Nebulosities create a lack of clarity in our communication. They contribute to vagueness and ambiguity. They’re the language of “saying things indirectly.” We may think we’re getting our point across without being too aggressive. Instead, we make it a cloud of words. Often times, they come to a different conclusion.
After spending over 1,000 hours per year with CEO’s I have an observation, companies break in the middle.
Hold a stick with both hands at each end. Your right hand is the CEO, your left hand is the front-line employee. Everything in between is the middle. Now bend the stick…until it breaks.
The break will happen somewhere in the middle. No matter the strength of the branch, it will break with the right amount of pressure. This is why it is so important to pay attention to the middle.
These are stressful times with hard decisions and long days. For many of our members, this is the first economic downturn they have faced. This is my sixth downturn and... I believe that we will win.
I read (and listened) to 24 fantastic books in 2019. Most of them were business related, personal growth or pure entertainment. I rate books based on impact to me and add bonus points if I reread it. The 2019 nominees are:
Your clients and colleagues don't have time to engage fully with every e-mail they get. Some of them receive hundreds of messages per day. That's why they start with the ones they can deal with quickly. They may never get around to answering — or even reading — the rest.
So how do you earn their attention? Try these tips:
One of the most important lessons I learned during my years as a CEO was that great employees are not replaceable. It isn’t the technology or the product that make a company great, it’s the people. And companies who see their good employees as “replaceable” are wrong. Good employees are not replaceable. Let me clarify what I mean by “replaceable.” Can a company hire someone to fill a position to replace someone else? Of course they can. In today’s market, the world is ripe with candidates who are eager and willing to take the job. But putting a behind in a seat doesn’t replace a great employee. It simply puts a new behind in a seat.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA via @NYT
Facebook is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your indiscretions. It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers. It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.
And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go.
Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.
The latest of its frequent changes to the site’s privacy settings was made in December. Facebook is nudging each of its billion subscribers to review them.
The nudge could not have been more timely, said Sarah Downey, a lawyer with the Boston company Abine, which markets tools to help users control their visibility online. “It is more important than ever to lock down your Facebook privacy settings now that everything you post will be even easier to find,” she said.
That is to say, your settings will determine, to a large extent, who can find you when they search for women who buy dresses for toddlers or, more unsettling, women who jog a particular secluded trail.
What can you do? Ask yourself four simple questions.
QUESTION 1 How would you like to be found?
Go to “who can see my stuff” on the upper right side of your Facebook page. Click on “see more settings.” By default, search engines can link to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.
Go to “activity log.” Here you can review all your posts, pictures, “likes” and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what, look at the original privacy setting of the original post.
In my case, I had been tagged eating a bowl of ricotta with my fingers at midnight near Arezzo. My friend who posted the picture enabled it to be seen by anyone, which means that it would show up in a stranger’s search for, I don’t know, people who eat ricotta with their fingers at midnight. I am tagged in other photos that are visible only to friends of the person who posted them.
The point is, you want to look carefully at what the original settings are for those photos and “likes,” and decide whether you would like to be associated with them.
“I don’t get this Facebook thing either,” said one woman whose friend request I had accepted in January 2008. “But everyone in our generation seems to be on it.”
If you are concerned about things that might embarrass or endanger you on Facebook — Syrians who endorse the opposition may not want to be discovered by government apparatchiks — comb through your timeline and get rid of them. The only way to ensure that a post or photo is not discovered is to “unlike” or “delete” it.
Make yourself a pot of tea. This may take a while. The nostalgia may just be amusing.
QUESTION 2 What do you want the world to know about you?
Go to your profile page and click “About me.” Decide if you would like your gender, or the name of your spouse, to be visible on your timeline. Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline. Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for hackers to exploit.
A tool created a couple of weeks ago by a team of college students offers to look for certain words and phrases that could embarrass other college students as they apply for internships and jobs. It is called Simplewash, formerly Facewash, and it looks for profanity, references to drugs and other faux pas that you do not necessarily want, say, a law school admissions officer to see.
Socioclean is another application that scours your Facebook posts. It is selling its service to college campuses to offer to students.
QUESTION 3 Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?
Facebook has eyes across the Web; one study found that its so-called widget — the innocuous blue letter “f” — is integrated into 20 percent of the 10,000 most popular Web sites. If that is annoying, several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, DisconnectMeand Ghostery offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.
Facebook also has a mechanism to show you ads based on the Web sites you have visited. It works with third-party companies to place cookies on my computer when, for instance, I visit an e-commerce site. That brand knows that I might be looking at girls’ dresses. It can ask Facebook to show me an ad for girls’ dresses when I log in to Facebook. You can control this. Hover over the “X” next to the ad and choose from the drop-down menu: “Hide this ad,” you could say. Or hide all ads from this brand. Facebook does not serve the ads itself, so to opt out of certain kinds of targeted ads, you must go to the third party that Facebook works with to show ads based on the Web sites you have browsed.
QUESTION 4 Whom do you want to befriend?
Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends. Your boss? Do you really want her to see pictures of you in Las Vegas? And the woman you met in Lamaze class: do you want the apps she has installed to know who you are?
Privacyfix.com, a browser extension, shows you how to keep your friends’ Facebook applications from sucking you into their orbit. It is preparing to introduce a tool to control what it calls your “exposure” to the Facebook search engine.
Secure.me offers a similar feature. Depending on your privacy settings, that photo-sharing app that your Lamaze compatriot just installed could, in one click, know who you are and have access to all the photos that you thought you were sharing with “friends.”
One of Facebook’s cleverest heists is the word “friend.” It makes you think all your Facebook contacts are really your “friends.” They may not be.
Forget the evil machinations of energy magnate C. Montgomery Burns on “The Simpsons” and the scheming of oil baron J.R. Ewing on “Dallas.” They are mere caricatures. The most subtle, vivid portrait of a corporate executive to ever appear on the small screen is nearing the end of his run: John Francis Donaghy — he goes by Jack — on the NBC show “30 Rock.”
For all of Jack Donaghy’s nutty hijinks and pithy one-liners, there is a surprising set of lessons hiding under the surface of the show, which premiered its seventh and final season Thursday night. The simple fact is that Jack, as portrayed by Alec Baldwin, is a superb executive.
When not busy managing a complex love life (Donaghy has dated characters played by Elizabeth Banks and Salma Hayek, and Condoleezza Rice as herself) or the travails of his ever-beleaguered employee Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), Donaghy manages to run the East Coast television and microwave oven division of General Electric with remarkable skill.
