First book my boy & I read together. Well, I did most of the reading since he was still in utero.

Pages 90-91 should be required reading for every employer. It deals with 2 things; treat your employee like an adult & allow people to manage their job as they see fit and trust them unless they prove un-trustworthy (and at that point you'd need to evaluate whether you need to keep them)

"... a great caring culture stems from the top of a company and cascades through it like a waterfall. If you want that culture to flow outside the company to the customer, and then get carried even farther by word of mouth, you have to be sure that your messengers live and breathe it the same way you do. Therefore, the dominant obsession for any leader running a company in the Thank You Economy shouldn't be the competition, nor should it be customer service. It should be your employees."

"Any company that gets so complacent it thinks everything is 'fine' deserves to go out of business—it literally means its leaders have stopped caring."

"Make all the people in your company, including yourself, take ownership of their decisions, make it easy for them to use their judgement without having to run for approval every time, and you'll save countless hours that can now be spent tracking Joe and Jane."

"Consider firing and employees who aren't bringing 100 percent of their efforts to the job, and replace them with people who will care as much about your company as you do."

"Being a part of the conversation is as important as having a website. ... If you establish the tone and voice of your brand to your satisfaction, you'll create a solid foundation for someone else to build upon when you do eventually delegate the task, or share it with someone else."

"The customer you should be scared of is the one who has a bad experience, doesn't say a word, and never returns. Thinking about that person should keep you up at night. You have no idea how to get the person back, and you might not even realize that you've lost a customer."

"But it works only if everybody at the company gets on board, which is why unless you are building a new company from the ground up and can install caring as your buiness's cornerstone, you have to be willing to embark on a complete cultural overhaul so that, like a local mom-and-pop shop, every employee is comfortable engaging service, and does it authentically. Your engagement has to be heartfelt, or it won't work."

It's almost as if big business looked around, took note of the increasingly relaxed social norms, and thought, "Well shoot, if they don't care, neither do we." If people were going to expect very little, little is what they were going to get.

"If you don't care, no one will"

"That's what I mean about revealing your company's heart and soul. There's only so low you can go on price. There's only so excellent you can make your product or service. There's only so far you can stretch your marketing budget. Your heart, though— that's boundless."

"The thing is, people don't talk about things they don't care about. So it's up to you to make them care, which means you have to care first."

If you simply hand things to somebody you destroy his pride, and when you do that you destroy him. Let him take charity and he comes to expect charity." —Martha Berry (Berry College)

I trust my management team to run the company from the inside. Trusting them doesn't mean I never question a decision. It's good for them to realize the decision can be challenged, and that I want them to be thoughtful in their conclusions and sure of their convictions. I hear stories about entrepreneurs who control too much and are too arbitrary with the people who work with them. Business owners can be so intimidating that people are afraid to tell the the real truth. It's difficult to disagree with a tyrant; the consequences can be severe—and lasting.

My policy has always been to select trustworthy people—then trust them!

Loyalty remains one of the greatest engines of business success.

People want to work with a person, not for a company.

...you grow through the talent of others—people I have attracted through the years who make my job look easy. I divided the tasks among other people more skilled in their areas that I am, and I trust them to do the job well.