The Wood-Mizer Way -- The Story

The company of Wood-Mizer has quite the story to tell! A small animal cage enterprise begun in the family garage by Daniel Laskowski grew into a world-renowned company – selling not cages – but sawmills! As Wood-Mizer expanded into post-Communist Poland, explosive growth paved the way for Poland to become Wood-Mizer’s European headquarters. Daniel recounts the cross-cultural differences between the countries and how the former Communistic business mindset in Poland diverged from the Christ-focused business mindset of Wood-Mizer America. As Wood-Mizer Poland grew, important discoveries were made on the most effective ways to help Wood-Mizer Poland adopt a Christian mindset toward business. In his new book, The Wood-Mizer Way — The Story, Daniel Laskowski shares that while establishing Poland as their European headquarters, a key goal of the company never wavered – honoring Christ with their business by recognizing and cherishing the God-given value in each employee. In the process, they solved the biggest hurdle Daniel had to overcome – how to properly evaluate and pay Poland’s employees.Before joining the family business, Daniel had been a software support engineer working for Hewlett Packard. Using his software system training, he developed software to modernize the Polish evaluation and pay process. Now, years later, Daniel has felt God’s leading to write this book and to offer for use an updated version of the software they used in Poland. The Wood-Mizer Way — The Story is not just describing a pivotal time in Daniel’s family company as they expanded into a new continent and a different way of doing business, but it is more about the lessons learned in embracing others of a different culture and finding Christ in the most unexpected ways in the workplace. Our hope is that others with cross-cultural challenges and those who have resolved to live out their core beliefs in their own company will be inspired and assisted by the author’s experience.As Daniel expressively states, this is “ultimately a story about culture change and how to put legs under the idea of ‘more of Christ in the workplace.’” .