American Express 2003 Annual Report Download - page 23

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American Express Employees and Advisors
I have often said that our greatest competitive advantage is our people. We possess what I believe is one of the
most talented and dedicated workforces in the world. I would like to thank all of our employees and financial
advisors for their contributions and tremendous commitment to our success.
To help our people and our business become even more successful, we took steps in 2003 to further strengthen
our internal culture, our talent and our leadership across the organization.
Following a company-wide review of our organizational culture, we introduced renewed values for American
Express Company in 2003. Our renewed values include all of those that have guided our company over the past
153 years — integrity, customer commitment, quality, teamwork, respect for people and good citizenship. We
reaffirmed our commitment to these traditional values while adding two new ones — demonstrating a will to
win and personal accountability.
To succeed in today’s marketplace, where competition is always intensifying, we wanted to sharpen our focus
on having a strong will to win and on taking responsibility for delivering on our commitments. However, as we
have made clear to our employees and advisors, having a strong will to win does not mean winning at all costs.
It means we will win the right way — with absolute integrity in all that we do. This leads to another important
point that we have reinforced in our communications with our people: the American Express Company values
are not separate concepts that should be viewed — or practiced — in isolation. They are intended to work
together and, as a whole, be the manifestation of who we are, what we stand for and how we behave as a company
and as individuals.
We communicated our renewed values throughout the year and across every level of the organization. But we
believe values are about more than just words; they are about putting those words into action. To make our
renewed values lead to tangible results, we incorporated them into our annual performance evaluation processes.
The revised values have resonated with employees around the world. They will serve us well and help us
improve our overall performance.
Employee Survey Results
The results of our annual employee survey demonstrate that our people are focused on our goals and energized
to achieve them. More than 90 percent of our employees took the 2003 survey, which is a record level of par-
ticipation. On large surveys such as ours, it’s difficult to make significant annual improvement when scores
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