He has overcome seemingly thwarted ambition, created new products and mentored younger executives with aplomb. He may lack eloquence. (He once proposed a line for a speech honoring GE’s real-life chief executive: “Jack Welch has such unparalleled management skills they named Welch’s Grape Juice after him, because he squeezes the sweetest juice out of his workers’ mind grapes.”) But he is shrewd, ambitious and has a vision for what the company under his command could be.
Donaghy is a plutocrat, but in a proud American tradition — a self-made plutocrat. He grew up the son of a working-class single mother in Boston, put himself through Princeton on a “handsomeness scholarship” and by working “the day shift at a graveyard and the graveyard shift at a Days Inn,” then made his way to Harvard Business School and GE’s management training program.
He has some mighty impressive mind grapes. Pour a scotch, stand wistfully staring out the window and consider some of Jack Donaghy’s lessons that every manager should take to heart.
Have a career plan, but don’t let it stifle you.
Donaghy had spent his professional career climbing the ranks of General Electric, aspiring to be its chief executive. He was disconsolate when the division he headed was sold to Philadelphia-based Kabletown (a thinly veiled take on Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal), and his longtime mentor, GE chief executive Don Geiss (played by Rip Torn), died.
Suddenly, Donaghy was exiled from a company he had long hoped to lead, his dream seemingly shattered. His ambition to lead GE had been the force driving his ascent up the corporate ladder, and that chance disappeared seemingly overnight.
After some brooding, though, Donaghy redirected his energy to dreaming up new products for Kabletown, learning its corporate culture and climbing a new corporate ladder. As disappointed as he may have been about not becoming CEO of “the General,” and there is nothing wrong with that, the key was channeling that disappointment in productive ways — toward making his mark at a new firm, in this case — rather than just moping.
It’s great to have a career driven by the ambition to reach a particular goal; in Donaghy’s case, that surely served as the motivation for years of hard work. But the point of having a goal is not that one can be absolutely certain of attaining it; rather, it gives you a point on the horizon that ensures a career is heading the right general direction over time.
What Donaghy didn’t do was try to ease his way back into the fold at GE when it was clear his moment had passed. The desire to be its CEO was a force that fueled ambition, not an end in itself.
There is an interesting real-life parallel. When Jack Welch was retiring as the chief of GE, there was a three-way competition to succeed him between Jeffrey Immelt, Bob Nardelli and James McNerney. Immelt got the job, and Nardelli and McNerney quickly moved on: the former to run Home Depot, the latter to Boeing. Neither took their failure to reach a long-standing career goal as an excuse to stop chasing something big.
Innovate whether they like it or not
An old friend who worked at Kabletown explained to Donaghy that the cable business is a piece of cake: With all the money that rolls in from pay-per-view porn, the joke goes, there’s no need to “make” anything.
Donaghy found himself in a corporate culture that had little appreciation for the very work that animated him as an executive: creating innovations, turning them into products and bringing them to the marketplace.
The key to emerging from his professional rut was realizing that innovation can bloom even in places that don’t seem ripe for it. It is a state of mind.
Donaghy becomes something of a guerilla innovator at Kabletown, inventing, among other things, what he called “porn for women,” offering a pay-per-view service with handsome men staring deeply into the screen asking women to talk about their day. A funny joke, yes, but one with a broader lesson. Not every company will be a Google or Apple, turning out never-before-seen products. But in any company, there are opportunities to look at old products in new ways or make customers happier.
The best managers find ways to bring that innovation sensibility to their jobs, regardless of their industry or what the environment around them encourages.
Take mentorship seriously
In the first season of “30 Rock,” Donaghy decided to take Liz Lemon under his wing and mentor her. She resisted, seeing him in those early days as a clueless corporate suit. With time, she would come to understand that having Jack Donaghy as a mentor was no small matter.
He sees a big part of his job as preparing his underlings to go out into the world and achieve success as he has done. It is not entirely selfless; Lemon and his other mentees will surely maintain a loyalty to him that could ease his own corporate ascent. But he goes far beyond the mere obligations of a boss, trying to ensure that his mentees reach their every goal.
When Lemon resists his initial entreaties, Donaghy presents her with his handiwork: Howard Jorgensen, a vice president of locomotives at GE who — before he met Jack — “dressed poorly, had bad posture, walked around with lettuce in my hair,” as he says. When Donaghy was done, Jorgensen was “earning seven figures and married to a swell Filipino gal.”
One fault in Donaghy’s management style is that he seems to view taking someone on as a binary event: Someone is either worthy of extraordinary time and effort or none at all. When his new wife, Avery Jessup (played by Elizabeth Banks), is uncomfortable about his close relationship with Lemon, he “tries out” other potential mentees, only to find them all wanting.
Of course, no manager can insinuate himself deeply into the lives of all his or her employees (and Donaghy’s relationship with Lemon often does veer toward being a little too close, though not in a romantic way). But mentorship doesn’t need to be the all-or-nothing enterprise that it seems to be for Donaghy, in which there are some worthy of his overwhelming efforts and everyone else is not. There is plenty of room for helping junior colleagues advance in small ways as well as large, and doing so can help assure an even larger network of allies.
But still, it is clear that part of Donaghy’s success comes not just from his own achievements, but in Liz Lemon’s and Howard Jorgensen’s.
Tolerate idiosyncracy
As the executive in charge of a television network, Donaghy oversees a lot of colorful people. The stars of the fictional NBC show “TGS,” Tracy Jordan (played by Tracy Morgan) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski), are self-absorbed, difficult and often unreliable. Donaghy sees them as nothing like himself, a buttoned-up aficionado of power ties and good scotch.
But they are the talents at the core of a TV show that is part of Donaghy’s empire. And to hold onto those first-rate talents, he tolerates the frustrations of working with people whose aesthetic sensibilities and work habits are very different from his own. He assesses their talent, and then adjusts his management style to get the most out of them.
Sometimes that means simply tolerating late arrivals or people storming into his office with odd demands. At other times, he takes a deeper personal role in resolving problems that are keeping his charges from doing their best work.
