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Panel Detail:

Wednesday, April 25, 2007
3:35 PM - 4:50 PM

Building Great Companies by Investing in Human Capital

Moderator:

Jeff Greenfield, Senior Political Correspondent, CBS News

Sumner Redstone, Terry Semel and Steve Wynn talk about what they do to keep their companies’ best talent.

Moderator Jeff Greenfield of CBS news began the session by asking Redstone his method for hiring employees. Redstone responded by outlining the three C's he looks for in people he works with (Redstone made a point of refusing to say that people work "for" him.). The three C's, he said, are competence, commitment and character, but he made clear that "without character, I'm not interested in competence or commitment."

Redstone said his criteria have served Viacom well, declaring, "We have the best programmers that exist in the world," which has allowed him to take a less hands-on approach in managing Viacom. This is the optimal way to develop a company culture, he said. "Don't be intrusive. Empower the people who work with you to make the decisions."

Redstone said that the combination of his leadership and the skill and integrity of his employees had produced remarkable success. Commenting on fostering creativity while maintaining fiscal discipline at CBS, Viacom's television network, he noted, "I think we have solved the problem where art reaches and meets commerce."

Greenfield asked Terry Semel whether he could utilize the same value system in managing a 12-year-old company Yahoo! as he had at his previous job at Warner Brothers. Semel described great similarities in his strategy for managing the two companies, noting, "It has everything to do with creating a family-type atmosphere, where people are a team and working together and trying to help each other really succeed, instead of competing with each other all day long."

Addressing Yahoo's! ups and downs over the past several years, Semel emphasized the need to think long term and keep employees informed about company developments. He spoke of Yahoo's! quarterly company-wide meeting in which employees meet with him and other executives in small groups to discuss strategy and ask questions about the state of the firm.

Semel maintained that even in his unique position, leading a highly innovative company that is changing the face of human communication, his fundamental responsibility remains the same as that of any other leader. "Over the long run," he said, "my job, the job of any leader, is to motivate the audience, to motivate the team and to give them the encouragement that if they had something that didn't work that well, that they are still revved up and sticking to the strategy going through."

Wynn stressed that the key to fostering human capital is to focus on the simple things. "People relate to the same things in the workplace that they do at home -- kindness, consideration, those simple things," he said. "Every time we come up with a complicated idea in human resources, we can't get it accomplished in a large organization. Simple gets the money. Simple gets the job done."

Wynn described the fundamental challenge of business as "finding a way to make people feel good about themselves doing their everyday jobs, whether their boss is there or not." Wynn Resorts uses several techniques to try to accomplish this goal. The company has a program called "story-time," in which employees meet once a month with their supervisors to tell on-the-job stories. Wynn believes that the program has improved company morale by allowing employees to share their experiences and feel recognized for jobs done well.

The discussion showed that different approaches can be used to foster a company's human capital. Ultimately, these techniques are mostly focused on the same ends, namely, showing employees respect, providing them with room to exercise their talent and inspiring pride in their jobs.

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