All companies have a corporate culture, even if no one is aware of it. Corporate culture is nothing more than "the way we do things around here." The only question is: Will management shape a culture that insures the company's success, or leave things to chance?

Training a staff of adaptive, energetic, motivated employees to make informed, coordinated decisions in "real time" has become the essential task of management.

"It took us a while to understand we actually owned part of the company ourselves. But that part gets more exciting every year, especially for longer-term employees.

-- Pat Napolitano, Quality Control Supervisor, Reflexite10

"So what's the limiting factor?--The answer, I realized some years ago, is people. We are the limiting factor on this company. "

--Cecil Ursprung, Reflexite11

Learning how to exercise leadership in this environment is a challenge. Conventional topdown command and control leadership styles may bring compliance, but they have lost the ability to inspire loyalty and enthusiasm. And without that spark of extra energy, the company forsakes a vital competitive advantage. For managers, too, working in an environment without that spark of reciprocal energy is draining. The satisfaction that comes from coaching a winning team does not need to be confined to the playing field. While hierarchy will always be part of business life, companies which develop a participative culture often achieve a level of shared enthusiasm that equals the financial benefits of the program in its contribution to all the people who spend their working lives at the company. Working together can actually be fun.

Conventional managers treat labor as a cost to be minimized. Yet, actually, a company's work force is an asset to be developed, an asset with extremely high profit potential.

Many shareholders implicitly act as if they fear that the growth potential of their company is limited. Apparently, they regard their business as a zero sum game. They seem to feel that sharing ownership with others, even with the very employees they depend on to expand the success of the business, will reduce the value of their own ownership, This attitude itself may be the greatest limiting factor in the growth of such companies. In their anxiety not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, they starve it--not to death, perhaps, but into enfeeblement. Why, after all, should an employee strive to grow the company for the sake of the shareholders' future wealth?

Employee indifference to profitability is potentially more damaging than outright hostility. Apathy and cynicism are much harder to identify and correct.

In today's economy, no company can afford to neglect its most valuable resource: the talent of its employees. The PRO-Productivity System (tm) provides a step-by-step approach for any company to act on the most obvious lesson of the entire American economic experience:

People work best when they work for themselves.

In the end, there is no substitute for the internalized motivation based on shared stock ownership. Self-interest does not need to be taught.

A great deal of systematic effort, on the other hand, is required to assure that employees--who have often had little financial education and even less information about the inner workings of their company--come to recognize their own long term self-interest in sharing ownership of a flourishing enterprise.

A well-planned, systematic approach to employee education and the development of an ownership culture is indispensable to success. By designing and effectively implementing an employee ownership system, existing shareholders can tap into a natural reservoir of employee energy, ingenuity and commitment that few leaders could hope to stimulate by pep talks, picnics and quality circles alone. For many managers, the satisfaction they gain from creating a work environment that respects and expands the potential of each employee is reason enough to adopt the PRO-Productivity System (tm).

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