Stan Slap's Blog, page 2
November 20, 2012
VIDEO: How to Change Company Culture and Innovate by Steve Faktor & Stan Slap
On Steve Faktor’s latest podcast (subscribe here), guest Stan Slap confirmed his findings. (slap is a corporate culture guru and fellow speaker at the BusinessNext conference.) According to slap, “Most companies misperceive intellectual engagement for emotional engagement. It’s the emotional engagement that’s critical.” And when it comes to achieving change, slap agrees, “If you want the culture to buy it, you have to know how to sell it to them.”
View the Forbes article: The 9 Corporate Personality Types And How to Inspire Them to Innovate
IdeaFaktory Website: Episode 3: Slap out of it! How to Change Company Culture and Innovate
November 14, 2012
VIDEO: Employee Values VS Manager Values
A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success;any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted, said Einstein. This is a guy who conducted early nuclear experiments on his own hair and so is perhaps not your most reliable organizational thinker; still, he had a point. The really important measurements of emotional commitment include the ones a company can’t see until managers need to show them. Ferocious support for the company when the company needs it most is one of these hidden metrics. Any manager can appear fully productive and enthusiastic simply because they’re financially, intellectually and physically committed. But if you’ve ever witnessed a human being emotionally committed to a cause—working like they’re being paid a million when they’re not being paid a dime—you know there’s a difference and you know it’s big.
November 13, 2012
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November 7, 2012
Stan Slap Opening Keynote at BusinessNext Social in Las Vegas
We are proud to announce that kicking off the 2013 BusinessNext Social conference (formerly the Social Media Business Summit) on day one is Stan Slap. Stan has a history of accomplishments as a CEO with as many as 5,000 employees reporting to him and has served as a director of several companies with their CEOs reporting to him, which he prefers a whole lot more.
Stan has directed the successful expansion for companies ranging from Patagonia to Pennzoil. Stan wrote the New York Times Bestseller “Bury My Heart at Conference Room B” last year. He designed the plan that helped Oracle sell their strategic intent to 40,000 employees in 167 countries and developed employee re-engagement plans for HSBC, Europe’s largest bank. He has created winning brand strategies for companies from Deloitte to Black Entertainment Television. He has invented many successful advertising campaigns, consulted to leading advertising agencies and personally written slogans for companies from Coca-Cola to Checkpoint Software.
Get your free copy of Socialized! and a 15% discount (Click Here) when you register for a full access pass to BusinessNext Social, the world’s premier social business conference. As Conference Director, Mark Fidelman has gathered a dream team of social business luminaries (including yours truly), influencers and technology venders who will share firsthand experience harnessing powerful social business strategies, cutting-edge social media and mobile technologies, compelling content marketing and engaged communities to create highly adaptive, competitive organizations and rapidly grow their businesses.
October 19, 2012
CEO’s Saying They’ll Fire Employees if Obama’s Reelected?
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From: John Morrella
Date: Thursday, October 18, 2012 11:01 AM
To: Stan Slap
Cc: Sean Browne
Subject: For the company blog
Wanna weigh in on this important election “issue” on our blog:
Mitt Romney Encouraged Business Owners To Advise Employees How To Vote
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-employees-voting_n_1975636.html
CEO to Workers: I May Fire You if Obama Wins
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-workers-youll-likely-fired-131640914.html
From: Stan Slap
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 1:16 PM
To: John Morrella
Subject: Re: For the company blog
Yeah, here you go:
To all slap folks: You know who I’m voting for and why and I know who many of you are voting for and why — it’s all come up in various impromptu conversations around the offices. But who you vote for is totally up to you and there is no penalty to you nor harm that will befall our company because of your choice. I just care that you vote. And I care that you be true to what’s most important to you as human beings, all of the time. Our company would never presume to legislate your thoughts or your lifestyle. Think what you want. Believe what you want. Wear what you want. When you step inside our doors every day you know the uncompromising quality and purpose of our work. You had damn well better be able to roll with that without compromising who you are or you had damn well better let me know about it immediately so I can help fix the problem for you and for our company.
As to those CEO’s who may be threatening their employees with job loss because of voting for Obama, here’s my message: You whiny bitches. You are going to use your position as the Chief Executive to blame outside events for internal performance? You’ll never build a culture of accountability that way. That culture starts at the top and if you’re getting the big bucks and bragging rights as CEO you need to take responsibility for ensuring that your company is able to grow and prosper regardless of who is in the White House.
