A Journey into the Heroic Environment: A Personal Guide to Creating a Work Environment Built on Shared Values, 3rd Edition

Rob Lebow (SelectBooks, New York 2004 1590790618) $21.95

REVIEWED BY SHARIF KHAN

Living in what Alan Greenspan called an era of “infectious greed” with corporate titans facing serious jail time, Ex-WorldCom CEO, Bernard Ebbers, leading the way facing life behind bars, and sobering laws in place such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act making ethics and values increasingly important components in every organization, it would do well to learn how to help organizations create heroic environments based on higher standards of excellence. Mr. Rob Lebow, former Director of Corporate Communications for Microsoft, with over twenty years experience helping companies implement his Shared Values Process to create what he calls, a Freedom-Based Workplace, attempts to do just that for readers in his book, “A Journey into the Heroic Environment.”

Resurrecting an abandoned, ‘failed,’ 1972 study, undertaken by graduate students from the social psychology department of a major United States university, with over 17 million survey responses from workers and managers in 40 countries and over 32 Standard Industrial Codes, that was not able to reveal any conclusive connection between job satisfaction and individual or organizational performance, Mr. Lebow’s research team started their own investigation. Bringing a fresh perspective to the study, Lebow realized that the key to solving the mystery of overcoming cultural challenges to create exceptional levels of performance, was not going to be found in the hard numbers and statistics of the survey, but in the actual, literal comments of all the participants. Using this creative intelligence, Lebow indexed the most often addressed topics in all the discarded surveys by country. And the revelation was that all the surveys from the different countries mentioned the same subjects. This became the Lebow Company’s 20th Century Rosetta Stone that finally cracked the code to the secrets of unlocking high performance that were embedded in the previously undecipherable 17 million worldwide surveys that the original research missed.

Under the scrutiny of this new lens, the Lebow research group discovered that it was Values, not job satisfaction issues, which resided at the core between performance and what managers and workers were really looking for. Lebow’s research suggested that there were eight values that all people respected throughout the world regardless of race, religion, nationality, industry, gender, educational level, or organizational status. Furthermore, the Lebow research group concluded: “that these eight Shared Valuesrepresent the major factors that contribute not only to job satisfaction and employee morale, but to an organization’s performance, competitiveness, speed to change, innovation at every level, willingness to learn new things, and overall operational success. [That] this was the universal Cultural Return On Investment (ROI) linking people to performance.”

While the author does not mention exactly how he came to this revolutionary conclusion, he claims that the correlation between organizational performance and these Shared Values has been tested and validated with over 2,300 organizational sites. These universal Shared Values which Lebow calls The Eight Principles of the Heroic Environment

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