Reinspiring The Corporation - The Seven Seminal Paths To Corporate Greatness

Job Spec: Construction of Cathedral in Chartres, North West France Dimensions: 34m high, 130m long Materials: 500,000 tonnes of limestone, 176 stained glass windows Style: Gothic Time Frame: 30 years Confronted with this project would you screw it up and bin it? Probably. Why? Because the task is too enormous? Because the goal is too hard to achieve? Because you could not get the people in your organization to buy into the idea? But, wouldn't it be fabulous if you could achieve this, or its equivalent, in your place of business. How then could the construction of Chartres cathedral be achieved? Individuals working on a largely voluntary basis hauled and hammered stone, strained on pulleys, and mixed mortar to craft this monumental building. What drove them? A vision - the fulfilment of something in which they all consummately believed; something that validated the unrewarded toil; something they believed in fully. They call it Faith. What this achievement confirms is what is possible if people believe strongly enough in what they are doing. If the human soul buys into an idea with a passion, with total commitment, the bounds of what we are collectively capable are quite simply astounding. What would it be like for a company if fifty thousand souls were as single-mindedly driven to do what they did at Chartres? What would AT&T look like? IBM? ABB? Your company? This book argues that it is possible for the corporation to inspire and harness comparable committed, co-ordinated energy. The process is called Reinspiration. Apply it within your corporation and reap the benefits.

MARK COLERIDGE SCOTT is a director of Lake Capital Management, a principal investment group specialising in investing in professional service firms. He was formerly Executive Vice President and a founder at Lighthouse Global Network, a global marketing group that was acquired by Cordiant Communication Group plc in August 2000. Before Lighthouse he served as Operations Director at WPP Group plc and prior to this worked for a numbe of years as a management consultant in Europe and the USA. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and was educated at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He is author of Value Drivers, The Professional Service Firm and Heartland: How to build companies as strong as countries, all published by John Wiley and Sons.

Preface.

Introduction: The Need for a New Paradigm.

The Reinspiration Model.

The Way Corporations Think About Competitiveness: Is There Really a Problem?

The Origins of the Seven Well-Trodden Paths to Reinspiration.

Corporate Reinspiration: What's in it for the Individual?

Path 1: Reinstating a Framework of Moral Authority.

Path 2: Refocusing the Corporation on Collective Outcomes.

Path 3: Cultivating a Common Language, Idiom and Identity.

Path 4: Embedding a Shared Corporate Heritage.

Path 5: Releasing the Flow of Ideas: Inspiring the Asking of the Big Questions.

Path 6: Invoking an Aspirational View of the Collective Future.

Path 7: Cultivating Corporate Mystique.

The Shape of the Reinspired Corporation: Towards a New Dawn.

Select Bibliography.

Index.