Leader Harbor

Martin Luther King: Masterful Listener

2012-01-18T14:19:00.002-05:00

As we remember the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace prize laureate Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday, his "I have a dream" oratory still rings in our ears. But few of us know that King was also a consummate listener; and that in fact his speech made history only once he let go of his scripted remarks, allowed himself to "listen to the listening," and gave voice to his audience's innermost desires. That makes for transcendent leadership.

Martin Luther King's last words of his 1963 speech at the Washington Mall, in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln's statue, before some 250,000 people, "Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last," are still among the most powerful expressions of unleashing the human spirit almost half a century later.

The oratory of Dr. King ranks with the great speeches in history, alongside Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt's "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" during the Great Depression, and Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" inaugural address.

There is a moment in King's speech, halfway through, where according to communications professor Margaret Zulick at Wake Forest University, King completely abandoned his prepared text and never referred to it again.

"There's a spot where there's actually an incomplete sentence, which is very rare for King," Professor Zulick notes on Voice of America. "And he misses a beat: 'I say to you today, my friends – so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow . . . '"

If you have 18 minutes, watch this video of King's "I have a dream" speech. You will see the moment where King moves away from his script and starts "dancing" with the audience.

It may well be King's listening, at least as much as his speaking, that made him a transcendent leader who altered the course of history.

King had learned early on to read audiences of every composition.

Again and again, he was able to stand in the shoes of others, whether it was his church congregation or the AFL-CIO or John F. Kennedy, see the world from their point of view, and address what they needed to hear to mobilize for decisive action.

And that, my friends, is leadership of the highest order.

What do you think? What do you learn from Martin Luther King? What is your own dream? And how could you apply his listening practice to your own leadership? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn more about Martin Luther King and effective listening, check out "Communicate or Die: Getting Results Through Speaking and Listening."

Worst Corporate Jargon Offender?

2011-12-23T07:10:00.001-05:00

CareerBuilder asked 5,300 office workers for the corporate jargon that most makes their skin crawl, from "outside the box" to "low-hanging fruit" to "synergy." We've all been there. What buzzwords would you like to jettison next year to streamline your communication? (Oops, "streamline" is a no-go; and so is "no-go"...)

It's mission-critical that we circle back on this important matter of corporate jargon in the workplace. Let's optimize by focusing on the low-hanging fruit with key stakeholders first and then loop everyone in to maximize buy-in. Being proactive about our learnings will really incentivize the group to zero in on the most critical action items, deliverables and value-add for maximum impact. Let's start high level, drill down from there, and brainstorm next steps after lunch.

This is the type of corporate drivel that drives people to drink. George Orwell published his brilliant article "Politics and the English Language" 65 years ago, but if anything, our use of language has become only more automatic.

CareerBuilder has surveyed 5,300 office workers about their favorite (or rather least favorite) examples. Here is the hit list.

Outside the box (31 percent)
Low-hanging fruit (24 percent)
Synergy (23 percent)
Loop me in (22 percent)
Best of breed (19 percent)
Incentivize (19 percent)
Mission-critical (19 percent)
Bring to the table (18 percent)
Value-add (17 percent)
Elevator pitch (16 percent)
Actionable items (15 percent)
Proactive (15 percent)
Circle back (13 percent)
Bandwidth (13 percent)

This video gives a good example of how business jargon is used as a weapon to make people small:

If we thought for a moment before opening our mouth, we might be able to improve quickly. For example, as Amy Chulik pointed out:

Jargon: "Let's circle back early next year."
Instead: "Let's talk again on January 4. I will send you a calendar invite."

Jargon: "Let's start with the low-hanging fruit."
Instead: "What are the easiest goals for us to reach right now? Let's focus on those first."

Best wishes to all my readers for a happy holiday season and a great 2012.

What do you think? What is the worst corporate jargon you came across this year? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn more about effective speaking, check out "Communicate or Die: Getting Results Through Speaking and Listening." A great gift for colleagues, family, friends or enemies...

Was Steve Jobs an Innovator or Just a Tweaker?

