I know I have said this a million times, but what I like so much about practicing law is that I get to work with the same companies for year after year and so i get to see what works and what doesn’t. What I have found, maybe not that surprisingly, is that some companies just seem to have it.
I have one client who works in a really tough business. These company supplies a commodity to mostly Russian, Chinese, and Korean companies on credit. I have represented this company for probably ten years and in that time many of its competitors have shut down and yet this one company just keeps on growing. A couple things amaze me about this company. One, the fact that I cannot name even one single person who has left the company since I started representing it. Two, they eventually always get paid, even if it means pursuing litigation around the world.
This company has a formula for success and it never veers from it. It gives its people a lot of responsibility and high pay, closely tied to performance. Good people stay. Customer contact lists and pricing are critical trade secrets in this business and yet this client has never called me with an employee issue surrounding those. My firm has represented other companies in this same industry and they seem to have ongoing problems with this.
This company always gets paid because it uses tried and true contracts and because the word is out that if you do not pay, this company will fight you wherever and however it can to get paid.
I thought of this company today when I read a really interesting post over at the China Leadership Blog, entitled, “How to Protect Your China IP.” The post starts out noting how employees are a leading IP risk to companies and then it lists out the following two ways to lower this risk:
- Hire workers with character who share your values and they will not come to learn your technology and then sell it all away. Workers of character do not do that. They do not download all your secrets and sell them to someone else. If you want IP protection, then you want to focus on worker character. Workers of character also do not leave for a few extra bucks. They seek meaning in their work and stay if they feel valued. Strong cultures will hold them. Are you a most admired company? If you are, then your risks of people leaving at all go way down.
- Retain those workers. Care about workers and notice their achievements. Give them meaningful work and let them do it their way within agreed to top values. Build your IP protection on hiring and retaining workers of character . Good leaders make head hunters irrelevant. We need that. Good workers are hard to find. What are we doing to make them so happy they will not listen to any head hunter?
Hard to disagree. What do you think?
