Making An Honest Living

In June of 2010, my very good friend and former colleague Luisa Girotto asked me an incredible question (and some might add, made me a generous offer): “Mel, do you want to write a book with me?”

Did I ever! I’d been in the trenches with Luisa for close to 6 years at Cadbury, an amazing company that I was so proud to work for, and so sad to leave when the time eventually came (their choice, not mine). We started out thinking we wanted to write about our experiences working at a company we both loved, but soon realized it was so much more than that. It became a mission, a pilgrimage, a crusade, especially as we began to experience all those non-Cadbury companies out there in our new roles as “consultant” and “seeking next opportunity” (me and Luisa respectively, by June of 2010).

There was just so much to dislike: organizations grinding their people, their brands and their reputations to increase short term shareholder return. It was so myopic and so offensive. We knew there was another way, because we’d experienced it at Cadbury. We weren’t perfect, but we were far better than most, and we were successful. In just five years, we quadrupled our profit margin and our employee engagement scores pushed well past 90%, even as we were unleashing tremendous change in the business, change that included people losing their jobs, including me. How did we do it? We made An Honest Living.

Want to know more? Check out our manifesto, three and a half years in the making… An Honest Living: be wildly successful without being a jerk. At 84 pages, it captures our views on what we believe it takes to make an honest living and will take you less than an hour to read. Visit our website at anhonesliving.ca. And follow us on twitter @anhonestliving.

We hope you’ll join us on our crusade…

Mel