2011-12-07T03:24:00.003-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell just published a piece in the New Yorker arguing that Steve Jobs did not really invent anything, but merely tweaked and repackaged existing products. Is Gladwell right? Or was Jobs a large-scale visionary and innovator?

In his New Yorker article entitled "The Tweaker," Gladwell writes:

"In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture.

"Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker.

"He created the 'automatic' spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation.

"Such men, the economists argue, provided the 'micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.'

Gladwell asks, "Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts?"

Let's look at some facts. Here is a video of the 1982 Xerox Star, which, says Gladwell, Jobs and Apple simply "tweaked" to build the Macintosh.

As Walter Isaacson writes in his biography "Steve Jobs", Jobs was outraged when Microsoft came out with Windows in the 1980s. Windows featured the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh.

Jobs summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room," Isaacson writes, "where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him.

“Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’

"Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. 'Well, Steve,' Gates responded. 'I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.' "

It begs the question, What is innovation anyway? In his book, "The Power of Strategy Innovation" (co-authored with Douglas Bale), my fellow consultant Bob Johnston puts it this way:

"Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, Constantinos Markides, Jim Collins, and Clayton Christensen all champion strategy innovation as a vehicle for creating "new value" and spawning new wealth."

In 1981, a typical Xerox Star installation cost some $75,000, it needed a network and a dedicated file server, plus a starting price of $16,000 for each additional work station.

The 1984 Macintosh cost $2,495; and Jobs was pushing to make it cheaper.

"Bringing the concepts of a $100,000 networked workstation," writes John Gruber on his blog, "to a $2,500 standalone mass market personal computer is, I say, radically innovative.

"The Macintosh was no 'tweak'. Pixar was no 'tweak'. The iPod is maybe the closest thing among Jobs’s career highlights that one could call a 'tweak' of that which preceded it — but it’s hard to separate the iPod, the device, from the entire iTunes ecosystem in terms of measuring its effect on our culture and the way everyone today listens to music.

"Does anyone really think Apple’s entry into the music industry was a 'tweak'? A 'large-scale visionary' is precisely what Steve Jobs was."
What do you think? Was Steve Jobs a mere tweaker, or did he come up with true innovation? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn more about innovation and how to bring it about, check out "The Power of Strategy Innovation" by my colleagues Robert E. Johnston Jr. and J. Douglas Bate.

"Culture Clash" at Lac Léman Communication Forum 2011

2011-10-28T09:29:00.002-04:00

In case you haven't seen this yet...

Watch & Learn:

An innovative method of mapping cultures across the globe along four fundamental cultural dimensions.

Why knowing how to bow in Japan or whether to bring wine in Singapore has never lost a cross-border deal, but knowing the eight hidden dimensions of culture is the secret ingredient for success.

How I prepared for working with the prime minister and cabinet of Kazakhstan (yes, that's right, Kazakhstan of Borat fame) and knew next to nothing about what made them tick; and how doing the right homework got me a standing ovation and customer intimacy.

Lost In Translation: The Hidden Drivers of Culture Clash

2011-10-21T12:01:00.014-04:00

Have you heard this one? The bus stops and two Italian men get on. They sit down and engage in an animated conversation.

The lady sitting in front of them ignores them at first, but her attention is galvanized when she hears one of the men say the following:

"Emma come first. Den I come. Den two asses come together. I come once-a-more. Two asses, they come together again. I come again and pee twice. Then I come one lasta time."

"You foul-mouthed swine, " snaps the lady indignantly. "In this country we don't talk about our sex lives in public!"

"Hey, coola down lady," says the man. "Whosa talkin' abouta sex?

I'm justa tellin' my friend how to spella 'Mississippi'!"

Welcome to the world of culture clash, where things easily get lost in translation. This joke, which I received from my friend Lark van Hugo, shows what can go wrong in cross-cultural interactions.

What is going on exactly? Here's what few people know: We all have a filter through which we hear everything that's being said.

The lady in the bus knew what the two Italians were talking about. Of course they were talking about dirty sex!

The woman never once stopped to check her own assumptions before lashing out.