He went particularly above and beyond in the second season. The conceit is this: Tracy Jordan was stirring up trouble because of unresolved issues with his absent father. Donaghy helps him get through the frustrations during a role-playing therapy session in which he portrays Jordan’s father, a droopy-lipped Campbell Soup factory employee from funky North Philly. The (quite politically incorrect) result is not just among the funniest sitcom scenes of all time. It is also a manager doing whatever it takes to make one of his most talented employees more productive, even at no small cost in terms of personal dignity (and, if it were real life, some unpleasant consequences from the HR department).
Personal touches matter
Donaghy is highly attuned to the personal lives of his employees and what makes them tick. He is a superb giver of gifts, viewing it as the “purest expression of friendship” and invariably selecting uniquely appropriate presents. He may be a coldhearted corporate tactician at times, but he also cares deeply about his people, and does the little things to let them know it.
This, more than any other character trait, appears to be based on Jack Welch, the GE chief executive from 1981 to 2004.
“Do you know why Jack Welch is the greatest leader since the pharaohs?” Donaghy asked in the first “30 Rock” season. “Because he didn’t only involve himself in our work lives, but our personal lives as well. He introduced us to the finest booze, the most restrictive country clubs. He gave us the names of the most discreet private investigators to spy on our ex-wives. He held our hands during our triumphs and our Senate hearings.”
The real Jack Welch may not favor restrictive country clubs or spying on ex-wives, but he has a reputation for taking intense interest in the lives of his underlings. For example, in an interview with BusinessWeek, Bob Nardelli told of Welch once making him work through a holiday weekend that he had been supposed to spend with his wife — and then sending a case of Dom Perignon and an apology note saying, “I was thinking more of myself than you and Sue. Have a toast on me.”
Donaghy practices the same philosophy. He understands that you can get more out of an employee when they know you will fight for them when the chips are down and help them emerge from personal crises or other challenges in life.
Learn from everyone around you
For all his elitism, Donaghy has often displayed an ability to learn lessons from those around him. He has an especially savvy ability to learn lessons and adapt strategies used by people who might seem to have little to offer to an accomplished businessperson.
Never was that more true than in Season 6, when he found himself being outnegotiated by his baby daughter’s night nurse, Sherry. She refused to accept a pay cut when her hours were reduced, negotiating by sitting quietly and eating an orange while Jack awkwardly acquiesced to her demands. He was, as he put it, “reamed by a woman in Winnie the Pooh hospital pants.”
Donaghy, he told Lemon later, violated every rule of negotiation. “I spoke first. I smiled. I negotiated with myself. If I had done that during a mock negotiation in business school, Professor Woodmer would have spanked me in front of the whole class. Bare bottom.”
But a key negotiation over licensing fees between the hapless NBC and its parent company, Kabletown, was shaking Donaghy’s confidence until he learned the crucial lesson that Sherry had taught. When somebody’s helpless baby is in the mix, the usual negotiating strategies don’t apply. And NBC was Kabletown’s baby. By negotiating like Sherry, he prevailed.
Of course, if he had been blind to her effectiveness and the lessons it offered, he might not have found himself on the cover of that month’s “Meetings” magazine.
Have a career plan, but don’t let it stifle you.
Innovate whether they like it or not.
Take mentorship seriously.
Learn from everyone around you.
Tolerate idiosyncracy.
Personal touches matter.
They're small things, but each has the power to dramatically change someone's day. Including yours.
Getty
Want to make a huge difference in someone's life? Here are things you should say every day to your employees, colleagues, family members, friends, and everyone you care about:
"Here's what I'm thinking."
You're in charge, but that doesn't mean you're smarter, savvier, or more insightful than everyone else. Back up your statements and decisions. Give reasons. Justify with logic, not with position or authority.
Though taking the time to explain your decisions opens those decisions up to discussion or criticism, it also opens up your decisions to improvement.
Authority can make you "right," but collaboration makes everyone right--and makes everyone pull together.
"I was wrong."
I once came up with what I thought was an awesome plan to improve overall productivity by moving a crew to a different shift on an open production line. The inconvenience to the crew was considerable, but the payoff seemed worth it. On paper, it was perfect.
In practice, it wasn't.
So, a few weeks later, I met with the crew and said, "I know you didn't think this would work, and you were right. I was wrong. Let's move you back to your original shift."
I felt terrible. I felt stupid. I was sure I'd lost any respect they had for me.
It turns out I was wrong about that, too. Later one employee said, "I didn't really know you, but the fact you were willing to admit you were wrong told me everything I needed to know."
When you're wrong, say you're wrong. You won't lose respect--you'll gain it.
"That was awesome."
No one gets enough praise. No one. Pick someone--pick anyone--who does or did something well and say, "Wow, that was great how you..."
And feel free to go back in time. Saying "Earlier, I was thinking about how you handled that employee issue last month..." can make just as positive an impact today as it would have then. (It could even make a bigger impact, because it shows you still remember what happened last month, and you still think about it.)
Praise is a gift that costs the giver nothing but is priceless to the recipient. Start praising. The people around you will love you for it--and you'll like yourself a little better, too.
"You're welcome."
Think about a time you gave a gift and the recipient seemed uncomfortable or awkward. Their reaction took away a little of the fun for you, right?
The same thing can happen when you are thanked or complimented or praised. Don't spoil the moment or the fun for the other person. The spotlight may make you feel uneasy or insecure, but all you have to do is make eye contact and say, "Thank you." Or make eye contact and say, "You're welcome. I was glad to do it."
Don't let thanks, congratulations, or praise be all about you. Make it about the other person, too.
"Can you help me?"
When you need help, regardless of the type of help you need or the person you need it from, just say, sincerely and humbly, "Can you help me?"
I promise you'll get help. And in the process you'll show vulnerability, respect, and a willingness to listen--which, by the way, are all qualities of a great leader.
And are all qualities of a great friend.
"I'm sorry."
We all make mistakes, so we all have things we need to apologize for: words, actions, omissions, failing to step up, step in, show support...
Say you're sorry.
But never follow an apology with a disclaimer like "But I was really mad, because..." or "But I did think you were..." or any statement that in any way places even the smallest amount of blame back on the other person.
Say you're sorry, say why you're sorry, and take all the blame. No less. No more.
Then you both get to make the freshest of fresh starts.
"Can you show me?"
Advice is temporary; knowledge is forever. Knowing what to do helps, but knowing how or why to do it means everything.
When you ask to be taught or shown, several things happen: You implicitly show you respect the person giving the advice; you show you trust his or her experience, skill, and insight; and you get to better assess the value of the advice.
Don't just ask for input. Ask to be taught or trained or shown.
