Family Values - The Bedrock of Corporate Values

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Mr. Howard Khoo, CEO and Executive Director of the Hing Yiap Group of Companies, a public listed company in the business of lifestyle fashion and F&B. The title of his talk was " Shuffling Family, Work & Play".

Among the many points shared by him on how he balances family, work and play, one particular message stood out very prominently. He owed his successes to the family values which have shaped the lives of his family members over the generations. He shared with the participants of how the values of sharing, caring, diligence, respect, tolerance, patience and risk taking were inculcated among the young and younger ones by his grandmother, parents, uncles and aunts through their respective beliefs, words, deeds and actions. Likewise, his children are now being exposed to and instilled with the same set of family values by his own unique way of incorporating these values while on business cum holiday trips and participating in sports activities.

We have witnessed and still witnessing how decades old corporate giants had fallen like bowling pins and consigned to the corporate scrapbooks. Many experts have put forwarded several plausible reasons for these modern day corporate failures. The absence of integrity and the presence of unsatiated monetary greed and unethical business practices have been singled out to be the principal causes.

If the researchers were to go back into the genesis of each of these fallen giants, they would have uncover the corporate principles, values and business practices of these organizations laid down by their respective founding fathers based on their own family values. It is not wrong to say that family values form the bedrock of corporate values. However, when these organizations grew by leaps and bounds over the years, professional managers were hired to lead and run the businesses with the founding family members taking a back seat.

As these professional managers were rewarded based on the level of corporate performance, they would have thrown caution to the wind and took extreme risks in the pursuit of corporate and also personal successes. Along the way, someone somehow lost his/her moral compass and whatever espoused corporate values stay at lip-service level with no inkling of the original intention of those values.

To me, this undesirable situation can be avoided if the affected corporations had put in place a set of values-based core competencies to be demonstrated by all levels of employee at all times.

Being SMARTER in the New Year

It's that time of the year where most people would make new resolutions for the coming year. All time favorites include "I've to go on a diet program!", "I must start exercising daily" and "I got to quit smoking". These resolutions are very personal and beneficial to the person/s who made them. Yet, we all know that most of these resolutions would have been broken before the new year is barely a week old.

Why are new year resolutions so fragile? My view is that they are so general that they don't lend themselves to specific action, measurability and commitment. Making resolutions and yet not resolute enough to see them through may reflect the character of a person.

However, for those who are so intent to be successful in achieving something during the year, I have a solution for you. Instead of new year resolutions, you can set personal goals with clear milestones marked over the next 12 months.

Corporate goal setting usually follows the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Realistic and Time-based) principle. In setting personal goals, I like to advocate the SMARTER way. As the achievement of personal goals pertains to personal successes, each personal goal statement has to have elements of Stretched, Measurable, Aggressive, Repetitive, Time-based, Emotional and Rewarding. For example, an individual who is 10 kg overweight and desires a balanced body weight, can set a personal goal like " To achieve a 12 kg reduction in body weight by end of June 2009". This means that the individual has only to take the necessary action steps to achieve a monthly 2 kg reduction over the next 6 months. Paul J. Meyer says "success is the progressive realization of worthwhile predetermined personal goals".

The good habits of being discipline and highly committed honed from the process of setting and achieving personal goals yearly invariably will positively contribute to the professional development of an individual at the workplace. Personal success is the cornerstone of professional success.

As a first step to personal and professional success, get rid of the old habit of making new year resolutions which you don't intent to follow through. So be smarter than others in the coming new year by setting personal goals the SMARTER way!