Love, Joy, Authenticity, and Soul:

Building Winning Businesses in the

New Age of Transcendence

• Why today’s most humane companies are blowing away the S&P 500 averages

• Increasing “share of heart”: delivering the emotional, experiential, and social value your stakeholders are demanding

• 30 powerful case studies, including CarMax^®, Timberland^™, Jordan’s Furniture, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, and Toyota^™

Today’s best companies get it. From Costco^® to Commerce Bank, Wegmans to Whole Foods^®: they’re becoming the ultimate value creators. They’re generating every form of value that matters: emotional, experiential, social, and financial. And they’re doing it for all their stakeholders. Not because it’s “politically correct”: because it’s the only path to long-term competitive advantage.

These are the Firms of Endearment. Companies people love doing business with. Love partnering with. Love working for. Love investing in. Companies for whom “loyalty” isn’t just real: it’s palpable, and driving unbeatable advantages in everything from marketing to recruitment.

You need to become one of those companies. This book will show you how. You’ll find specific, practical guidance on transforming every relationship you have: with customers, associates, partners, investors, and society. If you want to be great–truly great–this is your blueprint.

We’re entering an Age of Transcendence, as people increasingly search for higher meaning in their lives, not just more possessions. This is transforming the marketplace, the workplace, the very soul of capitalism. Increasingly, today’s most successful companies are bringing love, joy, authenticity, empathy, and soulfulness into their businesses: they are delivering emotional, experiential, and social value—not just profits.

Firms of Endearment illuminates this, the most fundamental transformation in capitalism since Adam Smith. It’s not about “corporate social responsibility”: it’s about building companies that can sustain success in a radically new era. It’s about great companies like IDEO and IKEA^®, Commerce Bank and Costco^®, Wegmans and Whole Foods^®: how they earn the powerful loyalty and affection that enables truly breathtaking performance.

This book is about gaining “share of heart,” not just share of wallet. It’s about aligning stakeholders’ interests, not just juggling them. It’s about building companies that leave the world a better place. Most of all, it’s about why you must do all this, or risk being left in the dust... and how to get there from wherever you are now.

Foreword     xv

Prologue      A Whole New World         xxi

Chapter 1    It’s Not Share of Wallet Anymore; It’s Share of Heart       1

Chapter 2    New Age, New Rules, New Capitalism  23

Chapter 3    The Chaotic Interregnum 49

Chapter 4    Employees—The Decline and Fall of Human Resources      65

Chapter 5    Customers—The Power of Love 97

Chapter 6    Investors—Reaping What FoEs Sow    125

Chapter 7    Partners—Elegant Harmonies     145

Chapter 8    Society—The Ultimate Stakeholder      171

Chapter 9    Culture—The Secret Ingredient   197

Chapter 10  Lessons Learned    235

Chapter 11  Crossing Over to the Other Side 253

Acknowledgments  273

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 19 Ratings

A profitable, wholistic approach to doing business - 2009-02-24
Reviewer Rating:
There is an age old debate amongst business school professors over which corporate stakeholder trumps all others, especially when those stakeholders have conflicting wants. For instance, customers usually want the most of a product or service for the least cost while owners want to maximize profits by selling a service or good at the highest price. Such dynamic tensions contribute to some of the jerky, spastic movements of organizational earnings, revenues and stock prices across the corporate landscape. However, the book Firms of Endearment discusses a class of companies that are seeking to neutralize the discord amongst varied stakeholders by aligning their individual interests along a unifying vision. Soundview recommends this book because it champions a novel concept that mirrors a reverse engineering of divergent colors of the rainbow back into a single, illuminating white light. The authors coined the term Firms of Endearment to articulate how leaders of these non-personal entities are striving to endear their respective organizations to internal and external audiences by doing what's both subjectively and objectively right by embracing a positive perspective of capitalism's role in society. In light of the recent bad behaviors on Wall Street, this is a book whose time has come.

Wishful thinking and lacking evidence - 2009-01-11
Reviewer Rating:
This book outlines a possible shift in the way people are thinking about their roles and purpose within the companies they work. Basically people are seeking more 'meaning' from their work and as a result companies are changing their basic assumptions and approaches in the field of people management.

The authors assert that changes in demographics, consumer knowledge and an ageing population (which is working longer) is moderating the effects of Hard Capitalism, which favoured shareholders, and introducing a more egalitarian form of Capitalism which favours all stake holders.