Then you both win.
"Let me give you a hand."
Many people see asking for help as a sign of weakness. So, many people hesitate to ask for help.
But everyone needs help.
Don't just say, "Is there anything I can help you with?" Most people will give you a version of the reflexive "No, I'm just looking" reply to sales clerks and say, "No, I'm all right."
Be specific. Find something you can help with. Say "I've got a few minutes. Can I help you finish that?" Offer in a way that feels collaborative, not patronizing or gratuitous. Model the behavior you want your employees to display.
Then actually roll up your sleeves and help.
"I love you."
No, not at work, but everywhere you mean it--and every time you feel it.
Nothing.
Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing. If you're upset, frustrated, or angry, stay quiet. You may think venting will make you feel better, but it never does.
That's especially true where your employees are concerned. Results come and go, but feelings are forever. Criticize an employee in a group setting and it will seem like he eventually got over it, but inside, he never will.
Before you speak, spend more time considering how employees will think and feel than you do evaluating whether the decision makes objective sense. You can easily recover from a mistake made because of faulty data or inaccurate projections.
You'll never recover from the damage you inflict on an employee's self-esteem.
Be quiet until you know exactly what to say--and exactly what affect your words will have.
Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up fromghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden
Want to be happier? Steal a page from the perennial optimist's playbook.
rkramer62/Flickr
As a therapist-turned-entrepreneur (kinda), I have helped lots of people fight myriad mental and emotional setbacks.
Over time, I have learned that the skill set that helps you avoid depression or anxiety is not the same skill set that helps you experience a joyful, meaningful, and connected life. If you want to be truly happy, you need a new playbook.
Here's a page from that playbook. It contains eight ways that happy people are different than everyone else.
They are resilient.
Happy people bounce back, often quickly, from setbacks. Rather than see life's adversities as destructive and rigid roadblocks that they must quash in order to be happy, they see adverse situations as manageable and temporary fixtures in a pretty good life--the price they pay for renting space on the planet.
They are optimistic.
You know this to be true--most people want to talk about their problems and what's not going right. Happy people have the same problems that everyone else does, they are just solution-focused and get bored and irritated talking about problems all the time. They have an uncanny skill for finding solutions where there seem to be none. There's a time and place for venting, but when you're ready for a solution, ask an optimist.
They experience a wide-range of emotions.
While happy people have more positive emotions than negative ones--three times as many, in fact--they do experience negative emotions just like everyone else. However, they experience them differently. They don't squelch negative emotions. They face them head on in order to learn from them. They let negative emotions guide them into changing a behavior, self-examining, or getting out of a bad relationship. They see negative emotions as an internal wake-up call to change course or re-evaluate.
They savor things that most people take for granted or overlook.
Happy people are masters at the art of savoring. They joyfully anticipate events, stay present during events, and reminisce after events. They do this because they tend to keep the end in mind. They know that kids grow up, time passes, and we all die. Happy people live by a carpe diem philosophy, never needing a reason to celebrate.
They seek constant challenge and mastery.
Happy people continually look for ways to challenge themselves and develop or master a skill. Rarely complacent, they have an idea of what personal success looks like and use healthy doses of self-criticism to achieve their goals. They don't self-loathe, but they are realistic with themselves and their deficiencies. They seek out people, hobbies, professions, or ideas that challenge them and their stale self-concepts.
They spend lots of time with people they like.
Happy people know that relationships are essential to living a good life. Humans aren't meant to live in isolation. When we do, loneliness sets in, depression ensues, and we find ourselves in a downward spiral of negativity and withdrawal. Relationships are critical to happy people. The key is spending time with people you like and want to be with. Not just any warm body will do.
They are quick to forgive.
Forgiving a wrongdoing isn't easy. It almost feels good to harbor a grudge or pass judgment, producing the mild comfort of self-righteousness. But happy people choose forgiveness. They see the larger context of forgiveness--it allows both the offender and the offended a chance to move on. Happy people know that their inability to forgive someone doesn't hurt that person or "show them up," it only hurts them.
They serve a purpose bigger than themselves.
Happy people live out their values in tangible ways. They are eager to connect to something meaningful--a cause, purpose, or belief that is bigger than them. Human existence has two aims: to make a contribution to humanity and to have a purpose for living. Happy people spend a lot of time making sure they get these two right.
by Les McKeown via @inc
Outwardly, you appear effective, dependable, on top of things. But look closer. Are you in danger of destructive behaviors?
Here's a statement of the blindingly obvious: strong, effective leadership is better than weak, ineffective leadership.
Thankfully, it's usually obvious which is which--most of us can spot a strong leader from a weak one with relative ease.
The problem comes when a weak leader masquerades as a strong leader. Outwardly, they appear effective, dependable, on top of things. But look closely at what they believe to be strong leadership and what you see is in fact a set of dangerous, destructive behaviors. Behaviors which will eventually strangle the organization.
It's one thing having to work alongside a weak leader who thinks otherwise. Much worse is to find out, painfully and over a long time, that the culprit is you. That the leadership traits and behaviors you'd thought were strengths are in fact the exact opposite, and that instead of leading your enterprise, like an unpinned grenade, you're about to blow it up.
Time for some tough love. Here are the four most common behaviors of an ineffective leader who thinks otherwise. Recognize any?
1. You know everything. My work involves talking with founder/owners and CEO's about their business, usually for hours, sometimes days at a time. And in doing so, I've noticed an interesting pattern: The weaker the leader, the more they know.
When I meet with weak or ineffective leaders, they can (and do) talk about their business for hours, uninterrupted and without assistance from others. There's nothing they don't know, no-one they need to consult and no information that's not to hand. The whole experience is like sitting with them in a goldfish bowl while the real world carries on outside.
Talking with truly effective leaders is just the opposite. They involve others when discussing their business. Whether it's putting the VP Sales on speakerphone or wandering down the corridor to talk with the warehouse manager, strong leaders know they can't--and shouldn't--know everything about their business. They build strong teams and are proud to depend upon them.
2. You're always busy. Yes, running a business (or a division, department, project, group or team) is time consuming--sometimes to the point of exhaustion.
No, it's not a sign of leadership strength to be permanently over-scheduled and over-worked.
If you have no time to think; if you can't recall the last time you took a walk around the block to clear your head, then you're not truly leading. If you're not taking time to set the strategic compass of your organization, who do you think is?
