Be Connected to Our Culture

  The Beginning is So Important

   One of the biggest movies of 2010—The Social Media—tells a very revealing story of the founding of a company: Facebook.  In the factually based dramatization, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, basically takes an idea that others brought to him for his collaborative help in developing, cuts the originators out, recruits some new people to help him and then cuts them out as well when it starts to take off.  (To be fair, there are some redeeming features to the Zuckerberg character portrayed in the movie: For example, being incredibly disciplined, single-minded and focused on one idea.)

  The culture of Facebook, the company, is no doubt only really understood from the inside, but there is a strong probability that the traumatic founding—multiple, multimillion dollar lawsuits involved—has had a profound and lasting impact on the way people behave towards each other. 

   Why is all this important?  Because the culture of a company—and each organization has one—is rooted in its founding and in the beliefs, values and actions of its founders. 

  LaserShip and our culture is exactly that way.  The belief structure of the founding is still our belief structure today.    

   Our organizational culture was formed early on as a reflection of the founder's beliefs. As these beliefs proved to be a successful formula for forming and conducting business relationships, it has remained intact.  It spread slowly, from one generation of employees to the next: What was important to the founders of the company became important to the first generation of employees and managers and the next and next after that.  Overtime, the values of the organization became the corporate culture: How we do things, how we relate to each other.  

  In the beginning, the fundamental driving values were a set of shared beliefs—All of which you today should still find to be prevalent, relevant and actionable:

  

·         Work together

·         All hands on deck

·         Do whatever it takes to get the job done

·         Keep relationships alive

·         Trust each other

·         Do what feels right in your heart

·         Reward performance

·         Teach the next person in line

·         Take care of those around you

·         Give your all each day

·         Make it better tomorrow

·         Be passionate about what you do

·         Show the world your good side

   Eventually, these shared beliefs made their way into five value statements or focuses of the business:

CUSTOMER FOCUS—driven to create satisfied, long-term customers through superior service.

EMPLOYEE FOCUS—driven to recognize, reward and respect the contribution of our people.

ETHICAL FOCUS—driven to demonstrate integrity to customers and employees through honesty and fairness.

QUALITY FOCUS— driven to constantly improve our performance.

IMAGE FOCUS—driven to conduct ourselves in a professional manner.

  These are the values that we (and all of you as you go about your daily work) should be basing your choices and decisions upon.  

   Our values are “contributory values,” because practicing them on a daily basis contributes to achieving our long range goals. Our values are essentially a behavioral guide:  They guide us toward not only what we want to achieve, but perhaps more importantly, how we want to achieve it.   For example, taking care of our customers, being honest with them and providing quality services all contribute to helping achieve our goals of having long-term relationships, being proud of our achievements, generating growth, developing opportunities and increasing prosperity.

   Each of us makes choices each day—how we are going to: Answer the phone, Reply to an email inquiry, Input data that will update customers, Sort packages for delivery, Decide who is allowed to deliver a route…etc.

   All of these are important decisions that you make—and most of them are not constantly observed, monitored and supervised by someone above you.  What guides you as you go through your daily choice making is our culture, our values, our accepted modes of conduct.   

  Each choice you make—and please think about it—should pass the Values Test:  Is this what we want to achieve and is this the way we want to go about doing it?  Does my choice enhance who we are, reflect where we have come from, improve our ability to grow, prosper and provide opportunity?  

   If your daily choices pass the test, then thanks for being connected to our core.

Play Well LaserShip

Making the Vital Connections to People, Processes & Outcomes

LEGO is a visual metaphor, an image that brings forth both understanding and inspiration on a very serious topic: How do we connect our current business problems—the day to day issues each of you deal with—to our established foundation of business practices, goals and values?

What we do today must be linked to our long held purpose and mission. Each of us as we go about our daily tasks need to think about what we are trying to achieve: Our goals are long-term, our mission is to be the best at what we do, our duty to each of us and to the company is to be profitable and our values require all of this to be done while keeping in mind our image of professionalism, quality and integrity.

LEGO building blocks might just help us understand this point. LEGO blocks must fit with and be connected to all others. No one LEGO block is independent of others. LEGO blocks come in various sizes and colors, but in order to construct something each block must fit with the previous one—it must snap into place. To build the next level of a creation the previous and the current pieces of the structure must to be snapped into place and firmly connected; if not, the creation will not be structurally sound, long lasting or look anything like the outcome envisioned.

