Spark

The best-selling Harvard Business School case study of all time is not about Coca-Cola or Microsoft, but the Cleveland-based arc welding manufacturer Lincoln Electric. The company has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, globalization, the decline of industrial America, and the recent credit crash - and yielded impressive profits throughout. While factories in the Midwest are shutting their doors, Lincoln Electric remains a rare success story.

Lincoln Electric operates on a solid foundation of old-fashioned values: loyalty, trust, flexibility, and a fair reward for a job well done. At Lincoln, any of the 3,000 employees can approach the CEO with a problem - or an idea. There are no designated parking spots; everyone enters and exits through the same front doors and eats in the same drab cafeteria. Any employee with over three years of tenure, and who meets the firm's performance benchmarks, is part of Lincoln's "Guaranteed Continuous Employment" policy, a promise that the company will do anything - and everything - it can to avoid layoffs for economic reasons.

The effect of this program on both the employee's well-being and the company's bottom line are remarkable. Veteran workers stick around, preserving generations of knowledge and know-how. New workers, attracted by the company's reputation and its merit-based compensation system, bring fresh ideas and energy. Spared from the unnecessary costs of cyclically hiring in the good times and firing whenever the economy stumbles, Lincoln Electric draws strength its most valuable resource: its employees.

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