The Conference Coach™

My parents did a great job raising me.  They were the Ozzie and Harriett of parents, if you’re old enough to know what that means.  Not only did we have a strong sense of family, community and faith, but we had a lot of conversation about value system and what that means both personally and professionally.  My dad, who turns 85 soon, keeps the Rotary Creed on his wall which has the motto, “Service Above Self.”    He lives that creed every day and always has in his personal life and when he worked for General Motors.

Whenever I am fortunate enough to run a company, as I am now with Copper Conferencing, I think about value systems and want to make sure that employees think about them as well.  A strong corporate value system dictates how people should treat their customers, their employees, their stockholders, and their peers. 

Copper’s value system is straightforward and simple.  It has some simple concepts:

• Be easy to do business with
• Customer needs are always first and always urgent
• Communicate honestly, specifically and directly
• The task is the boss

I wholeheartedly believe that we better think about what we stand for as business leaders and make sure we’re running our companies that way.  We owe it to a generation of workers who spend as much if not more time on the job than they do at home.  And we certainly owe it to our customers so they know what it is our company stands for.