Just as with LEGO, everything in our business is connected: Connected to our mission, our goals and our values. The concerns of today—such as social media and DPMO concessions, or scanning percentages and driver costs—are connected to each other and to our long-term mission, goals and values.

In order for us to build a sound, lasting structure that looks something like our plan; we must consciously and consistently connect our current problems, solutions and actions to our overall vision of the company.

Social media buzz, for example, is directly connected to individual acts of omission: When we do not snap firmly into place the uniform LEGO, the vehicle signage LEGO, the door tag procedure LEGO or the follow-up communication LEGO we see the negative buzz increase.

Each and every concern/problem/issue of today is a connection issue that LEGO blocks help us visualize, understand and just perhaps solve by consciously making us aware of the impact each unconnected or imperfectly connected LEGO has on the entire structure; if one imperfectly fitted LEGO block fails, the entire structure can come crashing down.

Moreover, all of the issue-of-the-day labeled LEGO blocks are connected (or should be) to the larger structural elements of LaserShip: Growth, Opportunity and Prosperity. Individual, organizational and business growth through (and only through) high service levels and attention to details creates opportunities for us to expand our volume, our markets, our job creation and our career growth which produces profits for the company and prosperity for individuals who make a lasting and recognizable contribution.

The point of the LEGO metaphor for LaserShip is simple: No problem-of-the-day is unconnected from yesterday’s issue or tomorrow’s concern; no task is unconnected from the purpose of the organization; no person employed or contracted is unconnected from the long-term viability and survivability of the company.

Each of us, as a LEGO block, must share the connection to each other; our connection is to our mutual well-being. Each of our actions must demonstrate personal accountability for our own success as well as the success of your team and the entire company; our action must always demonstrate a consideration of the whole not just the parts.

The LEGO block was invented by a Denmark based company. The word LEGO comes from the first two letters of two words in the Danish language—"leg godt:—which means "play-well". Play well for LaserShip means that we have a passion for excellence, that we care about people, processes and outcomes, and that we find joy in both the resulting relationships and the outcomes.

Play Well Today LaserShip

The Ripple Effect

How Many People Does Your Work Touch Each Day

  

At 3:56 a.m. Tuesday morning the XYZ Transportation Supervisor for northern California emailed Cathie H in the Global Critical Deliveries operations center a simple message: “You are awesome.”

  Cathie works 3rd shift for GCD, often with little back-up and with fewer resources; nevertheless she is a problem solver for many of LaserShip’s customers who are relying upon us to get extremely time-sensitive, special treatment shipments  from one place to another overnight.  

   Toiling away at night Cathie is probably unaware of the impact that she has, not only on LaserShip, but on our customers, their operations as well as on the people who depend upon our customers.   The decisions Cathie makes also have an impact (depending on the routing she chooses) on the airlines and the agents across the country who do work for LaserShip.  But it doesn’t stop there, Cathie, based on her decisions and performance, has a huge impact on retained and prospective revenue. 

   There is a ripple effect, an ever widening circle of consequences to everything everybody does.

   We are all Cathie.  Cathie is “awesome,” but not unique.  Throughout the entire company there are replicas of Cathie:  All of the people of LaserShip who are doing their jobs, adding value and making a positive impact, whether they are sorting packages, dispatching drivers, making deliveries, entering data and managing projects.  Going about your job you are having a huge unseen impact on multiple companies and people each day.

   “Cathie,” says GCD’s Vice President, “is a person who has an appreciation for the consequences of her actions; she understands the impact on multiple supply chains down the line if her solutions are not the right ones.”

   To be the “Cathie” in your office, below are a few of the things you can do to increase your ripple effect:

*Have a positive mind-set: Never underestimate the power of enthusiasm in a workplace. Don’t complain when things don’t go your way. *Take pride in the work you do and your passion will not go unnoticed.

*Be accountable:  Don’t make excuses or blame others; be responsible for what you are responsible for.

*Be a Team Player:  To make an impact at work, you have to be able to work effectively with your colleagues. Deliver results consistently and reliably; aim to inspire those you work with by offering and sharing ideas and by being proactive; listen to your customers’ and colleagues' ideas and give positive and respectful feedback; be supportive and share your skills with others on the team.

