After thirty years years of leadership experience  in roles that include front line management, executive leadership and even business consulting, I often find myself frustrated as I see a “boss” poorly execute the responsibilities of his or her office. Hal Rosenbluth in 1992 wrote the book The Customer Comes Second in which Rosenbluth detailed a management paradigm recognizing the primacy of taking care of your employees as the key to organizational success. The customer comes second paradigm permeated business thought for most of the 1990′s and 2000′s. Unfortunately as we entered the late 2000′s an opposite approach seems to have developed. It is an unspoken practice in which the employee comes second. The employee comes second may not be an explicit practice but it has emerged as a dominant stratagem of business leaders throughout the country.

On the surface there may be a correlation between the economy and these implicit leadership practices. As the housing and banking sectors slumped in 2007 and 2008 driving the economy into a recession, businesses laid off thousands of workers creating a surplus of potential employees in the marketplace. Bosses soon realized that these potential employees represented tremendous power. Current employees became expendable and hence when I talk about the “good boss”, I often get the response: “Really, they don’t exist!”

Future posts will present the search for “the good boss”. They will detail organizations where leadership understands the value of employees and produces outstanding results. In addition, organization’s where leadership is out of control and employees are seen as expendable resources that can be discarded much like a broken tools will also be discussed. If you have personal stories you would like to share, this blog welcomes your experience about either scenario.

The passing of Steve Jobs affected me on multiple levels. My first computer was purchased in 1984. I missed the debut of the iconic 128k Mac but in late fall I purchased the Fat Mac the 512k version of the original. I have owned Macintosh computers ever since. One of Steve’s best known ideas was his desire to ding the universe. In other words, if you are going to do something do it with passion, swing for the fences and change the world. This blog will swing for the fences, it wants bosses to become good bosses and for organizations to appreciate them. The good boss is the one that recognizes, that in order to drive business results, the customer has to come second, and the employee comes first. Being “the good boss”  and other leadership skills can be learned; one way to reach your full potential as a leader is to lean more about a Masters in Leadership Online Degree Program from Saint Joseph’s University. The goal for this blog is that when someone says: “the good boss”, the response is: “you must mean my boss!” Stay tuned there is much more to come!