3. Your default perception of others is negative. When truly effective leaders talk, one thing becomes noticeable. When discussing others, whether their employees, vendors or customers, the conversation typically trends toward the positive.
Strong leaders look for success in others. They focus on what has been done well, and seek to build on that success. Conversely, ineffective leaders' opinions of others typically trend to the negative. They focus mostly on what has gone wrong, and spend most of their time ranging from mildly dissatisfied to irritated.
Strong leaders aren't Pollyannas. They recognize and firmly correct failure or incompetence, but by default they expect competence and success, they enjoy pointing it out in others, and they celebrate it often.
4. You have only two modes of interaction. Weak leaders (who think they're strong) interact with direct reports in one of two ways: either they're in charge, or they're not there. If they're in the room, they're in charge.
Truly effective leaders have another string to their bow, a third way of interacting with their team--to be a resource for them. Genuinely strong leaders are confident enough in their position that they don't need to always be at the head of the table. They can, when needed or useful, sit down as a peer and be just another voice around the table, even with those who report to them.
When was the last time you sat in on an operations or planning meeting, simply as a resource, and not as the boss? How did your team react? Were they comfortable and relaxed with you around, or did it all seem forced, a little like playacting?
In reviewing the four behaviors above, did you experience a sinking feeling of recognition in more than one? If so, it might be time to reverse course.
by Jessica Stillman via @inc
Not a natural lark? People have probably been hectoring you to get up earlier since high school. Here's how to finally reset your waking time.
It's personal productivity month here on Inc.com, and the site is chockablock with great tips to get more done. Among all this advice, you may have noticed a near perfect consensus on one point: You really should get up earlier.
This probably isn't news to you. If you're not a natural lark, most likely people have been hectoring you (or you've been hectoring yourself) to wake up earlier since high school. If it were so simple, you would have done it already.
So, after all the years and all the failed attempts, how can you actually get yourself out of bed earlier?
I know you love it. Everyone loves it—Snooze is probably the most beloved button in America—but according to blogger Meredith Jaeger, like most things that feel so good, it's actually bad for you. And addictive. "Let’s face it, if you hit Snooze even once, you’re going to hit it again. The damn thing is addictive. It’s sort of like, 'Oh, I’ll only have one beer.' (We all know that never happens)," she writes.
So, it's time to take drastic measures to kick the habit. Put the alarm clock where you can't blearily whack it when it goes off. Across the room maybe, or if you have it really bad for your buddy the Snooze button, more elaborate tech solutions are on offer. Here's an app that forces you to violently shake your phone to make it shut up, or how about this alarm clock that runs away from you?
The first tip is all about tough love, but give yourself some sweetness to help that bitter medicine go down. Don't choose an alarm sound that enrages you. You have a choice as to what will be the first sensation you experience each day, after all. Is grating, repetitive beeping really what you want to choose?
Even better than a less gruesome alarm tone may be using light to wake you up. The underlying lesson is not to settle for your default sound. "I started using a cell phone as my alarm clock and quickly realized that different ringtones irritated me less but worked just as well to wake me up. I now use the ringtone alarm as a backup for my bedside lamp plugged in to a timer," writes Lifehack's Seth Simonds, who concludes: "Experiment a bit and see what works best for you."
Also consider further carrots to lure you from the embrace of your comforter. Or in other words, don't be ashamed of self-bribery! It worked for writer Jeff Goins. "Don’t drive yourself with guilt about why you have to wake up early…motivate yourself by doing something fun in the morning," he says. "Play some games or indulge in some leisure reading." If that still doesn't work, then "you can also keep track of your progress and reward yourself when you reach a milestone," he says. This system works to get toddlers to behave, so it may even work on your grumpy, morning self.
As you've read this far, we've already established you're not a natural early riser. So why are you fighting the good fight to wake up earlier when you're at your worst, i.e., in the morning?
"I understood the benefits of waking up early. I made plans to wake up early," confesses Goins, "but that discipline was gone in the morning. The groggy person hitting the Snooze button wasn’t the same clear-thinking person that had set the alarm the night before. When I realized waking up early is a battle fought on two fronts, everything changed." He began taking steps, like those outlined above, at night to force his hand when he was feeling weak-willed in the morning.
These three principles should get you started, but there's plenty more advice out there. Business Insider's Vivian Giang offers seven solid tips, while author Laura Vanderkam wrote an entire book on the hows and whys of waking up early.
By JOSH PATRICK via @nyt
Jim Collins writes that one of the keys of successful companies is to have the right person in the right seat. I don’t think anyone would argue. But I do wonder why we don’t take the same care hiring outside advisers that we do with hiring employees.
As we saw in my recent series of posts on Holly Hunter’s attempts to sell her business, much of her pain came from hiring the wrong advisers. To review, Ms. Hunter hired a friend to represent her, hired a broker who claimed to represent both the buyer and the seller, and hired an attorney who didn’t have much experience in transactional work.
These sorts mistakes look glaring in retrospect, but they are not unusual. Many business owners make them — and not just when they are trying to sell their businesses. They can happen any time an owner hires someone from outside the company to provide advice and guidance.
If you own a business, you hire outside advisers. If you own a small business, you may even outsource crucial functions. It’s one of the ways micro-businesses keep their employee headcount low. I spend a lot of time these days helping owners figure out how to make sure the right person is doing the right job.
First, it’s important to understand that the people who advise you bring their own worldviews. They have an expertise, and that expertise tends to color how they see things. Lawyers tend to look for legal solutions. Accountants look for tax-based solutions. It’s important to understand that and to think about what you are trying to accomplish. If you start with clarity about what you want to do and why, you give yourself an advantage.
Next, move on to how you’re going to get there and who needs to help. Having a system for hiring the right help is often the difference between success and failure. The first question to ask when hiring an outside adviser is, do you need a specialist or a generalist.
If the outcome you’re trying to accomplish is relatively straightforward, you probably need a specialist. But when things get complicated, such as if you are selling your business, you may benefit if you have either a specialist who can think globally or you a generalist who gets the big picture.
Next, I suggest you ask yourself a question: “What type of adviser do I work with most successfully?” You may have to do a little soul searching. I find that I’m most successful with advisers who share my view of how the world works. Do they need to be in control? Do they work well collaboratively? Do they listen well? I need to know the answers to these questions before I’m willing to sign on. The questions you need to answer will likely be different from mine.
