Your entry and Julian’s remark point to the notion of trust, leadership and company culture. For me its ultimately about how the mix of people work together and how the core group (responsible for the revenue and mission) relates and learns with and sparks the social network surrounding a venture to learn and act.

Right now something hidden in both these entries also alludes to the invisible and that which is not obvious to the eyes of the beholder. That is ultimately what challenges an entry today that stated you have to be able to measure profit gained from each employee.

I am not really certain when Oprah relates to her employees she is thinking, “how did this person add to my profit today?” I do think she may be thinking what is great about what this person contributed to my organization today and how did that help me do my job.

Maybe that ties to Haughton’s notion of how do you do your job, rather than how did you behave today or what did you say?

Through a strange twist of travel fortune that Shannon and I experienced last night in Atlanta, we bumped into Gary, a VP of Operations for the travel company . What a fascinating character he was. We shared some laughs and stories - one of which was his story about Adelman.

Adelman is a company of somewhere north of 300 employees, very successful from a customer and revenue perspective and one that very much sounded like a model employer. The founder, Ollie Adelman is 92 and still comes to the office every day, meets with his people every day and so on. His kids are running the business too but instead of being spoiled rich kids living off dad, they’re humble and act like the other employees. They preach trust and autonomy as cornerstones of their business success as much by action as by their words. It is clear that they treat their employees very well in all areas. No one ever wants to leave the company and the employees are happy and fiercely loyal. When down turns around 9/11 killed the travel industry they were one of the only travel companies to refuse layoffs, instead instituting a voluntary vacation policy where employees who could afford to take unpaid vacation did - while others of lesser means could keep working. I could go on. There were lots of stories like this.

I wanted to run right out and interview Ollie Adelman, his family, and his employees and I still might! The good news is that Ollie wrote a book. So I’ll start there. It’s called All Things Are Possible. I suspect it would be worth adding to your reading list as well.