Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ Category
The Week in Review March 30 2012 no responses
Beginning today, I’ll be posting a roundup of leadership news that’s caught my eye each Friday. This week, I’m highlighting posts on the importance of competence in building trust, the love-hate relationship we have with our smartphones, the secret behind the Disney experience and the role of charisma in a leader’s effectiveness. The last link is a video interview with Chrysler’s Sergio Marchionne from “60 Minutes.”
- To Build Trust, Competence is Key
- Slaves to the Smartphone: The Horrors of Hyperconnectivity—and How to Restore a Degree of Freedom
- Disney Nailed Attention to Detail Long Before Apple
- Cultivating Charisma: How Personal Magnetism Can Help (Or Hurt) You At Work
- Sergio Marchionne: Resurrecting Chrysler
What caught your eye this week? Share your favorite links in the comments.
John Elway for Manager of the Year? March 21 2012 7 responses
While fans of Tim Tebow will likely vehemently disagree, I’d have to put John Elway, executive vice president of football operations for the Denver Broncos, in the running for manager of the year. And not just NFL manager of the year; anybody’s manager of the year. Let me be the first to acknowledge that I enjoyed Tebowmania and Tebow Time as much as anyone. As I wrote here during football season, I thought Tebow and his coach Jon Fox did a masterful job of figuring out how to use his skillset to maximum advantage. For most of their run together, Elway came across as the wet blanket at the party. He was polite but sparing in his praise for Tebow because he couldn’t see a long-term plan for winning with the guy. Elway may have been right or wrong on that call. We won’t know how it plays out for the Broncos on that front because Elway went out and got himself Peyton Manning this week.
In moving Tebow aside for Manning, Elway did what a lot of managers have to do or at least should do. In his assessment, he had a good guy working for him that he didn’t think was going to work out over the long run. Especially with the pressure from Tebow fans in Denver and across the country, it would have been easy for Elway to keep Tim, let it ride and see what happened. After all, things could get better. (How many times have you heard that in performance management discussions?) Instead, Elway decided to make the move and go out and get the best quarterback available for his team.
Here are three lessons from Elway that I think managers should keep in mind for the next time they face a talent management dilemma:
Does Life Imitate Art at Goldman Sachs? Or Something Else? March 15 2012 5 responses
When Greg Smith quit his job running a London based line of business for Goldman Sachs — and told the world why in an op-ed in the New York Times – he acted out the fantasy of everyone who’s ever wanted to tell their employer what they really think of them as they walk out the door.
Smith’s article reminded me of two great lines from “Jerry Maguire.” The first, of course, is the one immortalized by Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Ron Tidwell: “Show me the money!” As Smith writes, the only way that customers came up in regular sales meetings at Goldman was “purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them,” and that managing directors of the firm routinely referred to customers as “muppets.”
The second line from Jerry MaGuire that came to mind isn’t quoted as often, but it’s actually my favorite. It’s the title of the mission statement that Tom Cruise’s Jerry wrote at the beginning of the movie and slipped into the hotel mailboxes of all the sports agents with whom he was attending the company’s offsite. It was called, “The Things We Think And Do Not Say.” It was a plea for more humanity in the way his firm did business. The only difference at Goldman this week was that Smith actually said it and did so in the most publicly possible way.
What GE Aviation Knows About Inspiring Workers March 6 2012 3 responses
Last week, I wrote a post that asked if your organization is ready for the era of connect and collaborate. Today, I want to go a little deeper on the connection part. In particular, I want to talk about how leaders can accomplish big things by connecting their people with the higher purpose of their work.
You’ve probably heard the story about the traveler in the Middle Ages walking down a road who stops at a quarry to ask the workers what they’re doing. The first person he asks replies that his work is sheer, meaningless drudgery. “All I do, all day long, he says, is pound these rocks into bricks.” The traveler walks a little further and asks another worker doing the same thing the same question. “I am doing the greatest thing a man can do, the second worker replies, I’m building a cathedral to glorify God.”
Pride in your work isn’t limited to building cathedrals. You may have seen the advertisements that have been running lately that show GE Aviation workers talking about their craft. They talk about how much pride they have in their skills, each other and what their product does for the world. As one woman says in the video, the work she does helps make the world a smaller place. At the end of the spot, the GE team travels from their plant in North Carolina to Boeing Field in Seattle to see their engine help lift a new 787 Dreamliner into the air.
