The Design

The Design

In this chapter of Back To The Cottage, John Sipple gathers his design team together to rethink the foundational principles of the entire Foley plant. Along the way they give Foley employees a stronger sense of ownership of their work by changing the leadership model and opening up opportunities for employees to develop their skills. Here's an excerpt:

Armed with our training experience and site visits, the design team was ready to tackle the work we had been chartered to do. We began with a thorough assessment of where we were. This took some time and produced a few spirited exchanges but for the most part there was pretty close agreement regarding the state of things at Foley.

We shifted our focus to the future. Comparing what we saw on the site visits with the assessment of our current situation gave us a starting point to discuss what we wanted our business to look like in the future. We needed one more thing; we needed to know the guiding principles for our journey together.

Our challenge was not how to develop a list of guiding principles – we had had a set of principles developed by someone now long gone. The problem was whether they were the right principles and, if so, how to live them out. The organization in general, and the design team specifically, were not of one mind about that.

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ABOUT BACK TO THE COTTAGE

Back to the Cottage unpacks John's numerous leadership experiences and traces the development of the values that made him an effective leader. These are the lessons learned not in a high powered educational institution or a corporate leader development boot camp, but in the family's cottage business of his youth.

About the author

Contributing author John L. Sipple is the President of the Business Resource Network, a management consulting firm that specializes in executive coaching and leadership development. Since founding the Business Resource Network in 1996, John has worked with management teams ranging from entrepreneurial start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations.

John has over 30 years experience in corporate management, at both Dupont and Procter & Gamble. He has held numerous management positions, and was responsible for the success of several P&G manufacturing facilities in the United States, Canada and Germany. In his professional career, John was involved in over 20 successful organizational start-ups or change processes, and is an expert in change management strategies.

John and his wife Kathie have three married daughters, and eight granddaughters. They live in Fayetteville, Georgia (Atlanta) and are very active in a number of volunteer activities including The Navigators, for which John serves as associate staff, and Global Commerce Network, for which John is a board member.
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