Culture clashes like this can be hilarious, but they are no laughing matter when cross-cultural misunderstandings lead to strategic failures and billion-dollar fiascos.

In the video you will see what happened to Microsoft in China, or to Electrolux in the United States. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

But back to you and me. Think about both your work/life for a moment.

In your business and/or personal life, do you regularly deal with team members, customers, and/or stakeholders from other cultures who may not share your values? YES / NO
Are you competing against or negotiating with another firm and need better strategic intelligence? YES / NO
Is your company interested in opening a new market? YES / NO
Could you use better intercultural skills to collaborate with others and get the job done? YES / NO

If you answered “Yes” to at least one of these questions, welcome to the club!

This is a community of big thinkers, global citizens, and world travelers who are not confined by national borders, who like to play a game larger than themselves, and who know that solving complex problems demands the capacity to traffic in multiple perspectives.

(This is actually a great way to keep your brain from aging, for example by adopting different viewpoints about what you're seeing or reading.)

In a word, we are 21st-century leaders.

Now, to business. Last month I had the honor of giving a keynote at the Lac Leman Communication Forum in Geneva. My friend and colleague Philippe Baeriswyl was there.

Philippe has shot a series of leadership videos with me, and I’d like to send these over to you. They distill in a powerful way the tools secrets that have made me and my clients successful over time.

No matter where you are in your own leadership journey, this first 12-minute video will show you three new tools and stories that people can find nowhere in my books. Tools that will make you effective with, and in, any target culture.

You’ll learn:

An innovative method of mapping cultures across the globe along four fundamental cultural dimensions.
Why knowing how to bow in Japan or whether to bring wine in Singapore has never lost a cross-border deal, but knowing the eight hidden dimensions of culture is the secret ingredient for success.
How I prepared for working with the prime minister and cabinet of Kazakhstan (yes, that's right, Kazakhstan of Borat fame) and knew next to nothing about what made them tick.

You have to take action though. Watch these free videos, post a comment, and boost your leadership. Join us.

All the best,

Thomas

P.S. I know you are very busy these days. That's why I have made the video short and sweet. Do yourself a favor and invest the 12 minutes to watch the video. At least one of these tools is guaranteed to boost your productivity.

Prisoner Swap: An Ethical Dilemma

2011-10-14T06:40:00.000-04:00

If all goes as planned, Israeli sergeant Gilad Shalit will be freed by Hamas on Wednesday in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas said it reached 90% of its objectives with the swap, and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has broad public support for the deal. Others warn that the prisoner swap will only boost terror. It's a classical case of an ethical dilemma.

For more than five years, Israelis agonized over the fate of Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli soldier (and dual Israeli and French citizen) held captive by Palestinian terrorists in a secret underground location.

Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that a "window of opportunity" had opened through the Arab Spring that might have soon closed.

He thanked the governments of Egypt and Germany for mediating the negotiations with Hamas that led to the deal.

Israel's citizenry is largely enthusiastic about the deal. But not everybody agrees.

Israeli cabinet minister Uzi Landau rejected the prisoner swap this week as a "big victory for terror."

He added that the Shalit deal would set a dangerous precedent that would offer an incentive to kill more Israelis and make more kidnappings.

Hamas chief Haled Meshal indicated that he will launch more attacks to kidnap Israeli soldiers and use them as bargaining chips to free more of the 8,000 remaining Palestinians who remain in Israeli prisons.

On the other hand, as the Jewish saying goes, if you save one life, you save all of humanity.

The deal is a perfect example of an ethical dilemma, a right-versus-right decision where the better solution is far from obvious and there is no right answer.

In today's complex world, ethical dilemmas are much more frequent than before. And they are much tougher to solve than right-versus-wrong decisions (temptations).

Is it better to return one soldier to his family, no matter the consequences?

Or is it better to sacrifice that one soldier for the protection of many others?

This ethical dilemma is called individual-versus-group.

It could also be called short-versus-long-term: Is it better to get an immediate result, since one bird in the hand is better than two in the bush?

