Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture

by Stan Slap

You can't sell it outside if you can't sell it inside.

You want maximum business performance? Look under the hood and you’ll find your employee it is the power that drives the enterprise engine. To harness that rumbling power you’ve got to solve the mystery of what an employee culture actually is, how it operates and how to move it forward. These are the keys that this book will put right in your hands.

Renowned business culture expert Stan Slap knows the difference between understanding your employees and understanding your employee culture . The distinction isn’t semantics; it’s the key to whether your strategies will succeed or fail. This myth-busting book reveals why an employee culture is an independent organism with its own rules, beliefs, and motivations—and the power to make or break any management plan (and any manager right along with it).

Slap shows you how to get whatever you want from your employee culture, whether it’s improved accountability, innovation, flexibility, resilience, energy, loyalty, or trust. Along the way he solves mysteries that have puzzled managers since the first Mesopotamian farmer hired some help,

Why does an employee culture really resist change?

What does it care about more than money?

Why does it respond to leadership differently than to management?

How does it talk to itself, and what does it mean when it won’t talk to you?

Why are company values the most dangerous threat to gaining its trust?

If you have a wonderful employee culture, this book will help you scale it. If you have a troubled employee culture, this book will help you fix it. If you have an employee culture under pressure, this book will help you ease it. If you have a new employee culture, this book will help you shape it. And if you are investing in a company, this book will help you protect your greatest purchasable asset.

Under the Hood is informed by immaculate research, including surveys of more than 15,000 employees from companies the world over. It’s packed with original tactics that have driven performance for many organizations and countless managers. And it includes jaw-dropping inside stories of employee cultures from the likes of Samsung, Oracle, Progressive, CNN during wartime, Paul McCartney’s band, and the Super Bowl film crew.

It’s all delivered in classic Stan Slap profound and provocative, heartfelt and often hysterical. This is not simply a management book; it is the business case for humanity. Management advice doesn’t get realer or more important than this.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Reference, Cultural

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2015

About the author

Stan Slap is the president of the international consulting company called, by a remarkable coincidence, “slap.” He has a history of accomplishments as a CEO with as many as 5,000 employees reporting to him and has served as a director of several companies with their CEOs reporting to him, which he prefers a whole lot more.

Since 1985, Stan has focused his hoodlum neurons on creating success for slap clients. He is credited with revolutionizing performance for some of the world’s biggest, smartest and fastest companies — developing explosive growth strategies and the cultural willingness to implement them. He personally coaches CEOs and the executive teams of many of these companies.

Stan has directed the successful expansion for companies ranging from Patagonia to Pennzoil. He designed the plan that helped Oracle sell their strategic intent to 40,000 employees in 167 countries and developed employee re-engagement plans for HSBC, Europe’s largest bank. He has created winning brand strategies for companies from Deloitte to Black Entertainment Television. He has invented many successful advertising campaigns, consulted to leading advertising agencies and personally written slogans for companies from Coca-Cola to Checkpoint Software.

Mr. Fabulous has also developed a number of successful management training programs (the number is 27) that have been implemented in more than 70 countries. Stan is a frequently requested keynote speaker in many of these same countries and in constant demand for major event presentations by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies.

Oh, enough already: His self-published “off-white papers” are required reading in several university MBA programs, and his first book Bury My Heart at Conference Room B was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today Best Seller. Stan is working on his second book which will be released later this year.

Stan Slap is intent on making a profound difference in the world before he is forcibly removed from it.

Reviews

[Natascha Thomson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend you read this book. Just today at lunch a friend told me about political internal struggles at her company and how everybody is resisting change. I told her I'd give her a copy of Stan Slap's book "Under the Hood" as that is EXACTLY the kind of stuff he is helping to solve.

The book is a lot of fun and not a typical boring business book. It also has heart and some good pictures.

Find out for yourself. If you work with teams, this is a must read.