No matter how the vote goes in November we will take care of each other in this company, same as we always have. As just one example that you already know: We have been paying 100% of our people’s health insurance since we were a tiny, tiny company and we have insisted that our company insurance always be the very best policy available regardless of cost. We have a fund for treatments that insurance doesn’t cover and we’ve always stepped up to help any of our people if something seriously weird goes wrong. If we can’t afford to protect our people we need to fix the business, not fire the people.
Enough — I gotta get back to stuff. Post it if you want, don’t if you don’t. Thanks for asking.
S.
October 16, 2012
Stan Slap Forbes Article: Inside Yahoo! How Marissa Mayer Can Turn it All Around
I don’t know Yahoo! personally; they’re not one of my company’s clients. But I know how cultures work and how to work them. The turnaround that Marissa Mayer is attempting will be decided by the reactions and actions of its manager, employee and customer cultures – in that order. You may not know Yahoo! either but these are the same three groups that are deciding the success of your own company while you read this sentence. Listen up.
A culture is not simply a bunch of managers, employees and customers. When they form as a culture, each of these group… (Read More here…)
October 10, 2012
The slap Office Photo Gallery Union Square San Francisco [Images]
People always want to know what the slap offices look like. Here are a few shots of our San Francisco headquarters showing some of our people’s favorite features, from the outdoor meeting area to the “slap map,” which Stan curated from over 2,500 photos to tell the story of how we roll.
September 5, 2012
The Phobia of Emotional Commitment by Stan Slap
You may want to give emotional commitment to your company; if you can give it, that means it’s safe to give it and you want to be safe in a world you’re devoting so much of your life to. But as a manager you have a lot of indications that giving it isn’t such a fabulous idea. After all, every other type of commitment you’ve fed your company has been slurped down greedily and, my God, it’s still hungry. Willing to work fifty hours a week? Your company will take sixty. Willing to back those strategies that are obviously brilliant? You’re expected to back the ones that are obviously boneheaded with equal fervor. Willing to work hard for bonuses and options when times are good? Plan on working even harder when those are things of distant memory and fuzzy future.
You were an adult before you were a manager and any adult knows the danger of recklessly offering emotional commitment. Emotional commitment is the biggest thing a human being has to give; it’s unconditional, often overruling logic or self-preservation. It doesn’t matter how otherwise confident you are; emotional commitment means strolling into the spotlight, buck naked and vulnerable, anxiously muttering, “Please don’t hurt me.” Well, sometimes you do get hurt, life being life. These are the hurts that last a while, therapy being therapy.
Relationships with family, friends, lovers? Those can be agonizing enough. What can you do but live through them and determinedly fling yourself back into the mosh pit of social intercourse, knowing that to do anything less is to miss the opportunity for true fulfillment?
But to close your eyes and fall confidently into the secure bosom of your company? Uh . . . yeah. Get right back to you on that.
At one time or another, every manager has felt trapped in a vague conspiracy between idiots above them and idiots below. Many are uneasily aware that they inhabit an alien planet whose rulers consider them life forms expendable at a moment’s notice. Company performance requirements are often blithely dismissive of the reality that faces managers as they attempt to do their jobs well and simultaneously protect the sense of self that’s required to do their jobs well.
This is a problem for managers at every level; I regularly coach CEOs and executive teams and they voice exactly the same concerns. When you’re clawing your way to the top, it’s easy to cling to the illusion that everything will be figured out and fulfilling once you get there. When you get there and find that’s not the case, you’ve gained all apparent rewards the job has to offer, everybody expects you to know everything, you can’t easily admit what doesn’t feel good, things still don’t make sense and there’s nowhere else to go. . . . People jump from the top floors of buildings, not the bottom.
I’ve rarely met managers who’ve come into their jobs with a cynical worldview, but I’ve met plenty who’ve adopted one as a protective mechanism. Yet most managers still have plenty of emotional commitment to give to their jobs if they can be convinced it makes sense to give it.
August 29, 2012
slap Offices CLOSED – Happy Birthday Charlie Parker
The slap offices are closed on Wednesday, August 29 for our annual celebration of Charlie Parker’s birthday.
We love Charlie “Yardbird” Parker’s intuitive genius, deconstruction and reconstruction of the established mathematics of his field and unrelenting passionate pursuit of the new.
Our kind of guy.
Bird’s remarkable prowess and vision earned him a reputation as the best alto saxophone player in history and one of the founding fathers of modern music. If you play music or like music or maybe have just heard of music, we urge you to listen to him.
The slap offices will be bopping as usual on Thursday, August 30. We will respond right away to you at that time.
