Word: lincolnisms
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Even if a company were willing to try, it wouldn't be easy to imitate Lincoln. "So much depends on the culture they have built up," says Norman Berg, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. When Lincoln embarked on an international expansion in the early '90s, it learned the hard way that its system wasn't easy to export; many foreign workers valued perks more than individual advancement...
Which begs the question: If Lincoln is such a proven winner, why don't more companies play by the same rules? Answer: most companies aren't willing to make the necessary trade-offs. Lincoln may guarantee a job, but not much else. Workers get neither sick days nor holidays and have to pay for their health insurance. Not surprisingly, organized labor, which relies on solidarity, doesn't like the competitive set-up at Lincoln, which isn't unionized. Seniority barely exists: if older workers slow down, their salaries could too. Management also moves employees at will, from payroll and sales...
Mind you, the rewards are not small. Over the past three years, Lincoln has doled out nearly $200 million in profit sharing to its Cleveland employees alone. In 2000, the average bonus was $17,579, about 45% of an employee's salary; the top factory workers pull in more than $100,000 a year. When the firm faced its first loss in 1992, Lincoln even borrowed millions to keep the payouts coming...
...course, that might not go over so well on Wall Street. Lincoln has been a public company for six years now, and shareholders might not be tolerant during a pronounced slowdown. As Joseph Maciariello, professor of business administration at Claremont Graduate University, says, "Lincoln puts the employee first, customer second and shareholder last." For the rest of corporate America, that ranking still won't make the grade...
...inflexible and deceptive in a memo to colleagues last week and made a public show of introducing his legislation in the House. Now the White House has to take those defections seriously, which affects their negotiating posture. Apply too much muscle and you might lose moderates like Senator Lincoln Chaffee, who cares about this issue and who last week was publicly flirting with pulling a Jeffords...