Making Perfect
For Vladimir, Leonid and Savva:
May this book one day help you during your careers; to speak up when you have ideas, to listen for good ideas from others, and to never stop improving yourselves and the companies you work for or lead.
© Lindeberg Teri Ann, 2012
© “Sunshine Publishing House” LLC, 2012
“Making Perfect is not a book to read cover– to-cover in a few sittings; it is a tool for business leaders to improve their connection with their employees. On nearly every page is feeling. The reader will realize that this positive dynamism is tapped by asking, listening and acting on employee input – resulting in customer satisfaction and company success. Using this book, not just reading it, can make a real difference in organizations.”
“Making Perfect is a book that should stay within arm’s reach on any manager’s desktop. It is a touchstone that will serve as a constant reminder to the most successful bosses that human capital is the most important component of any business, and that by listening to and learning from employees, an enterprise can and will thrive. Both market conditions and office cultures (Staffwell operates in Russia) vary, but Teri’s tenet doesn’t: always, regardless of the environment, have open, two-way communication with your people, at all levels, and implement the good ideas and proposals they provide, and then reward the resultant success.
Teri reminds us to have fun at work, too – we managers ignore that maxim far too often. Managers, present and future, will enjoy Making Perfect, and will refer to it regularly– its lessons are golden.”
“Employers around the world are finally recognizing that the Employee Experience and Employee Loyalty are just as important as the Customer Experience and Customer Loyalty. Companies that work to build lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with each team member will undoubtedly keep their teams engaged and happy. Many companies have adopted the practice of creating the Voice of the Customer. In Making Perfect, Teri Lindeberg does a great job of building the Voice of the Employee and understanding how her team members “view” the company, as well as what they “get” out of the relationship. Every employer and every employee can learn a lot about themselves by applying this principle.”
“Although most leaders claim their organisation’s greatest asset are its people very few actively engage with them as individuals. The benefits of doing this – clearly charted in this real-life business story – are huge: critical issues addressed, real insight gained and knowledge about how to build a better organisation. Like all successful entrepreneurs, Teri blazes a path here showing leaders that a successful organisation with engaged, involved people actually starts with them.”
“One year in Moscow is equivalent to 4-6 years in most other parts of the world. Therefore, this book – covering 12 years of entrepreneurial experience, is really a source of experience and knowledge. Although you may believe you are reading a promotional booklet at the beginning, as you explore the different chapters you realize that you are exposed to an honest, simple and pragmatic guide to addressing the most important asset any Company has: its PEOPLE.
Even though we all have read and used some of Teri’s findings and recommendations from time-to-time, her book provides a valuable and systematic guideline to uncover the realities of your Companies’ work environment and what to do about it. All in all, I think we could all use Making Perfect to improve our Companies’ life. Great and inspirational reading!”
“While unorthodox in its approach, Making Perfect strikes to the core of our human nature by revealing what most corporates and business owners really want to know, but rarely bother to ask. Teri’s discovery of the necessary ingredients to develop Staffwell to success and her observations in respect to them, are poignant, purposeful and profound. Though unique in its perspective, the lessons learned will correlate in most business environments and the book will be a valuable desktop resource for anyone managing human capital. Tops off to Tea with Teri!
“Making Perfect is one of the most unique books to have ever emerged on the Russian business and publishing horizon. Its genuine originality is multi-faceted and stipulated by a multiplicity of unifying successful factors, bringing to the Russian readership a truly unusual, yet extremely well-structured, manuscript that is also fresh, yet well researched, and profoundly practical.
What makes the book so unusual?
Firstly, it was written in Russia by an American entrepreneur, who has created her own business that grew to become one of the most influential and successful recruitment agencies in the country.
Secondly, because the book reflects the story, atmosphere, rich business and social context of a very sophisticated and vibrant organization – the recruitment agency, where a fantastic mix of industrial and functional cultures, views, values and behaviors inter-link and inter-weave as they evolve into a cohesive, well-orchestrated and superbly performing team, united by a common goal.
Thirdly, because with all its polyphonic nature, the book delivers a strong and unambiguous account of thoughts, expectations, values and symbols of a team and the company – very representative of the emerging Russian capitalism. In this quality, it assumes the thought leadership in one of the least researched fields – the development of a new generation of managers and entrepreneurs in a major emerging market evolving in front of our eyes.
While having been written with enviable mastery, the book provides an extremely valuable set of practical tools and means inestimable for managing and developing a multi-cultural and multi-lingual team, which will serve well to those who are facing the challenge that the author embraced back in 1990s.
Particularly captivating are the passages on how the author and the Team overcame the hurdles of the economic crises – the memorable Russian meltdown of 1998, and the Global downturn of 2008 that still haunts both economies and minds alike. Lessons that readers can learn from respective parts of the book can be very practical in the current conditions of economic volatility and its social and motivational derivatives.
Overall, the book brings to life a sophisticated, well-nuanced, and subtly drawn picture of the rich context, emerging and evolving in a real-life organization that (in its almost palpable existence on the pages) incessantly creates unique knowledge – the theme of knowledge (tacit and explicit, sticky and leaky) is not brought by the author to the forefront of the book, but it reveals itself in many connotations and allusions to the famous book by I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi on the Knowledge-Creating Company. In its ultimate role, the book is all about knowledge, both developing in the Team that makes the centerpiece of it, but also – to a much higher degree – the knowledge that permeates and inspires the contemplation of the dedicated reader.
In its significance for the understanding of contemporary corporate life and its multi-faceted context with its values, emotions, stories, and insights, the new book inherits from the seminal writings of J. Collins, but it takes us to a new quality – not only Great, but truly Perfect. And it clearly succeeds in that due to its ability to penetrate into the psyche of the Team, and not only into the tenets of corporate strategy and optimal business processes.
The book is destined to become the must-read among those who want to get a lease of precious knowledge, scrupulously gathered by the author in her years-long effort on managing the organization while writing down the inspirational chronicles of its evolution and attainment of ever-elusive perfection.
And soon it will clearly