Then, make sure the advisers you are considering have the technical skills you need. Make sure they are accustomed to facing the issues you’re facing. You might have to pay a little more, but in the end you will probably end up saving money, time and aggravation.
Along with technical ability, you want your advisers to demonstrate that they have been successful in achieving the type of outcomes you’re interested in. This means you must check references. Don’t just ask where they have been successful, ask them to describe a time things didn’t go well and what they learned.
Throughout the process of hiring and managing outside advisers, it is important to maintain control. This was part of the problem when Ms. Hunter hired a business broker. That broker represented both the buyer and the seller, and Ms. Hunter lost control of her adviser and her sale. (It didn’t work out very well for the buyer either.)
Make sure the adviser you hire understands why you hired him or her. Let this person know why the outcome is important to you. If you feel your adviser is taking you off course, it’s your responsibility to rein him or her back in.
Have you thought about how you hire advisers? What kind of success have you had? Do you think it makes sense to have a system? What advice would you add?
BY ALAN HENRY
You know that sinking feeling you have when there's too much on your plate? When you try to tackle your tasks by priority, but it feels like everything's important? Don't get overwhelmed—it's a problem that everyone faces at some point or another, and while it's difficult to skillfully juggle multiple priorities and competing responsibilities, it's not impossible. Here's how.
It just so happens that there's a career that focuses specifically on juggling competing tasks and priorities: These people are called project managers. And as luck would have it, I was a full time PM for many years, PMP-certified and everything. In that time, I learned a number of helpful tricks that can help you manage your workload at the office as well as your ever-growing list of to-dos at home, with your family, or with your friends. Here's how you can apply some of those techniques to your everyday life.
Even if everything on your plate is supposedto be equally important, you still need a way to break down which ones you spend your time on, and how you slice up your time. The first question you have to get past is whether or not everything really is of equal importance. Here are a couple of tips to help you cut through the fog and get a feel for how important your responsibilities and projects really are.
Photo by Lisa Stevens.
In order for your priorities to even matter, you need to have some sort of a personal productivity system in place to which you hold yourself accountable—and in which your priorities will actually matter. If you've got a tried and true system, great. If not,check out our guide to building one that's right for you.
The goal of your system, whichever you select, is to take away the need for you to waste time deciding what to work on next, even when you have a lot on your plate. I've found that David Allen's GTD framework is one of the most effective methods for me, mostly because it focuses on what you should do now and what your next actions should be, and it emphasizes getting your to-dos out of your head and into some system that will help you work. I've mentioned before that I manage my to-dos in ReQall, but there are plenty of other options, like previously mentioned Wunderlist, or if you work on a team, Asana, a collaborative tool we adore.
Whichever tool and productivity method you choose, dump your to-dos and projects into it as quickly as possible. Make sure it's something you'll actually return to and use frequently, and something that's easy to fit into your workflow, and you'll be successful. In the end, you want something easy to refer to, easy to enter tasks into, and that gives you a great view of all of the balls you have in the air at any time.
Photo by David Chico Pham.
When I was a project manager, one of the first things I learned to help me judge which projects were most important or needed the most attention is the "triple constraint," or a triangle with three equilateral sides. Each side represents the cost of the project, the scope of the project, and the time required to complete the project. None of the sides can be adjusted without making changes to the other two sides. The sides you're weakest in help determine the projects that need special attention. This holds true for all things, not just projects and project managers: If someone heaps more work onto you (scope), but insists that you finish in the same amount of time (time), you'll need more resources (cost) to get the job done.
For example, if you want to paint the spare room in time for out-of-town guests to stay over, you can't change the size of the job (scope), but you can control whether you buckle down and do it yourself overnight (time), or get someone else to do it for you while you do something else (cost). Here's how you can use these three principles to organize your everyday to-dos.
Photo by Mike Truchon/Shutterstock.
It's easy for us to toil away in obscurity, quietly hating our lives and our jobs and growing more frustrated with every passing minute. All the while, there may be a friend who's willing to help if we had only asked, or a boss who would be willing to help you out if you asked the right questions or gave them the right information.
We've talked about how difficult it can be to delegate, and how to delegate effectively in the past, but however you go about it, it's important to remember that you need to be assertive, not aggressive when asking for help, and you need to make your case with all of the data you have available. By now, you should have your priorities laid out and you have a good idea what you need. Use that information to ask for help and prove you need it, and remember, don't be upset if your friends, boss, or coworkers say no.
Photo by Matthieu Plourde.
Using this method to set your own priorities and keep track of your own responsibilities isn't just something you should do when you're starting to feel overwhelmed. If the walls are closing in on you, yes, it's definitely time to take a good, hard look at what's on your plate, what can come off, and what has to give, but waiting until you're already busy and stressed out will make it especially difficult to make the changes you need to get your head above water. Even so, it's essential, and once you do it you'll never look back. Hopefully, you can apply these tricks to your work, at home, and in your day-to-day life. Once you really understand what you have to work on and how long it takes, you'll be able to make smart decisions about whether you can take on that big new project at work, or help your best friend plan their bachelor party.
Ad analytics company Adometry, the combined entity created when Click Forensics acquired Adometry and kept its branding, has announced it has closed an $8 million Series D round, led by Shasta Ventures, with Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures also participating. As part of the funding round, Shasta Venture’s MD, Jason Pressman, will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.
The company said it plans to use its latest funding to accelerate product development on its analytics platform, Adometry Attribute, as well as recruit staff and expand into new territories. It currently says it processes and analyzes “tens-of-billions of impressions and advertising transactions” per month on behalf of its customers.
Adometry sells tools to help advertisers and marketers determine how cross-channel media campaigns are performing and identify ways they can be optimized. Its approach to measuring campaign effectiveness involves aggregating data from multiple sources and signals, rather than just identifying the “last click” and giving that all the credit for the purchase.
Here’s how the company explains its analytics platform on its website:
Adometry Attribute uses a “data-driven,” probabilistic approach to determine what should receive the credit. Adometry identifies every conversion and “look-back” over the previous time period to find all the touch-points that user saw prior to the conversion. It then determines the probability of each conversion sequence – with and without an event – and then uses the ratio to determine the importance of the omitted event.
