OCTOBER 2008: FROM THE EDITOR
The path to excellence
The early September day couldn’t have been more beautiful
and the Portland Art Museum was just as spectacular, a fitting
setting for the creative work going on at our first annual 100
Best Conference.
We packed the Mark Building for a day designed to help
business leaders build a better workplace. It was remarkable to
see so many business people give up the tantalizing warm and
sunny day just outside the door so they could learn ways to
make their company a great place to work.
It was remarkable, but not surprising. The 100 Best project
has for 15 years shown that Oregon companies care about being
great workplaces. We’ve had thousands enter over the
years and hundreds repeatedly sign up. When we moved that
project beyond the pages of the magazine to a conference this
year, I wasn’t sure how many business leaders would care.
But I got my answer as I stood at the podium. Looking over the
assembled group, I saw 300 people representing almost 200
companies across dozens of industries. All with the same goal:
excellence.
I know time is precious and dollars are tight. But this group
managed to find both in order to learn from the nine workshops
on topics such as how to be a great boss, balancing work and
life, and why a positive culture is important to the bottom
line. A highlight of the conference was a panel discussion
among CEOs from 100 Best companies. The CEOs were generous and
honest about what they do to create employee satisfaction, and
they knew what it meant to their bottom line. As Dave Evans of
David Evans & Associates said, he hates it when CEOs say
that employees are a company’s most important asset.
“They aren’t assets,” he said
passionately. “They are the company.”
It is that kind of leadership and way of thinking about those
who work for you that creates a great company: David Evans has
been an Oregon
Business 100 Best company seven times, and this year was
named by Fortune as
one of its best companies to work for.
As I ducked in and out of the various sessions, I heard a
portion of David Layzell’s workshop. Layzell is a retired
Intel executive who teaches business ethics at Portland State
University and he was listing his seven steps to building an
ethics program. The first and most important was “Choose
to be an optimist.”
That’s powerful advice with meaning beyond ethics. If
you are optimistic, you will assume greatness can be yours. If
you are optimistic, you might know you aren’t there yet,
but given the right information, you could get there. If you
choose to be an optimist, knowing what your employees really think about working
for you isn’t terrifying. It’s necessary.
The 2009 100 Best Survey is under way. I hope you participate
this year if you haven’t before, and if you have, I hope
you join us again. (Go to Oregon100Best.com to sign up.)
There’s no cost to participate, and what you get back is
honest feedback (employees take the survey anonymously) about
what your workers think about your company — and you.
Choose to be an optimist.