Or is it better to pay the short-term costs in return for long-term benefits?

(Other ethical dilemmas are justice-versus-mercy and truth-versus-loyalty.)

When leaders face an ethical dilemma, they have to step back from the action and take a hard look at their value system.

Nobody envies Mr. Netanyahu for having to make a tough call. But who ever said that leadership was easy? More often than not, it is a messy, uncertain, and chaotic business.

What do you think? What would you have done in Netanyahu's sitution: approve the prisoner swap and risk the lives of many more people, or reject the deal and lose Gilad Shalit? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn more about tackling ethical dilemmas, check out "The Rabbi and the CEO."

The Nightmare Boss and Feedback

2011-09-21T08:12:00.000-04:00

"No one can make you feel small without your consent," Eleanor Roosevelt once said. Easier said than done, though. Many of us have been at the receiving end of bad feedback. And if we are honest, we may have on occasion given feedback that was less than graceful, let alone empowering. As a cookie break, here are three short videos of worst practices: how not do do it. Enjoy.

Here is a video by writer/director Paul Parducci of how not to do the quarterly performance review:

Here is one feedback session filled with rhetorical questions and pretenses of asking the employee what they think:

And here is a feedback by a boss berating the employee for being a total of 8 minutes late over a month:

What do you think? What stories do you have of giving or receiving bad feedback? What are your findings on what works and what does not? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn how to (and how not to) give effective feedback, read my book "Leadership in 100 Days."

Cisco and Microsoft: Handmaidens of Government Surveillance?

2011-09-08T20:18:00.001-04:00

Eighteen months after Google pulled its search engine out of China to avoid censorship, Microsoft's Bing still censors searches there. And now Cisco Systems and others are working on a government project in the city of Chongqing, for example, building what will be the biggest police surveillance system in the world. What is right, making concessions to do business in a fast-growing and lucrative market, or foregoing profits in the quest to "do no evil"?

I am in Singapore this week facilitating a leadership workshop with senior executives from across Asia, so it seems fitting to write this post about doing business in China.

In July, Microsoft agreed to provide English-language search results for Baidu, China's top search engine, which is heavily censored.

It seems ancient history now, but Microsoft had a rocky start in China with Windows 95.

The company had the operating system translated into Chinese, but it made one cross-cultural mistake: it hired Taiwanese programmers who peppered the software with references like "Take back the mainland" and "Kill the communists."

The government was not pleased at the time; it backed Linux, the open-source operating system.

Now Microsoft seems bent on making up for its past mistakes and working with the Chinese government.

But there is a history of what the government may do with search results. After Yahoo handed over data about a Chinese journalist five years ago, the journalist was condemned to ten years in jail.

In another controversial collaboration, Cisco Systems and other companies are poised to help the city of Chongqing keep an eye on its citizens. The project is to build a city-wide network of 500,000 cameras across an area 25% larger than New York City.

Both Cisco and the mayor of Chonqing assert that the surveillance will be used to crack down on crime, not to hunt down dissidents.

Hewlett-Packard is also bidding on the police surveillance project.

In July, the Wall Street Journal quoted Todd Bradley, an executive vice president who oversees Hewlett-Packard's China strategy, in an interview in China. "We take them at their word as to the usage," Bradley said.

He added, "It's not my job to really understand what they're going to use it for. Our job is to respond to the bid that they've made."

What do you think? Are Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, or Microsoft right to participate in the lucrative Chinese market, even if that means being the handmaiden of an authoritarian government that might use their work to violate human rights? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn how to manage ethical dilemmas, read my book "The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders."

Can (or Should) Tim Cook Replace Steve Jobs?

2011-08-29T05:41:00.002-04:00

The day after Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, Apple stocks dropped as much as 7%. Though shares have recovered since, concerns persist whether Jobs' long-time adviser and successor Tim Cook can step into his larger-than-life shoes, despite (or because?) Cook's reassurances that "Apple is not going to change." Can Cook replace Jobs? (Or, for that matter, would he want to?)

Steve Jobs, who resigned as Apple CEO on August 24, gave virtually no public limelight to Tim Cook, or anyone else for that matter, before moving into his new job as chairman of the company.

