Over the years, BYU-Idaho President Kim Clark discovered three principles of business that he saw in action during the course of his professional career. Two came of research, a third from his family experience.

Photo by Laura Seitz/Deseret Morning News

Speaking to members of the BYU Management Society on May 9 during a monthly luncheon at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, Elder Kim Clark, an Area Seventy and BYU-Idaho president, offers several business strategies.

Each, said the former dean of the Harvard Business School, has met the test of time and are true principles.

While addressing members of the BYU Management Society on May 9 during a monthly luncheon at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City, Elder Clark, also an Area Seventy, highlighted the three principles.

• Clark's Law: The first, he said, has to do with the fundamental variants in every aspect of business, at every level of business. For example, two plants for the same company with exactly the same product, the same corporate system, the same production equipment, the same customers, and the same market will perform differently, he said. There is no explanation, no theory to explain the variants, but they are there.

  The key, Elder Clark said, is that companies and individuals who have the capacity to learn "will have a significant advantage in the competitive world."

  "Learning is absolutely vital to a company's success," he said.

  In most successful companies, someone has learned to break the traditional trade-offs normally found in an organization: cost versus quality or cost versus flexibility. "If you look around," he said, "companies that have sustained success over time are really good at learning. They exploit the variants that exist and learn and become more effective."

• Less is more: Elder Clark said he once visited a company that was expending a huge amount of money for development, but not getting much out of it. He asked the CEO how many projects the company was currently attempting to develop. The CEO answered six or seven. In reality the company had 30 active projects. "They had three times the projects in process as they had capacity to complete," he said. "Which meant that none of the projects that were underway would get done in time. All the projects would get delayed."

  It turns out, he said, that this particular problem is ubiquitous.

  "Why is less more?" he questioned. "It is because if you reduce how many projects you are working on you can actually get them done. Why don't more people do it? We all suffer from what I call 'The illusion of activity.' We look around. We want things to be busy and active. If we see things being busy and active, we think we are being productive. But what really matters isn't how many things you have in process, it is how many things you actually get done."

• Companies need leadership with a little "L." On most days, companies don't need a Winston Churchill-type leader, they don't need a leader with a "big L," Elder Clark said.

  He shared several principles from his family that apply in organizations.

  Principle one: "Lead by example." A leader's example is a powerful source of guidance for children or employees. "What you do is very powerful," Elder Clark said.

  Principle two: "Leading through values has tremendous influence in the organization." Leaders must have integrity. People must believe what they say. They must follow through with what they say they will do. In essence, their behavior must match their words.

  "If you as a leader can teach people in your organization why you are doing certain things so that they come to internalize those values, it is very powerful," he said. "You can get people to do amazing things."

  Principle three: "There is tremendous power in the family in unity.... The same is true in organizations."

  Elder Clark said, "It is surprising how little time leaders spend helping the people who work for them understand the purpose and the processes of why they are doing what they are doing."

  It is important that employees understand the connection between their day-to-day work and the larger purpose of the company, Elder Clark said.

  Principle four: "Love each (child) as an individual."

  Leaders need to learn to love the people who work for them and treat them as individuals, he said.

  "It is remarkable what people will do, when they work in an organization where leaders create meaning, have integrity and care about the worker.... Human beings are capable of amazing things."

  Successful organizations, he said, have figured how to "tap the potential that is in human beings."

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