The theory is highly seductive and desirable, but the book did not provide any strong evidence to support these claims. They provide plenty of stories and examples to illustrate the theory in action, but it should not be presented as supporting evidence without considering those organisations that also have these 'Enlightened' traits but were nevertheless unsuccessful.

In addition it is not clear which form of employee policy comes first, could it be that only when a company is successful can it treat its employees better with higher wages and enlightened thinking? or will higher wages and an enlightened policy make a company successful?

This book provides a theory which you wish were true, but wishing does not make it so.

A Different Kind of Company. Wave of the Future? - 2009-01-14
Reviewer Rating:
Firms of Endearment is a book that should find its way into the reading list of some course or other in every MBA program. It is a sorely needed counterweight to the lop-sided views our future "captains of industry" are exposed to.

The dogma in business schools is that managers should "maximize" shareholder value and that the "invisible hand" will magically translate this effort into social good by reducing prices and making economically priced goods and services available to all. Laissez-faire economists like Milton Friedman actually go so far as to say that managers are derelict in their duty if they let concepts like social good creep into their decision making criteria. According to them, strict adherence to this philosophy will automatically result in the greatest good for all. Thus, employees will be paid fair wages because if they are not, then the good ones will leave and the company will be unable to "maximize" shareholder value.

The problem with this line of thinking is that human beings are reduced to instruments, to mechanisms whose behavior can be manipulated to achieve ends that benefit one class of persons - the shareholders. Supposedly we are all shareholders through our pension funds and individual holdings but the reality is that distribution of shareholding is highly skewed and getting even more so.

In any case, recent events have conclusively demonstrated that this model does not work. Many CEOs of our large firms have shown great acumen in gaming the system and amassing personal wealth to the detriment of all others including shareholders, employees and customers.

Sisodia et al have a different perspective. They assert that companies should align the interests of all stakeholders - investors, employees, customers, vendors and the community at large - explicitly in a different business model. This takes us beyond simplistic trade-offs - eg higher wages for employees or lower costs for - into a level of concinnity where can have higher wages AND lower prices AND higher profits.

This is a bold vision and I am not sure that they have done an adequate job of delineating the conditions necessary for it to work or how to bring it about. But then this book is a first cut at presenting the vision and it does a more than admirable job in that.

Sisodia et all describe the methodology they used to identify firms that had multiple stakeholder interests at heart and highlight the internal mechanisms they use to achieve that end eg Whole Foods brings together representatives of all stakeholder groups to help it craft its five year vision. This is a book that gets you thinking about the economic systems that shape the world we live in and what are the assumptions that are embedded in them. If you are an entrepreneur, it gives you ideas of how to do things differently and make a holistic set of changes that together can make the world a far better place.

And any book that can do that deserves five stars in my view.

Intellectual argument for corporate altruism - 2009-01-13
Reviewer Rating:
Authors Raj Sisodia, David B. Wolfe and Jag Sheth contend that as U.S. society becomes more concerned with caring, responsible practices, businesses are becoming more aware of serving the society around them, rather than being motivated only by profit. More companies now are building corporate cultures around humanistic values. They provide equal service to each stakeholder group: society, employees, customers, partners and investors. This creates lasting loyalty and even earns a profit. Despite a bit of jargon, the book paints an idyllic but desirable business portrait. Readers might even see its optimism and altruism as a balance to the prevailing negativity. getAbstract suggests this book to executives, entrepreneurs and business theorists.

For Once Nice Guys Finish First - 2008-10-14
Reviewer Rating:
In these trying and chaotic times, Firms of Enderament offers a refreshing new look at capitalism and what it really takes for a business to be successful in today's complex and ever shifting markets.
The authors start by identifying and studying the practices of comanies that honor and serve their customers, employees, suppliers,partners, investors and even the commuities in which they operate. After identifying 28 companys which score high marks in these areas, then and only then do the authors take a peek at the bottom line performance of this group. They then compare these bottom line results with their counterparts which are driven by the traditional and singular focus of shareholder wealth.
The results are eye opening as the FoE's profit performance is 8 times that of those companies which compulsively and almost exclusively pursue the bottom line in the interest of shareholder return. The book makes a compelling arguement that nice guys (business people) can finish first and that by paying attention to its stakeholders rather than just its shareholders a company can excel even beyond the paragons described in the works of Jim Collins.
Firms of Endearment is an excellent work and should be included in the curricula of business schools around the world.

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