So who is Tim Cook? The 50-year-old, whose father was a shipyard worker, who grew up in Alabama and got his MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, joined Apple in 1998 after stints at Compaq and IBM.

Initially Cook became Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations. In that post, he was credited with helping to dramatically grow margins by closing factories and warehouses around the world, reducing inventories, and streamlining supply chains.

In 2007 he was promoted to COO.

Cook has already served as Apple (interim) CEO twice before: once in 2004 when Jobs was recovering from pancreatic cancer surgery, and again in 2009 while Jobs took a leave of absence for a liver transplant.

Of course both times lasted only a few months.

One can hardly imagine a bigger contrast than the one between Cook and Jobs.

Will the cerebral and operational behind-the-scenes man Cook, the quintessential manager, be able to replace the charismatic Jobs, the quintessential leader (see video)?

In his letter to Apple employees, Cook made clear that he is committed to continuity. "I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change."

Certainly, in a world where even my two-year-old daughter cries out every day for her mother's and/or her sister's iPhone (the words "iPhone" and "iPod" were among the first words in her vocabulary), the sex appeal of Apple products will not disappear for a long time, if ever.

But should Cook promise continuity? Keeping Apple the same is precisely what Jobs never promised.

Leaders are not paid to extend the present (and therefore the past) into the future. Leaders are in charge of creating a new world, of bringing something about that does not exist today.

And in a highly competitive market where Samsung or Google have come as close to Apple as ever, or have even surpassed it with some products, staying the same could mean dangerous stagnation.
If every human being is unique, then by extension every leader is unique. Instead of trying to be like his predecessor, the new Apple CEO may want to give himself permission to be himself, and to create things that Jobs cannot even imagine.

As the Apple slogan put it, to "Think Different."

What do you think? Can, or should, Tim Cook replace Steve Jobs? Is Cook right to promise continuity and that "Apple is not going to change"? Or should he leave all options open and promise a future not given by Apple's past? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. As a roadmap for your own leadership, check out my latest book "Leadership in 100 Days."

What Do Leaders Do All Day?

2011-08-14T18:40:00.001-04:00

What do top executives actually do all day? Where do they invest their energies, how do they communicate, what are their roles, their key challenges? A new doctoral dissertation from the School of Management at Leipzig affords a rare glimpse behind the scenes. It is not a pretty picture. Most leaders fail to invest enough time in standing in the future.

A generation ago, in his seminal book "The Nature of Managerial Work," the management thinker Henry Mintzberg revealed the gulf that existed between theory and practice, between fiction and truth about top managers.

Mintzberg showed that the picture of the top manager as general was wrong. Top managers were far from strategists who sit atop the hill and guide their troops in a planned and proactive fashion.

Quite the contrary: Top managers were under constant time pressure, half of their activities lasted barely nine minutes, their work was fragmented.

They did not move according to a plan but were reactive pinballs of circumstances, they had no time for strategic reflection, their decisions were piece-meal, emotional, and micro-political.

That was in 1973. Is it still true today? What has changed since then?

That is where Emilo Matthaei's Ph.D. thesis comes in. Its title "The Nature of Executive Work" shows that Matthaei aims to build on Mintzberg's findings.

Matthaei analyzed 48 work weeks in the schedules of twelve top executives at multinationals with several 10,000 employees.

He found that the leaders of these companies worked an average of 65 hours a week. Three-quarters of that time is constantly booked. Two-thirds are tied up with meetings.

Top executives are alone a mere 14% of their time.

Time pressures have been compounded by more dynamic and global markets, more immediate communication tools, the need to cultivate relationships and build trust in decentralized organizations, and vanishing boundaries between private and professional lives.

Most alarmingly, these pressures exert a downward push on the quality of managerial decision-making. Top managers have (or take) extremely little time to stand in the future and ponder the long-term consequences of their choices.

Last Tuesday, Apple was briefly the company with the highest market value in the world. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive and co-founder, might serve as a counter-example. He attempts to live in the future every day (see video; if you don't have time to watch, here is the bottom line: Remember that you are going to die).