Those are real people who are doing real things that benefit other real people. One or more leaders has taken the time to establish that context for them. I’ve been talking a lot about this spot in workshops and speeches I’ve given this year. The question I’ve been asking leaders is what opportunities do you have to connect your people with the higher purpose of their work?
Is Your Organizational Development Plan Ready for “Connect and Collaborate”? March 1 2012 2 responses
I’m about halfway through “How” by Dov Seidman, and I find his overarching point compelling — that in a world of radical transparency, how we do things matters as much as or more than what we do. My big takeaway so far is that organizations and society are shifting from a command-and-control model, toward one that relies on connection and collaboration.
Examples of connect and collaborate replacing command and control are everywhere. Some of those examples, like the Arab Spring protests, involve the highest of stakes and don’t come without resistance from those who’ve had historic control. Other examples are sort of silly, but still telling.
For instance, you might have heard about NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski tweeting from the track of the Daytona 500 earlier this week. A car had collided with a maintenance vehicle and 200 gallons of fuel caught fire. (Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt.) While he was parked on the track, Keselowski pulled out his smart phone, took a picture of the fire and tweeted it to his 65,000 Twitter followers along with commentary about what was going on. When the race resumed a couple of hours later, he had more than 200,000 followers. Did he break NASCAR rules by tweeting from his car? The people in charge, knowing a fan builder when they see one, apparently didn’t care. As someone observed, Keselowski is a “digital native” and completely gets how to use technology to build a community. So did the Google exec and others in Egypt who used social media to organize the Tahrir Square protests.
For those of us involved in supporting leaders in creating the organization of the future, this is a seismic shift. Based on my own experience, I would argue that we’re going to have to look outside our own demographic cohorts to make this work. Here’s why I say that.
What Leaders Can Learn From Ryan Seacrest February 27 2012 7 responses
The most interesting part of the Oscar telecast last night happened before the awards show started. E! Network red carpet host and king of all media Ryan Seacrest was in his usual position, asking the stars if they were excited and who they were wearing, when Sacha Baron Cohen arrived in a limo. You may remember Cohen best as Borat (or, in one of my favorites roles, as the French foil to Will Farrell’s NASCAR driver in “Talladega Nights”).
Anyway, Cohen was decked out in the garb of a dictator who was so reminiscent of Gaddafi that it was kind of creepy. He was there in character to promote his new movie, “The Dictator,” and his bit involved holding an urn that supposedly held the ashes of his buddy Kim Jong-Il because Kim wanted to be on the red carpet one last time.
Seacrest played along and in the process of the interview, Cohen dumped whatever was in the urn right down the front of the host’s black tux. As he was hauled away by security guards, he yelled, “Now when people ask who you are wearing, you can say Kim Jong-Il!”
So, I’m not here to debate whether that was funny or appropriate. I’m here to talk about what Seacrest did next. He looked befuddled for 10 or 15 seconds then calmly turned to the camera and acknowledged that he he looked like a mess. Another reporter handed him a towel and a handler passed him a lint roller. He made a light-hearted little joke about both and cut to commercial. When they came back, he was more or less cleaned up and onto his next interview with Antonio Banderas about the challenges of playing Puss ‘n Boots as a headliner vs. a character in “Shrek.”
You can argue about how much value Seacrest is adding to society, but you have to hand one thing to him: The guy keeps his composure no matter what happens. He’s almost literally always on stage. So are leaders.
How to Coach a Future CEO February 21 2012 no responses
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I’m a fan of Ford CEO Alan Mulally. He started in the top job at Ford about five years ago and, he has led the company to quarter after quarter of profitable growth. He’s accomplished that through any number of ways. Probably one of the biggest is by changing the culture of the company’s leadership team.
Of course, you change a culture by inspiring people to think, feel and act differently. It’s a process of winning hearts and minds. As the New York Times reported this past weekend, Mulally just turned 66 and is expected to retire in the next couple of years. The front runner to succeed him is an executive named Mark Fields who runs Ford’s business in the Americas.
