I like to sift the good articles from the dross and share the good stuff with friends and coworkers. That’s the purpose of this column, incidentally. I read stuff, find things that are both informative and interesting to working professionals, and offer it for your consumption. Continue reading
You see it everywhere: car ads touting increased fuel economy, retailers featuring high-efficiency CFL light bulbs, and consumers carrying reusable grocery bags and coffee cups. The growing “green” movement encourages waste reduction to prevent over-burdening and polluting our natural resources.
As a manufacturer competing in the global marketplace, Leggett & Platt aggressively eliminates waste to reduce costs and provide more value to our customers. Our constant pursuit of efficiency naturally leads to more sustainable business practices. Our Geo Components business unit goes a step further by developing products engineered to protect the environment. Leggett has found that green businesses (and business practices) are good for business.
I like to sift the good articles from the dross and share the good stuff with friends and coworkers. That’s the purpose of this column, incidentally. I read stuff, find things that are both informative and interesting to working professionals, and offer it for your consumption.
Get enough sleep or die – Mashable
The topic of sleep is always close to the fore here at Leggett & Platt, so a lot of us pay attention to every bit of news we get about it. So, here’s a short piece about it. By the way, have you noticed how much attention has been given to sleep lately? It seems as if you can’t go a day without hearing about the importance of sleep, and how you’re basically a nonfunctioning troglodyte if you don’t get the recommended eight hours. Does this article shed any new light on the subject? A little, at least for me. And that is: the cells in our body produce waste product, which needs to be cleaned up. The best conditions for that cleanup exist while we’re sleeping.
Families display certain common traits and behaviors, generation after generation, that have nothing to do with genetics. These non-genetic markers are passed down through shared perceptions, beliefs, and actions, as surely as hazel eyes and curly hair. The same is true for companies.
At Leggett & Platt, we recently set out to revise the competencies in our annual performance review, and accidentally found ourselves deconstructing our corporate DNA. We started the project with 15 competencies – things like strategic thinking, decision making, interpersonal skills, and communication. Instead of simply trying to whack a few that seemed less important, we started with a clean sheet of paper and our company history book. Looking back over 130 years, our leaders displayed certain common qualities, no matter what the business challenge of the era. When we distilled this “Leggett DNA,” we found eight key qualities that drive our collective success. Eureka! These characteristics, expressed as actions, reflect our culture and the way we lead.
A member of the Leggett team: Continue reading
I like to sift the good articles from the dross and share the good stuff with friends and coworkers. That’s the purpose of this column, incidentally. I read stuff, find things that are both informative and interesting to working professionals, and offer it for your consumption.
Today’s blog features a couple articles about workers and the workplace. Incidentally, has “worker” become a pejorative or politically incorrect term yet? With so many companies referring to their employees as “associates” or “partners” (at Leggett & Platt, we prefer “employee-partner”), “worker” seems harsh somehow, even to an avowed capitalist like me. Anyway, this article describes the criticism leveled at Yahoo recently when it was revealed that they use a “ranking and yanking” policy in assessing employees. The approach, which began in the ‘80s and ‘90s but went out of fashion, is considered by many to be a severe way of ranking employees, with part of the purpose to get rid of the ones at the bottom.
Leggett & Platt has been in business for over a century, but our logo has undergone relatively few changes in that time. The one major change came in the early 1970s, when we moved from a simple “L” to a script typeface. I sat down with Leggett’s Creative Director, Scott Clark, to discuss the history of the logo.
In the early days, this metal tag was attached to every Leggett product and eventually became the official logo. The circle in the design was actually a hole used for fastening the tag to springs and frames. “I love the simplicity of this design,” stated Clark. “It’s fascinating how well it holds up–what looked good 100 years ago still looks good today, and that’s not always the case.”
Every week, I read stuff, find things that are both informative and interesting to working professionals, and offer it for your consumption.
For the week of Monday November 18, 2013:
Here at Leggett & Platt, we sell good sleep. We do it through the marketing of our comfortable bedding products. (Marketing example: as a copywriter, instead of writing that our products are “comfortable,” I might write that they’re “ultra-comfortable.” I learned how to do that in college.) But through the Adjustable Bed Group, we are also realistic in our marketing, knowing that the bedroom – and the bed – has become a place for many other things, such as watching TV, using a laptop, and reading. This article emphasizes that if good sleep is your number one goal, you should limit the number of things you do in bed.
Have you logged onto the Internet lately? If not, you’ll notice that the Web people have posted a bunch of articles since you last looked in. Some of the stuff is even worthwhile. But there’s a lot of dross, too, and what I like to do is sift through it and share the good stuff with friends and coworkers (some coworkers are also friends – you know who you are). That’s the purpose of this column, incidentally. I read stuff, find things that are both informative and interesting to working professionals, and offer it for your consumption. Yes, the definition of what is worthwhile reading is mine, but there’s a good chance you’ll agree. We’ll see, anyway.
For the week of Monday November 11, 2013:
This piece is from 2011, but I come back to it regularly. For an old-schooler like me, it’s beneficial to have young people around – except maybe when I want to illustrate a point by bringing up something that happened on “The Brady Bunch”; they’re terrible with Greg Brady background knowledge, which is sad. But they keep me current and help prevent me from slipping into lameness. Some smart companies actually assign reverse mentors to their “older” employees.
Board Chairman & CEO David S. Haffner
For four full decades—from the 1960’s through the 1990’s—Leggett & Platt achieved growth of 15% per year (on average) in earnings, dividends, and stock price, largely by pursuing a strategy that focused intently on revenue growth. Over those 40 years revenue ballooned from $7 million to $4.3 billion, earnings grew about 1000‐fold,and our stock split approximately every 5 years. But as we entered the new millennium, our strategy seemed to lose its effectiveness. For the five years ending December 2007, Leggett & Platt’s stock priced moved sideways while the S&P 500 index achieved an 80% return. The desire for topline growth had led us to make certain acquisitions for which it’s now clear we paid too much, given their failure to meet expected performance levels.
We needed to make a change in strategy.