The onslaught of emails, and especially what might be called the "Cc Syndrome" -- the widespread practice to copy superiors on just about anything that might be remotely relevant to them, might make their direct reports look good, or delegates management responsibility up to the top level, has made life at the C-level only more frantic.

The Cc Syndrome cuts both ways, since CEOs might just as well use it to push their message through the ranks to every single employee and bypass those employees' managers.

Mahatma Gandhi reminded us to "Be the change you wish for in the world." Unless top managers live in the future, who will?

What do you think? Do the findings in "The Nature of Executive Work" reflect your own experience? And how would you shape your ideal day? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. As a roadmap for your own leadership, check out my latest book "Leadership in 100 Days."

Is Workplace Loyalty Dead?

2011-07-21T06:19:00.003-04:00

Have the realities of a fast-paced economy—multiple careers, high mobility, freelancing, shortening of contracts, automation and outsourcing—killed off loyalty in the workplace? Or are the bonds between employers and employees just as strong as ever? And if loyalty is waning, what can company leaders do to strengthen their people's allegiance?

Have you seen the cartoon where one white-collar worker says to the other, "You can't buy loyalty"? Tthe other shoots back, "What do you mean, 'You can't buy loyalty?' I've sold mine numerous times."

My father did not do that. He worked for Sandoz (now Novartis) for 35 years, often grumbling at the dinner table about what he had to endure, sometimes dreaming about sailing around the world, but never seriously considering to leave the company.

And he was not alone. In my dad's day, employees stayed at the same firm for decades, and the firm held up its part of the deal, with security, long-term contracts in addition to health care and a pension.

But those days, when "company men" did what was expected from them, are over. Now everyone seems to ask, "What's in it for me?" And an ad by the online job search engine Monster.com says, "Your calling is calling."

Posting to a discussion in the Financial Times, workplace expert Lynda Gratton wrote: "Faced with what could be 50 years of work, who honestly wants to spend that much time with one company? Serial monogamy is the order of the day.

If there is a trend toward weaker bonds between workers and employers, the recent recession might have compounded it. If people were not laid off, they might have stayed in their job merely because they felt they had no choice.

In that case, employers would need to prepare for higher turnover as soon as the pendulum swings and the job market picks up again.

And since many companies can or will no longer hold up their end of the bargain, why should employees hold up theirs? Especially knowledge workers are likely to take their skills and portable retirement accounts elsewhere.

Not everyone agrees that worker allegiance is waning. Tom Peters is one who said that "Loyalty matters as much as it ever did. Both ways, I might add."

Either way, what can company leaders do to retain their best talents? Money is part of the answer, but certainly not the whole answer. See this video by Daniel Pink, the author of "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us."

Especially with younger people, "you're not going to buy extra loyalty with extra money," Tammy Erickson, a workplace consultant, said. Rather, employers should make jobs more challenging and give workers more leeway, Ms. Erickson said.

Add to that: more meaning. And more experienced workers can benefit from new opportunities, additional learning and retraining, appreciation and recognition, and more flexible hours.

What do you think? Is workplace loyalty a thing of the past? And how can company leaders boost the loyalty of the workforce? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn more about how leaders build loyalty and long-term relationships, check out my book "Communicate or Die."

Prince Philip: Appalling or Amusing?

2011-07-15T03:54:00.011-04:00

Most leaders avoid political incorrectness like the plague, and when they do commit a blunder, they bend over backward to apologize. Not so Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (also known as "Duke of Hazard"), who is famous (or infamous) for saying the very things nobody dares say and offending people at every turn. Is Queen Elizabeth's husband rude, or refreshing, or both?

On June 16, former Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney cracked a joke during one of his campaign appearances.

"I should tell my story," he said at a meeting with voters in Tampa, Florida. "I'm also unemployed."

"I'm networking," he told one of the men who asked if he was on LinkedIn. "I have my sight on a particular job."

Not a good joke when you're worth over $200 million and talking to unemployed people.

