At a high-tech firm in Bellevue, Washington, on an overcast Friday afternoon in October, 1985, Rob Lebow was sitting in his office when a stranger entered and asked "What do you do around here?" That stranger turned out to become, in his own right, a best-selling author and one of Rob's great friends; but on that day Roger Parker's question set Rob on a journey of discovery that has grown into an international training and consulting business on four continents with over 300 clients in literally every industry.

That day, Rob Lebow began his work to define the Heroic Environment and then to duplicate its positive power in organizations worldwide. In 1986, Rob discovered data gathered in 1972 by graduate students from the social psychology department of a major United States university on a research project seeking the link between job satisfaction and individual and organizational financial performance.

Initially, 2.4 million workers and managers in the United States from 32 Standard Industrial Codes (SIC) were surveyed, but no conclusive correlations or links could be validated. So these graduate students broadened their search to an additional 40 countries in hopes of achieving a correlation. The expansion generated an additional 14.6 million surveyed workers. In all, 17 million responses were reviewed. After almost three years of work and 17 million sources of data, no conclusive connection was validated between job satisfaction and individual or organizational performance. So, reluctantly, the students abandoned their work and viewed the data they had accumulated as having little or no value.

The Values & Attitude Study was created. The data had gathered dust in a dark corner of the university's dead files for nearly fifteen years until Rob Lebow and his research team started their own investigation. Their ultimate goal was to develop an instrument that organizations in any industry could use to uncover cultural challenges that impeded exceptional performance levels. Additionally, they hoped to use this new instrument to predict future financial performance, merger opportunities and uncover fraud in an operation. Today, the instrument is called the Values & Attitude Study and it is on-line and available to organizations worldwide, with a database of over 2,280 sites tested. Additionally, the GSA (Government Services Administration of the United States Government) has certified the instrument for use in any and all U.S. federal agencies.

The Lebow team identified three factors the graduate students had not recognized. First, job satisfaction is not linked quantifiably to performance or morale. One person's happiness is personal to the extent of that individual's perceptions. Second, performance is the outcome of an organization's culture, or the context in which individuals work. And third, job satisfaction, or intrinsic motivators, must be found deep in the human psyche.

The turning point came when Lebow took a cue from John Naisbitt, author of the bestseller, Mega Trends. In his book, Naisbitt used a most unorthodox approach to see the future; a future we now know Naisbitt predicted with uncanny accuracy. By totaling the column inches devoted in newspapers and magazines to the social, political, spiritual, and economic issues that would shape our future, Naisbitt postulated that those subjects which scored the highest would become the important issues of the future.

So, the approach Lebow took was to identify the most-often addressed topics from the discarded surveys by country. And the surprise was that all the surveys from the different countries spoke of the same subjects. That was the key! That was what people from every country were focusing upon. This became our 20th Century Rosetta Stone that finally unlocked the secrets in the 17 million worldwide surveys that had been overlooked in the original research. (The Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, cracked the code that allowed Egyptologists to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.)

Buried in the literal comments, unnoticed by the young university researchers and their advisors, was a treasure trove of answers that would unlock the key to high performance. The answer screamed at the Lebow team. It was Values, not job satisfaction issues that were the link which opened the door between performance and what workers and managers sought. And Lebow's results suggested there were eight values that mattered to all people throughout the world, regardless of nationality, race, religion, industry focus, gender, organizational status, or educational level.

Shared Values were identified. These eight values became the Shared Values that Lebow registered with the United States Patent Office in 1989 and became the basis for the early Shared Values Process^®/Operating System, and later the TransAction Zone^TM approach to creating Great Customer TransActions that are supported by the Shared Values Process^®. Here is the unique list.

The Lebow team concluded that these eight Shared Values^®—clearly important to people in all industries and all cultures worldwide—represent the major factors that contribute not only to job satisfaction and employee morale, but to performance, competitiveness, speed to change, innovation at every level, a willingness to learn new things and overall operational success. This was the universal Cultural ROI linking people to performance!

In 1989, the Lebow group tested their hypothesis on a small chain of three-meal-a-day restaurants located along the Interstate 5 corridor in the Western United States. This small study showed a direct link between how well each of these restaurants delivered on the eight unique Shared Values and how each restaurant scored on bottom-line financial results. From this beginning in 1989, over 2,280 organizational sites [in which 50 or more employees were surveyed] have been studied. And in each case, the correlation between organizational performance and these universal Shared Values has been validated. Today, more than 300 operations are using Shared Values principles in their daily efforts to achieve customer satisfaction and operational performance!

[Click HERE to see full history (PDF format)]