Archive for September, 2009
Jim Collins’ Top 10 To-Do’s for Leaders September 30 2009
This is the last of three posts that I’m writing based on some great presentations I heard at the Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC last week. The primary keynoter for the conference was leadership guru Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great
In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you the top 10 to-do’s for leaders that he offered at the end of his two hour segment. (These are paraphrased based on my notes.) It’s unlikely that all ten will resonate with you, but my guess is that you (like me) will find at least two or three that hit home. Here they are:
Jet Blue Founder’s Advice for Leaders: Have Your Cry and Keep Going September 28 2009
This week I’ll be sharing some insights I picked up at the recent Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC. Today's comes from Jet Blue’s founding CEO, David Neeleman who was one of several terrific speakers at the conference.
Lots of people in the United States are familiar with Jet Blue and have experienced the energetic service, seat back TV’s and Terra Blue potato chips that the airline is known for. What may not be as familiar is the story of Jet Blue’s founder David Neeleman and that he is now involved in starting his fourth airline. The first was Morris Air which was a regional carrier that began as a travel agency. In his Inc. presentation, Neeleman told the story of being approached by Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO of Southwest Airlines, and being asked if he wanted to sell his company to Southwest. Neeleman idolized Kelleher and told the audience that he would have sold Morris to Southwest for a lot less than he did to get the chance to work with Kelleher. Neeleman hit the ground running at Southwest and started pushing big changes on a number of fronts. Five months after getting there, Kelleher took Neeleman to lunch at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Dallas and told him he was fired because he was just too impetuous. Neeleman told us he cried after that conversation.
Leaders, Are You Thinking Big Enough? Zipcar’s CEO Has a Challenge for You. September 25 2009
I’m taking some time to feed the mind this week by attending the Inc. 500 conference taking place in Washington, DC. There have been some notable speakers on the agenda including Good to Great author Jim Collins and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. The most thought provoking speaker I’ve heard so far is the CEO of Zipcar Scott Griffith.
By now, you’ve probably heard of Zipcar, the car sharing service that is sprouting up in metro areas around the U.S. and the world. (Maybe you’re a Zipster yourself.) Backed up with some great technology, the Zipcar model is pretty simple. You join the program for a modest annual fee. When you need a car you reserve one online or on the phone. You walk to your car’s reserved parking space and unlock it using your Zipcard. You drive away for a low hourly fee which includes your gas and insurance coverage. When you’re done, you park the car in its spot, lock it up and walk away.
Before you conclude that this post is an ad for Zipcar, let me explain what really rocked me about Griffith’s presentation.
Leadership and Changing Your Mind September 23 2009
In the early morning on September 8, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I read a little bit of news and among the stories were a number on the presidential elections in Afghanistan and the early indications of widespread voting fraud. The other main story around Afghanistan that evening was the appointment of General McChrystal as the new U.S. Commander. He was named to come up with and implement a new plan. I’ll blame it on the semi-conscious state of being up in the middle of the night, but after my reading, I logged onto Twitter and posted the following haiku:
New team and new plan.
Wish them luck. They'll need it since
Karzai stole the votes.
As reported in the New York Times this week, President Obama is now considering a change in the plan for Afghanistan that he committed to six months ago. According to the Times’ report, a worsening situation on the ground, the fiasco of the Afghan elections and a dire assessment of the future from General McChrystal have prompted a series of debates among Obama, the vice president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the national security advisor and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on what to do next. The options being discussed range from a significant increase in troops to a reduction in forces. Along with the debate on options comes a debate on whether the objective of the mission is nation building, controlling Al Qaeda, some combination of the two or something in between.
My point in this post is not to rehash the headlines but to consider the process of how a leader changes his or her mind on a very visible and important decision. It’s pretty much guaranteed that no matter what Obama eventually decides to do he will be loudly criticized for the decision from one quarter or another. It’s tough to go back on a high stakes decision even if the situation has changed so much that the original objectives are no longer in play. That’s probably what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith had in mind when he said “In the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.”
What about you? When have you had to reverse a major decision? What process did you go through in evaluating whether or not to change course? If you were advising Obama, what questions, factors or criteria would you encourage him to consider as he considers a change in direction?
Five Tips for Living with a Big Leadership Footprint September 21 2009
Have you ever felt like you were being watched? I’m not trying to induce panicked paranoia here, but if you’re a leader you should be feeling that way. The more senior a leader you are, the more you’re being watched. You need to pick up what I call a big footprint view of your role because, as a leader, your actions have a much bigger impact than you may realize.
