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Mom's values are good business By DAVID PRESZLER When it comes to succeeding in business, a new book suggests your father had at least one piece of sage advice: Listen to your mother. Author Rhonda Abrams has parlayed those memorable kernels of motherly musings into "Wear Clean Underwear: Business Wisdom From Mom" (Villard Books, $22.95). Abrams, a business columnist whose work appears regularly in USA Today and other newspapers, was in the Rogue Valley on Friday to visit relatives and speak to Jacksonville Elementary sixth-graders about writing. Abrams, who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., spent the majority of 1998 researching and writing "Wear Clean Underwear," which was released in February and is due out in paperback in December. It didn't start as the tribute to mothers the title implies. Instead, Abrams set out to study companies that had achieved lasting success. "I traveled around the country, interviewing great companies and studying the values behind those companies," she says. "The basic idea was to look at the key values that make great companies." She started compiling a list of the traits she found when the motherly advice motif emerged. "I wanted to find a way to make those things memorable, so I paired them with momisms," she says. The result was book with chapter titles like "If You Keep Making That Face, Someday it Will Freeze that Way," "If All Your Friends jumped Off A Bridge, Would You Jump Off One Too?" and "I Don't Care Who Made This Mess, Just Clean It Up." Disney, Nordstrom, Patagonia, Sweet 'N' Low, Kinko's and 3M were among the companies she studied. She selected them based not only on financial success but on social responsibility and workplace culture. Though she studied larger companies, she says the lessons are applicable to small business -- which is the topic of her weekly columns and her first book, "The Successful Business Plan: Secrets & Strategies." She says many successful large companies are trying to create a small business atmosphere in which the employees feel like family and the passion that sparked the business keeps it going. She says some small business owners mistakenly try to suppress those feelings and be more "businesslike." She found that successful companies have -- and embrace -- guiding values that play large roles in their success. "The message is that great values make great companies," she says. One thing she found in the successful companies was employees who loved their jobs and employers who knew how to treat them. For example, Southwest Airlines turned a rather mundane equipment upgrade -- replacing the old engines on its luggage transports -- into a boost for employee morale. "To celebrate, they brought out ice cream for all the baggage handlers," she says. "It couldn't have cost them $100. I'd be surprised if it cost $50. But what it said was that we are thinking of you. You would be surprised how few companies do that." She also found successful companies empowered their employees, working to encourage success rather than prevent failure. She says companies frustrate their best employees with policies meant to protect against their worst employees. But successful companies avoid that impulse. For instance, Nordstrom's employee handbook, she says, consists not of page after page of policy but of one line: "Use good judgment in all situations." The company also calls its mistakes "spilt milk." "The idea is that everybody is going to spill milk, just clean it up and move on," she says. "It's the kind of stuff you learn from Mom." Today's Business Index Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA