Corporate Culture as Competitive Advantage - The "New" Right Stuff

For the Great Recruiting Blogswap Week 5, we are honored to have as our blogging guest David Perry, managing partner of Perry-Martel International Inc.  and proud keeper of the Guerilla Job Hunting blog.  Thank you for your thought-provoking insight.

By the year 2010, the cumulative codified knowledge of the world will double every 11 hours. What you go to bed knowing at night will be outdated by daybreak. Shelf life for knowledge will be the same as that for a banana. Already, product lifecycles are measured in weeks not months or years. In this environment a company’s survival hinges on its employee’s ability to share knowledge - a concept that is foreign to most organizations, where people hoard knowledge to safeguard their jobs.

In the forthcoming book, Building Organizations That Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound, authors Ron Wiens, Ken Sudday and I focus on how to build a corporate culture that produces a winning bottom line by focusing on the organization’s Relationship Intelligence. The ability of employees to trust is a measure of the organization’s Relationship Intelligence.

Companies with high Relationship Intelligence will succeed because they can build new knowledge and therefore new products and wealth on a continuing basis. In contrast, companies that have low Relationship Intelligence and hoard their knowledge and will fail.

Responding to challenge is not new for technology companies. But the speed at which companies must make high-impact additions to their leadership teams is new. A company’s leadership equity has a direct bearing on its ability to drive through new strategies, make tough decisions, and turn crisis into opportunity.

This is an environment for lean companies, driven by a relative handful of highest-quality employees. Prepare yourself, but for sheer luck, the leaders who have the talent you crave are likely already employed. Any person who can design a top product, manage project complexity, perform marketing miracles, sell new customers, or execute leadership, is an authority who can take his or her pick of top opportunities. They will only make a move if the career attraction is compelling. 

Recruiters need to learn to sell first and buy later or risk watching their company shrivel up and die!

David Perry is managing Partner of Perry-Martel International Inc. He is co-author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters [Wiley 2005] and Career Guide for the High Tech Professional [Career Press 2004] See www.perrymartel.com for contact details.

Get call center outsourcing services from Furst Person.

Technorati tags: corporate culture, business intelligence