That’s a lesson that Linda Hudson learned when she became a business unit president at General Dynamics back in the 1990’s. Hudson, who is now the president of the land and armaments group at BAE Systems, described her first few days as a BU president at General Dynamics in a “Corner Office” Q&A in Sunday’s New York Times. Wanting to make a good impression in her new role, Hudson picked up some new suits at Nordstrom’s and, as part of her ensemble, learned some interesting ways to tie a scarf to complement her suits. She showed up as president on day one looking really sharp. The surprise came on day two when, as she described to the Times, she ran “into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine.”
When you’re the leader, people take their cues from you. When you’re aware of it, this can work for everyone’s benefit. If you aren’t aware of your footprint or ignore its impact, you can quickly set yourself and the organization up for failure.
So, with your leadership success in mind, here are five tips for how to successfully live with a big leadership footprint:
Coach ‘Em Up: Leadership Wisdom from Tony Dungy September 18 2009
There’s been a lot written in the past few weeks about the demise of humility in our culture. (See David Brooks’ column last week for one of the most eloquent expressions of this problem.) Fortunately, we still have some great examples of successful leaders who demonstrate humility. One of those is the Super Bowl winning former coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy.
I’ve admired Tony Dungy for a long time because of his capacity to succeed in the high stakes competitive environment of the NFL while maintaining grace and humility whether he’s won or lost. Since I’m a huge football fan and Dungy is on the broadcast crew for NBC’s Football Night in America this year, he has been on my radar screen a little more than usual these past few weeks.
What brought him to mind today was an interview I just heard with him on Dan Patrick’s radio show while I was driving back from breakfast with a good friend. One of the questions that Patrick asked Dungy was, “What would you have said to the new Chicago Bears quarterback, Jay Cutler, after his team’s 21 to 15 loss to the Packers in the season opener?” I loved Dungy’s response which was (I’m paraphrasing here):
I would have told him that it’s OK, this is only one game. This is what the pressure’s going to be like from now on and this has been a good learning experience. You can handle it and lead us to success from here. It’s going to depend a lot on how you show up in practice and handle yourself in the team meetings because the team is looking to you as the leader. This week’s game is going to be really important because we don’t want to start 0 and 2. You can do it and you’re going to lead this team.
Imagine how you would feel if you were Jay Cutler listening to Tony Dungy. What is the Coach trying to instill in his player with those comments? Some of the things that come to my mind are perspective, reframing the experience as a positive building block, confidence and belief in oneself, direction and resolve, clarity around the stakes going forward and the role he has to play. All of that in one brief sound bite. I’d suggest that Dungy offers a great model for any leader that has to coach up a key player who’s coming off a loss or a disappointment.
Of course, the other thing that Tony Dungy has received a lot of attention for lately is the role that he’s played in counseling Michael Vick following the prison sentence he served for his involvement in dog fighting. Dungy has a long history of counseling prisoners and he talked about that experience in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last weekend. In that article he shared what he tries to get across with prisoners:
"What I look for, [is] 'What do you want to do from here?' That's something my dad used to tell me all the time. When you're in a situation you can complain about it, you can feel sorry for yourself, you can do a lot of things. But how are you gonna’ make the situation better?"
Dungy’s emphasis on what one can do to shape the future is an approach that all leaders can and should adopt. None of us can do anything to change the past and we really don’t know what the future will hold. All we can do is make the best choices we can right now to help shape the outcomes we hope to achieve. That’s true whether you’re coming off a season opening loss, ending a prison sentence or trying to get yourself or your organization out of a tough spot.
There are a lot of leaders we can look to for both good and bad examples of what to do. Tony Dungy strikes me as a great place to start if you’re looking for good examples of leadership.
Five Questions for Leaders Who Are at Their Limits September 16 2009
Earlier this week, I was talking with an executive who’s recently been promoted to run a business unit that earlier this decade was generating a few million dollars a year in revenue and this year will gross a few hundred million dollars. Through acquisitions and organic growth, the business could be twice its current size in a few more years. As we were talking about the changes she might have to make in her leadership style as the business grows, I remembered a conversation I had last year with another executive who was facing the same sort of situation.
