Frank Maguire

Frank Maguire was a founding senior executive at Federal Express, and served in a variety of senior executive positions with Kentucky Fried Chicken, ABC and American Airlines during benchmark years in the history of each. He also served in the executive offices of President's Kennedy and Johnson.

'Today, new technologies break through daily and are obsolete nearly overnight,' he says. 'We have mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, reengineering, and the global economy. We are watching the transformation from brick and mortar to click and mortar. But we're taking our eye off the ball.

'Business is people. We are in the people business, no matter our product. People do business with people they like. It is passion, not process, that forms the soul of a company. A passionate workforce inspired by its leaders has a direct positive effect on productivity and earnings.

'Slashing head count and operating expenses is not the way to a strong bottom line. The way to success and profit is through your people. They need validation, not motivation.'

This is the core of the Maguire leadership philosophy, and it is a theme that this influential man takes up time and again in his tireless public speaking.

He recently said: 'As I see it, corporations have a major communications problem. It is a crisis of employee morale. The work force is confused. They do not feel that they are getting the full story of what is happening within their company. They see a constantly changing management team.

'They perceive senior management as remote and often indifferent. They receive a wide variety of conflicting messages. And, in the absence of solid information, they are open to all kinds of misinformation, rumors, undigested data, and speculation about their company and its future.

This leads him to conclude: 'At the core is the need for a company-wide culture, which incorporates a shared vision, shared knowledge, and shared responsibility. If this positive corporate attitude is sometimes hard to identify and define, there is little problem in sensing its absence in an individual or group.

'A losing team mentality is devastating. It turns active and creative human energy into cynicism and hostility. It puts an end to pride of achievement and to initiative. It isolates people from one another and develops the 'us against them' mentality at all levels of the organization.'

Effective communication is thus the central nervous system of the corporation. For Maguire: 'At every level, the manager should be looked at as the source of information and motivation. If the managers are credible, the company is credible. The manager is the key factor in the triad of management, employees and customers.

'These principles were developed in the founding of FedEx and they have served that company productively for all these years. It's not that the system has been tried and found wanting: most often it hasn't been tried at all.'