A new and fascinating look at exactly how a business’s interior culture can drive corporate success has just been published by Gerald Klein, a management professor at Rider University in  Organizational Dynamics, one of the leading academic journals on management.

Creating Cultures That Lead to Success: Lincoln Electric, Southwest Airlines, and SAS Institute goes inside these three firms – all consistently-profitable leaders in their sectors of the economy over the long-term – to compare how their relationships with employees serve to maximize the benefits for their customers, shareholders and the workers themselves.

Prof. Klein and I spoke a few months ago about various issues I had written about in SPARK. I find the overall similarities between the three firm’s commitment to maintaining a long-term focus to be powerful evidence that the pursuit of profit simply does not have to be built on the backs of employees who are forced to share all the downside risks.

His analysis also, once again, provides convincing evidence that Lincoln Electric is not an outlier in the economy for its embrace of a no-layoff promise – because Southwest and SAS have had similar policies in play for many years. This is all about good leadership, not black magic.

Have a read.