Discuss the below:
1: Lululemon is a specialty retailer founded in 1998 that designs, manufactures and sells yoga-inspired apparel. Their business culture includes integrity, work/life balance and having fun. In addition, the company encompasses entrepreneurship and the importance of providing a high valued and quality product. Their core values are:
1. Quality
2. Product
3. Integrity
4. Balance
5. Entrepreneurship
6. Greatness
7. Fun The relationship between this culture and the mission and values of the company is fierce. The company actively invests in its training skill-based training program pulling employees into their culture. This program marries the mission of backing their quality products with quality and knowledgeable customer service. Goal setting is also included in the training. Employees of Lululemon are also compensated dearly with continued education, empowering employees and compensating them for their efforts. The benefits of having a strong culture like Lululemon's, which by the way is a pain to type, is that you have a strong following among your employees. Employees feel empowered with the fact that they can move up in the company, creating a lifted work environment. The costs associated with this strong culture is the leniency of the rules of business. Lulu offers many fringe benefits that others do not. From compensation packages to higher education it makes sense if you want to invest in that person. However, there are ZOINKS. I guess there are Zoinks everywhere. With that said, the cost of having a strong culture is the resistors who don't believe in the product and leave he company based on either the core values or the company culture.This is regardless on what benefits the company has to offer. As you all know, I am a Verizon Wireless employee and proud of it. The elements of Lulu are all there. I can't complain on anything associated with Verizon because so far everything is good. Commissions may have a problem but it is in the works. Hopefully. The elements of this culture I would like to see with my company is a better training system. We are currently experiencing a faulty training experience from a retail level and it is inhibiting sales. Unlike Lulu we are a service provider; however, inventory levels have seen an all-time low in certain stores resulting in lower sales dollars.We can have displays for products we don't have. Consumers want their products now. If they wanted it shipped they would order on-line.
2: Lululemon and Culture. Corporate culture refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determines how a companys' employees and management interact(Investopedia). Having this concept in mind, it confirms that lululemon's culture in rooted in their core values and manifesto(HBS, 2010). The core values places emphasis on entrepreneurship and making quality product. The seed was planted historically from when founder Chip Wilson designed the original products and started using ambassadors to provide feedback from his early yoga students, to continually improve the products during that time. Relationship. The mission and values are the direction where the company want to go and behaviors demonstrated daily to achieve the mission(Welch,2005). These two points would mean nothing without a healthy cultural environment, on which the cultural foundation stands for lululemon. The foundation stands for: Integrity, work/life balance, and also having fun. Just like a famous slogan, in milk does a body good,having fun makes for happy employees, and happy employees make a good company great. Benefits. The cost and benefit of having a strong culture like lululemon's are the following; When then SVP, Christine Days was promoted to CEO, she had the next level goal of taking the company to the 1billion financial goal. One key asset of this strong culture is the company operated as a vertical retailer. This communication top to bottom and bottom to top. The result was creating such superior products that basically sold themselves. The significant caveat, with the financial investment put into employee education which translated to staff educators, associates who could increase the consumer knowledge base about what they were buying. The strong cultural also allowed for feedback from corporate ambassadors who provided feedback of consumer likes and dislikes about the product. However, the benefits would not be possible if for one significant point,"No matter what strategies are created at the office, people who execute the strategic plan are the frontline"(Days, Christine,2010, HBS, Lululemon). Suggestions for my company. Primarily for my company, I would encourage leaders to adopt more of a vertical retailer approach to get the up and down feedback. And to, invest needed resources into education and training about the product in order to engage consumers from a knowledge based position to inform and get feedback to help improve product development going forward. And I would ask our company to ramp up the fun level, and celebrate more. As Jack Welch said success should be celebrated(Welch,2005). Conclusion. A strong corporate culture offer tremendous benefits to long term success, but it means nothing if a company is not willing to invest and empower their employees to succeed.