The golden rule of strategic choice

Cosmetics company Mary Kay owns the famous Pink Cadillac brand and is recognized as one of the best-run and most successful companies today. Mary Kay Ash founded Mary Kay in 1963 with an investment of $5,000, and today the company operates in 33 countries around the world, generates more than $1.4 billion in annual global revenue and maintains double-digit revenue. increase.

Mary Kay Ash firmly believes that one should treat others as one expects them to be treated. By doing so, his company will be able to last forever. This is the "golden rule" she believes in, and it is the core principle by which she runs the company. This simple but powerful principle drives all of her choices, including goal choices, relationship choices, psychological choices, and customer choices.

Goal Decision: Focus on Service to Others

Almost everything Mary Kay Ash did in founding and running the company was inspired by a noble sense of purpose , a core philosophy that drives her actions.

If you look at companies that act with lofty goals, you'll see that they go to great lengths to provide the best for others. They do it in a variety of ways, like extending a helping hand, providing financial help, providing services like training or education, etc., but with one goal: to make life better for others.

At these exceptional companies, the lofty purpose of serving others is reflected in the day-to-day operations of the business. Each question about this goal will be viewed from a different angle by employees, who may ask, "Will we be profitable by continuing with this goal?" They will also ask, "Through these actions, we are Create a human-centred environment?"

The answers to these questions are not or are not necessarily mutually exclusive. If you create a people-centric company, people will be more than willing to do business with your company. In fact, those great people around you will serve you. While having a group of talented people doesn't make a company profitable, they're one of the things that's integral to building a great company.

At The Mary Kay Company, the "go-give" philosophy reflects the company's lofty goals. If an Independent Beauty Consultant is faced with a choice between continuing her career at Mary Kay or looking elsewhere, Mary Kay Ash will encourage the Beauty Consultant to choose her own preferred development path. Even if it might mean losing a very talented beauty consultant to the company, it wouldn't matter to the company. What really matters is that the person made the best choice at that moment in their life. That's how Mary Kay Ash set herself the yardstick of giving without expecting anything in return, and she wants the entire company to operate in accordance with this lofty goal.

Mary Kay uses a number of ways to reward high-performing salespeople financially. But to ensure that the entire company remains focused on lofty goals, Mary Kay Ash created an annual award that has nothing to do with money, the Giving Award. The award, given annually to salespeople who perform exceptionally and expect nothing in return, has become one of the company's most coveted awards.

Relational Choices: Building Common Bonds

A special kind of relationship can develop between people in a community that identifies and shares good values. It's a relationship that goes beyond trust, it's a common bond! This relationship stimulates the company's potential to complete special tasks and is the starting point for the company to grow into a great company. Mary Kay Ash consciously infused this potential into the development of Mary Kay, and the company's current leadership continues to strive to maintain that legacy.

In practice, very few companies are able to implement this special case. The reason is simple: While most managers are willing to work for leaders with good character, they have a hard time doing it themselves. They want to enjoy the benefits of the golden rule, but they are unwilling to pay and lead by example.

One Fortune 500 manufacturing company has personally experienced the value of creating common bonds from the opposite. One day, a machine on the company's production line suddenly malfunctioned. As a result, a large piece of equipment fell off the production line, nearly crushing an employee standing next to it. The factory manager rushed to the scene anxiously and in a hurry. He blurted out before he got his footing: "How long will it take us to get the production line back to production?" ignoring the overwhelmed employees. On another day, at the same factory, an employee suffered a heart attack and the production line was forced to stop. The same thing happened again: They pulled the employee off the line, threw him on the floor, and went back to work on the line, almost ignoring him.

In both cases, no attention was paid to the injured or sick employee. Every signal from management is saying, "For us, our employees are of limited importance, and keeping the production line running is our real concern!"

This company pays its employees very well Competitiveness ranks among the highest in the world. Employees have unusual benefits, but they are also members of the world's most militant unions, ready to strike and often hostile to company management. They have chosen to leave before retirement, leaving this negative work environment.

A company like this deserves it! The employees came in with enthusiasm, but soon after, they just wanted to hurry up and finish their 8-hour work and go home.

Mental Choice: Making Others Feel Good

Businesses often do wonders if they treat their employees well. When employees feel valued and appreciated, their work efficiency will be greatly improved, and the company will therefore have a stronger competitiveness, which can provide employees with better treatment and ultimately achieve a virtuous circle.