In reading the story on Ford and Fields, I was struck by the evidence that Fields has changed his style as a leader over the past five years. Of course, that’s concurrent with Mulally’s time at the company. Prior to Mulally’s arrival, Fields was a high flier (literally and figuratively) who had gotten himself in trouble when it was revealed that he was using Ford’s corporate jets to fly back and forth to his Florida home at the same time that he was cutting thousands of jobs at the company and shutting down manufacturing plants.
As Fields himself said, “There was a ‘dead pool’ about me. People were saying, ‘When is Fields going to get shown the door?’ ” Five years later, however, he’s a poster dude for what great coaching and role modeling can do to turn an executive’s career and life around.
What a Top Chef Knows About Organizational Development – Lessons from Jose Andres February 16 2012 3 responses
Foodies in Washington, D.C., know all about Jose Andres, the award-winning chef who popularized Spanish style tapas dining in America. Andres arrived in the United States from Spain in 1993 and opened his first restaurant, Jaleo, that year. Today, he is the CEO of Think Food Group and the mastermind behind eight restaurant concepts with locations in D.C., Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Earlier this week, I was in the audience for a lunch-time conversation with Andres at a conference called American Competitiveness: What Works organized by General Electric and co-sponsored by Washington Post Live. I probably learned as much about leadership in an hour of listening to Jose as I have in the past year. It turns out there’s a lot you can learn about leadership and organizational development from a chef who has gone from running a small business to a culinary empire in less than 20 years.
I’ll likely write a few more Jose Andres posts over the next several weeks, but, for now, here are three of his leadership lessons about building a successful organization along with some thought starter questions for you and your organization.
- Share Your Passionate Purpose. It takes less than a minute with Andres to see how passionate he is about his work and the calling he feels around it. When a fellow panelist asked him what his advice was for anyone starting out in business, the first thing he said was that the business of feeding people is the best business in the world. “Food, he said, is the energy that moves everyone of us in this room.” That sort of purposeful passion about the bigger picture is what has inspired people to help Andres grow his organization. How do you share your passionate purpose about your business?
Wondering ‘Am I a Good Leader?’ Take the Sheryl Sandberg Test February 10 2012 no responses
Ever wonder if you’re a good leader? If so, I have a simple three question test that will help you answer the question. I call it the Sheryl Sandberg test.
OK, I know that some of you are thinking “Is it really fair to compare myself to the COO of Facebook - the same woman who spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos the week her company did an IPO that took her net worth past $1.6 billion?” I’ll be the first to acknowledge that there aren’t many of us who can compete with Sandberg’s calendar and bank account. That said, there’s a lot that leaders of any station can learn from Sandberg.
When Sandberg left Google to join Facebook in 2008, the social networking site had 70 million users and no profit-making business model. At the end of 2011, Facebook had over 850 million users, revenue of over $3 billion and profits of just over $1 billion. It’s not too big a stretch to conclude that Sandberg has some leadership skills that might be worth emulating.
Over the past six months I’ve read a number of profiles on Sandberg and, based on what I’ve learned about her, have come up with three questions that can help determine if you’re a good leader:
- Do I have followers?
- Do I have a cause bigger than myself?
- Do I get stuff done?
Here’s a bit on how Sandberg has answered those questions and what you can learn from the answers.
Has Ego Trumped Your Mission? Lessons in Transparency from the Komen Foundation Fiasco February 6 2012 11 responses
As you’ve no doubt read, the Komen Foundation – the people behind the pink ribbons to fight breast cancer – found themselves at the center of controversy last week after they decided to pull funding for breast cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood. The basis for the decision, according to Komen officials: They no longer wanted to give money to organizations that were “under investigation.” The only Komen grantee that met that criterion was Planned Parenthood, which is the subject of a non-criminal investigation by a member of Congress.
When an outcry on social media ensued, the traditional media quickly picked up the story. Many of the corporate partners of Komen started expressing their reservations. Two days later, the leadership of Komen tried to clarify their position by saying it was not their intention to target Planned Parenthood and that the funding would be restored. (The whole story is recapped in this article from The New York Times.)
Regardless of how you feel about Planned Parenthood, it’s clear that the Komen Foundation hadn’t fully prepared for the era when transparency has moved from buzzword to reality. Social media has a way of making quick work of leaders who put their ego games ahead of their organizations’ missions. Komen officials’ mistakes offer a warning to other leaders who think they are immune to such lightning-fast takedowns.
You know you’re headed for trouble when:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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