry (even above Coca-Cola). And the company ranked sixth of all large U.S. corporations in management quality, fifth overall in long-term investment value, eighth in its use of corporate assets, third in financial soundness, and first in the quality of its products and services.
Something must be working extremely well at Anheuser-Busch.
Corporate culture is a big part of it, Busch told his Tampa audience. The company chairman, dressed in a business suit and cowboy boots, has more than a passing interest in Florida, after all. Besides being the No. 1 state in company entertainment with Busch Gardens and SeaWorld, Florida also happens to be the No. 3 state in beer consumption.
The company, with its powerful Budweiser and Michelob brands, also holds nearly half of the nation's beer market.
That's an astonishing market share in such a competitive business - not one the company seems likely to maintain for too long.
Like Anheuser-Busch's 10 core values, BB&T Corp. has 10 of its own that it takes very seriously.
BB&T CEO John Allison, who runs the North Carolina banking company buying St. Petersburg's Republic Bank, spoke Tuesday with the lilt of a country Carolina banker and the focus of a student of Aristotle. BB&T's values, published in a small booklet called The BB&T Philosophy and handed to every new employee, were penned by Allison to give his company a sense of purpose and a consistency of values as the company bought dozens of other banks and insurance agencies.
Allison said the cultural statements of some businesses are just "bromides and cliches" that sound good but are disconnected from the company and its employees. At BB&T, core values are reinforced often and training is extensive. BB&T managers are measured on their performance twice a year, and half of their evaluations depend on whether they follow BB&T's core values.
Fellow speaker and business commentator Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder and CEO of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale University, could not resist a few lighter comments on corporate culture.
To August Busch: How can you not have fun when you are a company that sells beer and entertainment? Sonnenfeld also pointed out that Busch's son, 27-year-old Steven, was humbly manning the slides for his father in the back of the Tampa hall.
On the other hand, Sonnenfeld did not mention that the young Busch, who serves as an executive assistant to his father, was paid a not-so-humble salary of $168,912 last year, according to the Anheuser-Busch proxy filed last week.
Tuesday's event was part of a "fellows forum" affiliated with the University of Tampa. The university's business school dean, Joe McCann, served as the moderator.
Boil down all the talk of corporate culture, McCann concluded, and here's what you get. First, keep corporate values simple and communicate them consistently. Leaders should be honest and show that honesty in their actions to gain the trust and commitment of employees.
Second, there is a growing sense that investors, regulators and the media "do not understand and may be actually subverting" some of the positive corporate culture out there, McCann said. Young companies may suffer from the backlash inspired by a few bad apples such as Enron.
"Overall, we focus too much on the lessons from failures," he said. "We can't forget that there are countless very successful companies out there also with good lessons to share."
Sometimes, though such opportunities lately seem all too rare, it does not hurt to accentuate the positive.