[Alec L · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the whole, this book is mostly lessons that are fairly straightforward when thinking from the perspective of an individual employee--things like how managers should communicate with the culture, how certain forms of leadership can get people to be willing to work harder than they're obligated to or paid for monetarily (but in ways which instead compensate them emotionally), or how important it is to have messages from above be consistent and dependable (so e.g. that people know how different actions will be received/what will be punished or rewarded). However, it does offer some key useful perspectives of its own, like its fundamental shift to think of employee culture as a living organism unto itself, focused on its own survival, or its definition that "A culture is your employees' shared beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity" (14). In my opinion, basically everything in the book (and things which even go beyond the scope of the book) fall out naturally from just meditating on those three points: the perspective of the individual employee, employee culture as an organism, and the definition of culture. While these principles themselves are certainly important, the book itself does only a superficial job of fleshing out their corollaries, leaving a result which is certainly well-suited for a busy executive that wants the concrete implications spelled out to them, but which renders the book far less interesting conceptually.

[Hope Mueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important business book on culture. Treat culture as a living breathing thing to be nurtured, developed and well cared for. Quick read, excellent examples and great ideas shared.

[Roya]

I need this ebook
How can i download it

[Exevion Book Club]

Available from Darren Schindler in hardback

[Eric Nehrlich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great insights into culture but dragged on quite a bit after the key points are made. Would have worked better as a long article rather than dilute the message with padding.

[kari · Rating 5 out of 5]

i learned a lot from this book *and* it was excellently written in a way that made me pause and think twice, love it

[Scott Haraburda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodreads First Reads Giveaway Book.

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Under the Hood: How to Fire Up or Fine-tune Your Employee Culture for Maximum Performance is another management book that attempts to offer obvious information as profound insight. Yet, it does provide some historical information regarding the evolution of company cultures with some ideas on how to use it to improve performance, which may make this a useful book to read.

Written in informal prose, making it easy to understand, the author describes his list of seven deadly sins of cultural commitment (failure to respect its power, presumption of rapid behavioral change, plenty of management instead of needed leadership, communications, money, trust, and kickoff with little payoff), which isn’t anything I hadn’t seen elsewhere before.

This author, Stan Slap, is the president of an international consulting company that has helped thousands of corporate leaders improve their organizations. He is also the author of Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: What Truly Drives the World's Most Passionate Managers in 2010.

Under the Hood may be a useful book that highlights one aspect of an organization that management should understood if it truly wants to improve organizational performance. Nothing new, but a different perspective on recognizable corporate leadership issues.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book through Goodreads Giveaways.

I found the topic and concept of this book very thought provoking, which led me to slow the rate of my digesting the book,and considering how it applied to my work setting. In many of the management/leadership books, the focus is on employees, not employee culture, which is more difficult to impact and alter. Slap offers terrific insights in this matter. Anyone who is a manager should read this book.

The only fault/critique of the book that I have is that much of the focus, and many of the examples, pertain to for-profit, Forbes 500 companies. As an employee of a state supported public university in a department that is student fee funded, I found some difficulty connecting to some of the suggestions and concepts Slap suggested, and am still struggling with ways to move his suggestions to action.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stan Slap's "Under the Hood: How to Fire Up or Fine-tune Your Employee Culture for Maximum Performance" is a well-researched yet light-hearted look at issues surrounding employee culture.
I wish the business class I had taken during my undergraduate days had used this book instead of the one we had used regarding employee culture. It was so boring. This one was more educational and easier to read. I would definitely read more of Stan Slap's works in the future and would recommend it for any business student to add to their reference library.
My copy was obtained from Goodreads First Reads.

[Yuki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
Haha. This book was hilarious, also the most non - boring business book I've ever read so far. Such an informative book with an interesting writing style. Though there were quite a few typos, it doesn't matter much.

Also, I love the author's selected notes section. I've added many quotes in it into my favourite list.

Kinda want to go and visit Goldeneye now ... hmmm ...

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honest book about the importance of understanding your employee culture. It can get dull at times but it is a business book so...