Loose strands of ideas

If you were employed at the SAS Institute, you'd have 35-hour work weeks and unlimited sick leave "" even to take care of ailing family members.

Your pre-schoolers could be sent to one of four Montessori-based childcare centres set up by the company and you could help yourself to unlimited free snacks at any of the break rooms on each floor of the 24 buildings on SAS's 250-acre campus in Cary, North Carolina.

Oh, and did I mention the 54,000 sq. ft. gym, complete with free personal trainers, swimming pool, yoga and dance classes, soccer field, tennis courts and putting green? The catch? There's none.

But there is a lesson here. It's not enough to hire the best talent, you have to retain them to do their best work for you. And investments in employee loyalty pay off, apparently.

SAS is the world's largest private software company; it is the leader in intelligence-software services.

With revenues of over $1 billion, until the recent technology crash, the company had witnessed 24 consecutive years of double-digit revenue growth. All of which has been made possible by a dedicated, enthusiastic workforce.

That is the recurrent message of Kevin and Jackie Freiberg's Guts!"" identify your growth driver and don't be embarrassed to go all-out after it. Case study after case study looks at how entrepreneurs who threw themselves heart and soul into their businesses have succeeded.

It's all about guts "" the guts to create a sense of ownership; the guts to make business 'heroic'; the guts to hire people "who don't suck"; and the guts to "lead with love".

But this is not a book on good business practices or strong leaders "" although each chapter begins with "Gutsy leaders". Instead, a thin thread of commonality stitches together unrelated anecdotes about companies.

To be fair, the book jacket makes no promises of tales of extraordinary leadership or pathbreaking entrepreneurship. It says companies and companies is what you get. Southwest, of course. But also Aveda, Medtronic, Synovus, Planet Honda and Semco "" companies that are, perhaps, not yet household names in India.

The world-revolve-around-America attitude can be excused "" if you want to read about Indian leaders, find them and write your own book. The other oh-so-American aspect "" the design "" though, grates.

Reading Guts! is like reading a 278-page magazine article: cutesy graphics and fun photographs, checklists and subheads, subheads, subheads... It's fun for the first chapter. Not after.

Guts! is the sequel to the Freibergs' 1996 bestseller Nuts!: Southwest Airlines' crazy recipe for business and personal success where the Freibergs gushed about how the airline has become a phenomenon in the industry.

Unfortunately, Guts! goes the way of most sequels: it doesn't so much take off from where the first left off, as act as a recycling centre for all the leftover information.

Reams have been devoted to the continuation of the Southwest story, how company president Colleen Barrett has kept the airline soaring on the wings of success and how empowered employees take decisions that build goodwill for the company.

It all seems a little too good to be true. Is that all it takes, you wonder. Build them a country club and your employees will start beavering away? Arrive at a staff party on an elephant, wear a clown nose at another do and watch them bring in the bucks?

Not really, say the Freibergs. What stands out in the case studies of these companies is the practice of 'servant leadership'.

The concept was developed way back in the 1970s by AT &T executive and author Robert Greenleaf, but it's become the buzzword de jour in corporate circles.

Servant leadership exhorts leaders to create a shared vision for the organisation, one that offers everyone the chance to work together on a common goal.

The creation of a spirit of community and fostering a sense of interdependence are central to the concept. The experiences of the companies featured in Guts! exemplifies servant leadership. Birthday cakes and balloons, care packages for the ill and elderly at home, handshakes and hugs... all are part of the package. The thinking is simple "" and forms the backbone of the book.

Employees who work at companies that care for them are more satisfied; their level of engagement is higher and their commitment to the organisation is total. Loyal employees help create loyal customers and increase profitability.

But all that has to be inferred from the anecdotes. Guts! is more a slideshow of who does what than a serious, learned dissertation on how to stand out from the crowd and earn megabucks in the process.

The Freibergs have apparently drawn on five years of research to write this book, but where is the analysis, the deeper understanding of what makes a company "" and its leader "" truly great? There's precious little readers will take away with them after reading this book "" except for, perhaps, an overwhelming desire to send their resumes to SAS.

GUTS!
Companies that Blow the Doors Off Business-as-Usual

Kevin and Jackie Freiberg
Currency Books
Pages: 278
Price: $26