“I spent a huge amount of time and money attending Harvard Business School (HBS). For the record, I loved almost every minute of it, and would strongly recommend it. However, more than 15 years later, I only remember a handful of things. One of them was the importance of your workplace environment. The campus at HBS was impeccably maintained. As students, we used to balk at this, because it felt like our hard-earned tuition dollars were being used to fund a massively over-funded army of landscapers. It seemed like landscapers stood by, blowers in hand, ready to catch the leaves as they fell from the stately maple trees on campus. Each blade of grass was lovingly cut to the perfect length. You get the idea. Then one afternoon at a student meeting, the Dean addressed this issue head on. He said, ‘In my experience, if you put people in a professional environment they will behave in a professional manner.’ I took off my beer-can-helmet and listened. He was right.”
—Tom Gillis, VP/GM of the Security Technology Group at Cisco.
Source: “A Place of Excellence,” Forbes, February 3, 2012.