In this earlier case, a senior executive of a real estate company explained to me that he was responsible for properties that generated $500 million in revenue and that because of reorganizations in the company he was going to now be responsible for $1 billion worth of properties. He told me that in the previous year he had travelled 225 days to appear at one property after another and he didn’t know how he was going to pull off overseeing twice as many properties. My response was that one thing we knew for sure was that he wasn’t going to travel 450 days in the upcoming year.
That was the ah-ha moment for him. He recognized that the natural limits of time were going to force him to change his approach. Oftentimes leaders get so caught up in the doing that they don’t stop to assess whether or not what they’re trying to do is actually physically possible. In his case, being personally present at every property in his business unit over the course of a year just wasn’t possible. My observation that you can’t travel 450 days in one year was the trigger for him to step back and reassess.
Maybe you’re in a similar situation. Here are five questions you can ask yourself to assess your leadership situation and determine what your options are around the highest and best use of your time as a leader.
Results, Relationships, Leadership and the Brain September 14 2009
One thing I’ve learned in my years as an executive coach is that you can’t convince a leader who is heavily focused on results to work on relationship building skills just because it’s the “right thing” or a “nice thing” to do. To motivate the client to change, you have to make a direct connection as to how stronger relationship skills will support the client in getting the results they’re looking for. The results oriented leader usually needs evidence of how relationships can help him achieve what he wants to achieve.
So, it was with great interest that I read David Rock’s article, “Managing with the Brain in Mind,” in the latest issue of Booz and Company’s Strategy + Business magazine. Rock is an executive coach specializing in the connections between neuroscience and leadership. He is the author of Quiet Leadership and the forthcoming book, Your Brain at Work. In his S+B article, Rock opens with the story of recent MRI based research that demonstrates that people who feel rejected or treated unfairly activate the same regions of their brain as people who are taking a literal blow to the head. The brain’s responses to relational and physical attacks are quite similar.
Rock quotes a neuroscientist who says the link between social discomfort and physical pain makes sense “because, to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival.” In an economic environment where people are naturally worried about the future, this strikes me as a very important thing for leaders to pay attention to. Rock offers a helpful acronym, SCARF (which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness), which can help leaders better understand and act on the relationship factors that people naturally need to have addressed. He outlines a number of ideas in his article about how to act on these needs. Building on Rock’s model, I’ll offer a few of my own here:
Whatever Happened To… ? September 11 2009
One of the things that I think is completely true about leadership is that presence begets presence. Whatever tone or presence that is set by the leader is the tone or presence that will be adopted by the followers. At least I used to think that. After the outburst of, “You lie!” by Representative Joe Wilson during the President’s address to Congress on Wednesday night, I’m not sure who is following who anymore. As many commentators have pointed out, the scene in the House of Representatives the other night sometimes resembled the raucous health care reform town hall meetings of August. Were the catcalls, the sign waving, the heckling and the blatant Blackberrying of Wednesday night’s session conscious acts designed to fuel the next round of public outcry or was all of that more of a reflection of the leaders picking up on the presence of their followers?
I’m stumped on that one. It’s tough to figure out which is the chicken and which is the egg.
What I’m not stumped about at all is how disheartening I found the whole display. Leaders need to lead by example. If the example leaders set is that it’s OK to act like unruly children, then I think we will, as a society, eventually reap the whirlwind of that behavior. It all makes me wonder, whatever happened to…
Return of the Peanut Butter Man: A Lesson in How to Influence Your Top Leaders September 9 2009
No, I’m not talking about some schlocky movie that didn’t make it into theatres this summer. I’m talking about Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo Senior Vice President who was hired this week to be a key part of the leadership team charged with spinning AOL out of Time Warner over the next year. For fans of memorable business communication, Garlinghouse is best known as the author, in 2006, of a memo to the top executives at Yahoo that came to be known as “the peanut butter manifesto.”
Among other points in the manifesto, Garlinghouse wrote:
“I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
I hate peanut butter. We all should”
His memo, which was eventually featured in a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, was a clarion call for Yahoo to get its act together and recapture its leadership position in the Internet space. That hasn’t happened yet (and may never happen), but the memo set off a chain of events which led to a change in top leadership and the implementation of many of the strategies that Garlinghouse wrote about.
So, as Garlinghouse joins AOL to help lead what is a combination of a turnaround and a start-up, I thought it was worth taking a look at the peanut butter manifesto to see what we can learn about how leaders can influence their bosses through highly effective communications. Here are a few takeaways:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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