*Take on difficult assignments: Establish yourself as the go-to person in your office, the individual who is willing to take on the most onerous tasks.

*Manage your time well: Be punctual in all your commitments; learn to prioritize; make to-do lists; meet project deadlines; be considerate of others time. 

*Set the bar high:  Never settle for being ‘good enough.’ Have high expectations for yourself and work hard to exceed them.

   To make an impact at work, you need to be proactive and to keep looking for opportunities to progress; you need to be disciplined, focused and persistent in all that you do; you need to have an “other person” mentality (how does this affect others); you need to be considerate of time—yours and others’; you need to step up and accept responsibility for processes, communications and results; and finally, you need to share the credit for positive things with the entire team.

   As is said about Cathie, “she does so much work behind the scenes we don’t take enough time to thank her for all that she does, for all the people she touches, for all the positive things that result from her actions.”  

Riding the Wave of the Future

LaserShip and Wikinomics

    Collaboration across Boundaries is one of LaserShip’s organizational culture traits.  It describes how “Our organizational and hierarchical lines do not exist to prevent our reaching out to request or give assistance, to offer or receive advice, or to accept or provide feedback that contributes to our mutual success.”  

   Collaboration, trade and the open sharing of ideas, as we have seen (see LaserDay yesterday) are the concepts that have driven the advancement of human and organizations throughout history.  These age-old ideas have received a modern day update with a popular “in” term: Wikinomics.

   What we do, “supply chain logistics” as a network of businesses moving product through connected processes implies a form of cooperation and collaboration and really can be seen as a forerunner of the leading principles of this new field of “Wikinomics” (which describes the effects of extensive collaboration and user-participation on the marketplace and within the business world).

   The use of mass collaboration (the combination and extension of familiar concepts such as teamwork, intra-company cooperation, customer partnerships and end-user relationships) is an extension of the trend to outsources (externalize formerly internal business functions) but has most recently evolved beyond that to refer to individuals who come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem.

   This coming together does not just occur in the “virtual” world of online companies and communities or in software development alone but even in traditional industries.  The adoption of collaboration principles in distribution and supply chain logistics is encouraging innovation, coordination and involvement of customers in the value creation process.

  It is worth LaserShip’s effort to understand these emerging trends.  Wikinomics is based upon four essential principles:

·   Openness—Transparent information sharing and an open attitude towards external ideas and resources; this openness is evidence by the creation or adoption of informal networks both inside and outside an organization as well as the willingness to establish new contacts and in sharing resources, information and ideas.

·   Peering—Empowering of employees to embrace team work, self-organization and shared decision-making/problem-solving; static up and down organizational hierarchies are replaced by flat models characterized by ad hoc collaborative forums.

·   Sharing—Sharing all but the most proprietary and strategic processes and information with anyone who can collaborate to accelerate innovation In this way, all players “ride the wave” of new solutions.

·   Boundary-less—Flexible and unstructured approach that ignores internal and external organizational boundaries in order to promote partnerships and collaboration within a company and between suppliers, customers and end-users

  Our Dulles and Miami branches have created a kind of boundary-less, open, sharing and peering collaboration between offices, with Project Managers willing to share ideas and innovations. 

   Our Global Critical Deliveries division, which has a different workflow than our other offices has also created a Wikinomics model:  GCD does not have “a day” in which product coming in completes a work flow and is all delivered by the end of the day; the workflow is around the clock with jobs starting at any time and continuing for an indefinite period until completion through multiple shifts and teams.  By necessity, the recording and sharing of information within GCD must be across shifts and hierarchies (involving management and all others), comprehensive and with peers openly making suggestions and offering ideas.  In many cases, the customers are actively involved in the details regarding shipments along with the airlines that move most of GCD’s shipments, as well as the ground transportation contractors who start and complete the jobs.

   “We have created a mechanism within GCD,” says GCD’s Vice President, “just to facilitate the open free flow of vital information; a mechanism that allows for us to go beyond the nuts and bolts of a job and communicate the thoughts, feelings, experiences of all that have touched a job.” 

  LaserShip has long embraced openness:  Openness to the exchange of ideas, solutions and feedback, with our actions demonstrating approachability, willingness to receive and share the advice and experience of others, and the desire to examine our own actions, performance and results in order to improve ourselves and the company.  Don’t ever doubt LaserShip’s “riding the wave” into the future.