Mary Kay Ash often tells her colleagues that everyone around you should feel that they are important. However, many business people often do the opposite. They announce to the world that they expect themselves to be important in the perception of others, especially those of their subordinates.

Let's be honest: We all want to feel important, but how do we achieve this confusing goal? Generally speaking, there are two paths to this goal: one is to increase your importance at the expense of others; the other is to make others feel more confident, competitive and valuable.

When you truly value others, a crucial thing will happen: they will decide that you are important, they will perceive that you care about others. If they are your customers, the odds of them making up their minds to do business with you are greatly increased. If they are your employees, they will put in 100%+ effort to work. This is because they are motivated by your attitude and eager to fulfill the expectations of those they respect.

In many cases, as a business grows, employees feel less and less of their importance to the business. Ordinary employees can become isolated and lose contact and contact with others. In response to these problems, Mary Kay Company designed an effective response: arrange for employees and their "clients" -- independent beauty consultants -- to have direct contact. Dick Bartlett, the company's vice president, explained: "We start each year with a 'Leadership Conference' that brings about 10,000 top sales team leaders to a meeting somewhere. An ideal place to assign support staff who not only help frontline salespeople, but build personal relationships with them.

"The leadership conference is followed by our most famous frontline salesperson event--- Annual seminar. This workshop provides an important networking opportunity for support staff. During workshops, we take advantage of a 'creative exchange' format, where support staff take their place, answer questions from front-line salespeople, and show them new products or services from the company. 'Creative Exchange' is an integral part of Mary Kay's service-learning system, which is built on our company's philosophy of "Listen, Listen, Listen!" "You show that you value someone so much that he is eager to share his best ideas with you. That's the beauty of listening.

Customer Choice: Identifying New Needs Early

A Powerful Motivation A people-enhancing strategy is usually not something someone single-handedly thinks about in a corner of an office. Typically, such a strategy is the result of a key company team answering a key question. The key question is: How can we become in the future? Excellence? Obviously, the more talented and committed employees that focus on this issue, the better your company will be.

Strategy should be a process that maximizes utility today and tomorrow, and a plan for long-term success. What an obvious concept. Sadly, many companies are "seeing flowers in the fog". Many companies in trouble are suffering from "quarterly reports", that is, companies focus too much on the situation at hand. And Great companies are different! Of course, they are very concerned about the current performance of the business, but at the same time they also understand that the present must also contribute to creating the potential for future profit growth.

How Mary Kay Company What makes the difference? Outsiders might think that it is the company that has been noticing and focusing on its core competencies—production and marketing skills—that makes it the pre-eminent brand in the global cosmetics market. In fact, like other outstanding companies, Mary Kay Continuous change is taking place in almost everything. This habit-breaking mentality has kept the company at the forefront of anticipating customer needs. To maximize utility today and tomorrow, the company has become a master of change.< For example, early leaders at Mary Kay discovered an interesting trend that seemed to intensify as the years passed, namely that the daughters of existing Mary Kay customers would also be eager to use the company's products. This means that the company must be able to understand this rapidly changing younger market. While this new market is nominally easier to reach, it is equally difficult to meet market demand. These daughters not only Like their mothers, they have high expectations for the company's products and want the company to design products specifically for their age group.

Therefore, Mary Kay has developed a new Velocity brand product line to complement the company's core product line and Meeting the needs of this youth market. The company refines the Velocity collection each year to reflect changes in fashion seasons and consumer preferences. At the same time, Mary Kay, the skincare group, occasionally adds new additions to its classic line. Content, but always stable. This is Mary Kay's strategic principle: make the most of today, but also actively prepare new products and services to embrace tomorrow!

Mary Kay's strategic choices and the personal belief system of the company's founders are enduring in themselves. Likewise, when you write something as fundamental as a lofty purpose in your mission, you are likely to find your The mission, and the market potential that goes with it, will become practically infinitely powerful.

This text is adapted from the book More Than a Pink Cadillac: Mary Kay Inc.'s 9 Leadership Keys to Success by Jim Underwood with permission from publisher McGraw-Hill Company. The publisher registered the copyright in 2002. Translated by Li Jian.