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Lesson #4: “If you don’t have tall poppies, you only have weeds”

Article Overview: “One of the problems in Australia is we get caught up with the tall poppy syndrome,” cautions Fox. “If you don’t have tall poppies, you only have weeds.”

Lesson #4: “If you don’t have tall poppies, you only have weeds”

"One of the problems in Australia is we get caught up with the tall poppy syndrome," cautions Fox. "If you don't have tall poppies, you only have weeds."

The tall poppy syndrome Fox speaks of is one in which people of merit, people who genuinely deserve to have gotten to where they are in life, are resented or even cut down from their positions by those around them because they are standing too tall above their peers.

In order to succeed in business, says Fox, you need to be bold enough to be that poppy. You need to stand tall over the rest - as tall as you can - no matter how much they try to bring you down. The only other alternative is to be a weed, which relegates you to being permanently at the bottom of the barrel. There may be many more weeds than poppies, but that is one time when being in the majority is not in your best interests.

One way to do that, to be that poppy, says Fox, is to make a commitment to your community and the environment in which you and your company find yourself. His company, LinFox, is leading the way when it comes to implementing high safety and environmental standards of business operation. Indeed, it has helped to redefine industry standards.

Fox has demonstrated a strong commitment to things such as workplace safety, through his Vision Zero program, a safety policy that includes regular safety workshops, risk networks that meet regularly to examine key safety issues and reward safe behavior and practices among employees, mandatory safety leadership journals that require site managers to keep daily logs of potential hazards they notice, and ensuring that compliance with all of the set out standards are monitored.

A few years ago, LinFox also committed itself to reducing its carbon emissions by 15 percent by 2010. It recently set a new goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2015. Fox aims to do this through improved business practices, implementing new environmentally friendly technologies and changing his workers' behaviours - not an easy thing to tackle.

He has even introduced a program called Green Fox to encourage employees to reduce their environmental footprint at work through simple changes in routine. Steps include increasing recycling options and stations throughout the company, introducing and strictly enforcing ‘Switch Off' programs for all electronics such as room lights and computers, and encouraging fuel efficiency and hybrid cars. Fox says his company is currently well ahead of schedule towards achieving its targets.

"We don't need our name up in lights to make our contribution," he says. "Never have spoken about what we do, but we do what we need to do within our community... Enough on the trucks. There's plenty of them to show what we do. But we have always been mindful that we have to put back into the community from which we take."

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Article Tags: australia, fox, tall poppies, tall poppy syndrome, weeds



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