Advanced Attribution offers a number of benefits when compared to simple attribution models. To start, Attribute takes into account any and all available data streams, and analyzes all data instead of sample sets, yielding a highly accurate and insightful model for marketers to judge their marketing efforts by. Attribute is also integrated with numerous data providers and pulls additional third party data for increased accuracy, scalable marketing analytics and reporting depth that allows for truly actionable insights to be uncovered.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Shasta’s Pressman said: “We believe Adometry has built a unique and sustainable business at the intersection of several exploding market dynamics. Using big data to optimize and influence advertising spend is the future of marketing, and many of the world’s largest brands already rely on Adometry’s robust platform and expertise. We are thrilled to lead this round of funding and excited about Adometry’s continued growth and success.”
Adometry’s full release follows below.
ADOMETRY RAISES $8 MILLION IN LATEST ROUND OF FINANCING
Funding to Fuel New Products and Expansion into New GeographiesAUSTIN, Texas – January 21, 2013 – Adometry, Inc., a leader in cross-channel attribution, today announced that it has completed an $8 million round of financing. The company will use the funds to accelerate its product roadmap, recruit top talent and expand into new territories.
The financing was led by Shasta Ventures and includes participation from Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Adometry also announced Shasta Venture’s Jason Pressman will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.
As a result of the funding, the company plans to accelerate product development on its Adometry Attribute™ platform, which provides marketers with acomprehensive lens through which to analyze and optimize the performance of their cross-channel marketing campaigns. Through unique integrations with leading programmatic buying platforms, advertisers can also automatically funnel performance data and optimization recommendations from Adometry’s platform to real-time bidding engines to optimize media and channel investments for active campaigns.
“Our focus has always been to deliver the best possible products for advertisers so that our customers and agency partners around the world are better able to understand and make decisions about their marketing spend,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry. “We are humbled by the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received thus far and look forward to delivering even greater value through our Attribute platform by offering new capabilities and features in the coming year.”
“We believe Adometry has built a unique and sustainable business at the intersection of several exploding market dynamics,” said Jason Pressman, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures. “Using big data to optimize and influence advertising spend is the future of marketing, and many of the world’s largest brands already rely on Adometry’s robust platform and expertise. We are thrilled to lead this round of funding and excited about Adometry’s continued growth and success.”
For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter: @Adometry.
About Adometry
Adometry, Inc. redefines marketing analytics by combining and interpreting previously silo-ed sources of big data to generate actions that improve return on advertising spend and increase sales. Through its SaaS-based attribution platform, Adometry processes tens-of-billions of marketing touch points from online and offline media channels for some of the world’s largest advertisers to identify the true consumer purchase journey. Adometry’s scientifically proven methodology and flexible, easy-to-implement solution generates the industry’s most accurate insights, in the shortest amount of time. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information, visit www.adometry.com.
POSTED by WBRIGGS
Popular pictures of Mark Twain show the American man of letters in a relaxed slump, enjoying a cigar, and sheepishly scanning a warm summer afternoon in a comfortable, white linen suit. A calm, restful smile resides on Twain’s lips and his wild, white hair appears to have recently departed from a goose feather pillow.
On first glance, Twain doesn’t seem like a very productive soul, but you can’t judge a book by its cover.
The fact is Twain was a steady, consistent, and productive writer who tirelessly worked on his craft. There’s a reason why Hemingway called Twain’s most popular book, Huckleberry Finn, the root of all modern American literature.
Twain’s impressive work rate is the result of his happy outlook on life and his unique principles. Even if you aren’t a writer, the following list of Twain’s productivity tips will help you work harder and smarter:
Twain observed, “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” Twain didn’t let misspellings and rules of grammar get in the way of his storytelling. He believed in telling simple, humorous tales. Twain left the editing to the editors. This carefree attitude spurred his creativity and let him develop his own style that wasn’t beholden to established rules of fiction
Don’t waste all of your time editing and making things perfect. Give yourself time to be sloppy, creative, and messy. It gives you the opportunity to express yourself without barriers. You can edit, retool, and tweak later.
Productivity isn’t always about waking up early, setting a schedule and trying your best to ignore your email and phone. Sometimes it boils down to confidence and Twain believed only certain people inspire self-assurance. Twain writes, “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Ignore the naysayers, the cynics, and the folks who are always sucking their teeth whenever a new idea is brought up. They are the “small people” and all they want from you is to join them in their misery. You must associate with people who allow, encourage, and demand big dreams.
Everyone has their favorite Twain joke. Mine is, “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
Twain knew that humor, jokes, and laughter soothed many headaches and ills. “Humor is the great thing,” Twain writes, “the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.”
If you have a mountain of work and stress dogs your daily life than take time to seek out humor. Laughter will help you relax. Once you’re relaxed you can get back to work with more clarity and focus.
Twain knew that good habits are hard to acquire. While it’s easy to say you’ll get up early and visit the gym, it’s another thing completely to obey your screeching alarm clock before the sun begins its day.
Twain had a hack to instill good habits and it goes as follows, “Do something every day that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”
He went on to observe, “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by man, but coaxed downstairs, a step at a time.”
Twain knew that one can’t simply pull a positive habit out of the blue. Good habits have to be worked at incrementally.
Twain also writes, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex and overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
Don’t jolt your system into new, better habits. Gradually work your way into them so they stick.
Twain didn’t believe in dieting or maintaining a healthy lifestyle. He smoked cigars, he drank, and he didn’t believe in abstaining from fattening foods.
When it came to cigars he had an especially large appetite. He writes, “I ordinarily smoke fifteen cigars during my five hours’ labors.” It is not exactly a habit one should replicate, but it illustrates that Twain allowed himself small pleasures while he went about his work.
There’s no rule forbidding yourself from small pleasures while you toil over your projects. Faced with a monumental task one should bear down and get to work while allowing for the odd indulgence.
After all, Twain writes, “There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.”
If there’s one thing executives lack, it’s time. And many of them, it turns out, aren’t happy with how they’re managing this limited resource.
In an online survey of nearly 1,400 senior executives — including 668 CEOs and 557 other C-level execs — just 52% said they were spending their time in a way that matched their companies’ strategic priorities.
Respondents were further divided in their satisfaction of how they utilized their time at work: 32% said they were somewhat or very dissatisfied, 48% were somewhat satisfied, and only 9% were highly satisfied. The rest said they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, or did not know. The study will be released Monday by consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
When compared with the highly satisfied group, executives who were dissatisfied exhibited remarkably similar time-use habits, which McKinsey grouped into four categories:
“Online junkies” spent on average 38% of their time using email or voicemail, leaving little time for personal interaction.
“Schmoozers,” represented well by CEOs and sales directors, interacted heavily with external stakeholders like clients and customers, at the risk of neglecting their own employees.
Meanwhile, “cheerleaders,” often C-suite executives, spent a big chunk of their schedules meeting and managing employees, but considerably less time with outsiders.
“Firefighters,” usually general managers, were often preoccupied with resolving short-term and unexpected issues.
The findings indicate that methods of time management are a crucial yet overlooked issue at many companies, says Aaron De Smet, a principal at McKinsey’s Houston office and co-author of the report. Executives generally don’t track how they spend their time, he says, and many companies don’t offer guidance in this area.
“Time is one of the most precious and undermanaged resources at a company, and it seems to be getting more so,” De Smet says. “We’re just piling on more and more and more.”
Executives who were fully satisfied with their time management were generally more consistent and balanced in the way they budgeted their time. They spent on average 38% of their time in face-to-face interactions, 28% using email or voice mail, and 21% on the phone. They were more likely to be found working alone (24% of time), than with clients and customers (17%) or direct reports (15%).
CEOs, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprised more than one-third of the 124 executives in the “fully-satisfied” group. De Smet theorizes that they are more efficient with their time because they have executive assistants who manage their calendars. These top bosses also have more discretion when it comes to how they choose to budget their time, he adds.
Overall De Smet argues that companies need to address time management as an organizational initiative, not an individual one. He says firms should set “time budgets” for certain projects and tasks, and limit the introduction of new initiatives that might overwhelm executives.
The survey, conducted in late 2011, polled executives from a mix of public and private companies around the world.
by Boris Wertz
Sitting on the board of a dozen startups, I have seen my fair share of really productive -- and really unproductive -- board meetings.
Here are some best practices to ensure your board meeting delivers the best results:
approvals, board resolutions, etc.). It is important to leave enough time for them at the end of the meeting.
A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to come in for a radio interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own — but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations operating reliably and efficiently.
That's not leadership, I explained. That's management — and the two are radically different.
In more than four decades of studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new strategies, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people use the words"leadership" and "management" synonymously, and it drives me crazy every time.
The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century. The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:
Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.
Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.
Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.
In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.
Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.
Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen.
There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.
Dr. John P. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Chief Innovation Officer at Kotter International, a firm that helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations.
Upcoming event: Forecasting Economic Trends for 2013
For more than 27 years, Alan Beaulieu and Brian Beaulieu have specialized in forecasting future economic changes for businesses. Alan is the President and Brian is the CEO of ITR Economics™ (aka the Institute for Trend Research). Their forecasting accuracy rate is a reliable 94.7%. In their upcoming webinar, “Forecasting Economic Trends for 2013,” they offer practical strategies and solutions for spotting unfolding business cycle trends.
The brothers began by asserting that business leaders need to decide now how they are going to make their move for the economic future. “Economics without actionable items is worthless economics,” said Alan. Their most recent book, Make Your Move: Change the Way You Look at Your Business and Increase Your Bottom Line, elaborates on this concept further. The time to prepare for the economic ups and downs of 2013 and the years beyond is now.
According to Beaulieu, when you survey the world, you have to keep three megatrends in mind that are going to define economic opportunities in the future. These megatrends are:
With those megatrends in mind, Alan and Brian make some general predictions about the next five years.
At first, the outlook can seem dim, as inflation reduces purchasing power and increased taxes reduce cash for businesses. But if you figure out now how you’re going to fight this, if you look at your inventories differently, restructure employee compensation now and find ways to drive efficiency to stay ahead of your competitors, you can react in advance to prosper and profit.
It’s a two-year process, and to do it, you start with your competitive advantage. What do your customers really value? Aim your competitive advantages to that. Aim your website, study, adjustment, sales approach, and marketing plan to protect your profit margins. If you aggressively pursue new customers, markets and opportunities now, then market share gains in 2014 can be used to offset a lot of the decline.
During the hour-long webinar, the Beaulieu brothers address further questions on the impact of healthcare reform, world countries’ industrial production, housing, the U.S. public debt, and more.
Join Tom Cuthbert and Vistage San Antonio is viewing the webinar together on Friday January 25th at noon. Email tom dot cuthbert at vistage dot com to request an invitation.
By Mike Myatt
My question for you today is a simple one: ”How’s Your Attitude?” Show me a CEO with a bad attitude and I’ll show you a poor leader. While this sounds simple enough at face value, I have consistently found one of the most often overlooked leadership attributes is having a consistently positive attitude. As a CEO, how can you expect to inspire, motivate, engender confidence, and to lead with a lousy attitude? The simple answer is that you can’t – it just won’t work. In today’s post I’ll examine the importance of CEOs having a positive attitude…
I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to watch one of my clients deliver a keynote at a national conference, and while I expected nothing less than an outstanding presentation, what I ended-up witnessing was a true masterclass in the contagious, inspirational power that comes from positive leadership. What made this presentation so powerful was it was more than just an act put on for the benefit of the attendees, it was completely authentic and the audience knew it. This is a relatively new client, but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, his positivity sets the tone for the entire organization and has produced incredible results. Let me be clear – don’t underestimate the power of a positive attitude.
Clearly the topic of “attitude” has been addressed ad-nauseum in many a self-help piece, but this doesn’t mean that it is not worthy of topical consideration for chief executives. Leaders are not perfect, and as CEO, trust me when I tell you you’re going to have your fair share of bad days. The difference between you the CEO, and everyone else on the planet is you don’t have the luxury of displaying a bad attitude.
Why then do so many CEOs appear to have a bad attitude? While there are certainly a variety of reasons (ego, arrogance, pride, etc.) for why a CEO can display a bad attitude, I believe in many instances it’s because they have fallen prey to a bad habit. Yes, attitudes are formed, and a bad attitude is nothing more than an ingrained habit. The good news is that habits can be broken. So, this begs the question how does a CEO know when they have a bad attitude? If you answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then you are likely in need of an attitude adjustment:
If you still don’t know whether or not your attitude is affecting your performance, I would strongly suggest participation in a 360 review process where your strengths and weakness are objectively assessed by those whom you interface with on a frequent basis. Lastly, following are few statistics that might convince you to change your outlook on life if you tend to be a pessimist:
If your attitude is impeding your relationships, your talent, or your health, it might be time to consider making some changes. If you have any great stories about how attitudes impact leadership and morale please share them in the comments section below.
Thoughts?