To save his campaign, Romney had a lot of explaining to do. His excuse, that "self-deprecating humor is a part of who I am," did not help.

Prince Philip, who turned 90 the week before Romney's faux-pas, has no such worries. He regularly delights and appalls the United Kingdom with his impolitic remarks.

In an age when every gaffe by every public personality seems to call for a self-flagellating apology, some say it is refreshing to have an all-purpose offender at the top (see video).

On a trip to Australia, the prince asked an Aboriginal leader, "Do you still throw spears at each other"?

When a reporter told him that his remark had offended some sensibilities, he growled, "The trouble with you lot is that you've got a total absence of humor."

Philip, who seems to despise speaking to the media, recently made a rare move: He agreed to collaborate on a TV documentary about his life.

The word "collaborate" might be a reach though.

When the unlucky interviewer mentioned an award Philip had received from The Oldie magazine, he got a testy response. "Well, so what?" the prince barked. "You just get old."

Asked if it had been hard to give up his naval career when his wife became queen, Philip snorted, "How long is a piece of string?"

Perhaps a 90-year-old should be forgiven for being a grumpy old man.

And perhaps the prince comes from a generation inspired by Winston Churchill, who could still get away with calling Mahatma Gandhi "that little naked man" and who thought nothing of carving up Britain's colonies into countries like Iraq.

Perhaps this mind-set led Philip to ask a Sottish driving instructor: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them to pass the test?"

Some admire Philip for his lack of decorum. British prime minister David Cameron recently praised the duke for his "unique turn of phrase."

Not all agree. The Independent columnist Johann Hari said there was little to laugh at.

"If you gave my dad a job from which he could not be sacked and a massive palace in which to live," Mr. Hari said, "he'd be a symbol of continuity, too."

What do you think? Is Prince Philip rude or refreshing? Should leaders be politically correct or incorrect? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To read more about Prince Philip's testy turns of phrases, check out "Duke of Hazard: The Wit and Wisdom of Prince Philip" by Phil Dampier. To learn more about how leaders communicate, check out my book "Communicate or Die."

IBM at 100: What Is the Secret Sauce?

2011-06-29T07:48:00.000-04:00

IBM is 100 years old now, in the same year it passes $100 billion in sales. The company that started in 1911 as a merger of four companies named Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. boasts robust profits, products, and services, and its stock market value surpassed Google's. What is the secret of the company's staying power and ability to reinvent itself?

Named International Business Machines in 1924, IBM is by no means the world's oldest company.

The Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena was founded in 1472, the German Weihenstephan brewery goes back to 1040, and the Keiunkan hotal in Japan launched in 705.

But IBM has come back from a near-death experience in the early 1990s with remarkable staying power.

"IBM faced the challenge that all great companies do sooner or later," said George F. Colony, the CEO of the a technology and market research firm Forrester Research; "they dominate, they lose it, and then they recreate themselves or not."

Now the company has 427,000 employees and could well be an inert colossus. But it is remarkably agile. How did it achieve this rare feat?

From Forbes magazine to the Economist to the New York Times, publications and pundits have wondered about the source of IBM's resilience.

They have theorized that it's the company's ability to build on its past instead of walking away from it; its long-term relationships; its deep scientific and research capabilities; its unmatched breadth of hardware, software, and services; its roadmaps (5-year visions); its being built around an idea instead of being attached to a particular technology; or simply its dumb luck.

There may be another success factor that is largely ignored: IBM's willingness to share its intellectual property.

In early 2005, the U.S. leader in new patents (IBM registers some ten patents a day, more than any other company) made a sweeping gesture: it gave away five hundred of its patents for free.

Why would IBM do that? Had its chairman and CEO since 2002, Sam Palmisano (in picture above, receiving the Deming Award for innovation) lost it, like the people in this IBM commercial?

No; the answer is self-interest. Diverging from conventional wisdom, the company calculated that sharing technology can sometimes be more profitable than jealously guarding its property rights on patents, copyrights and trade secrets.

“If you open up your technology and reveal quickly, people will build on your stuff,” said Eric von Hippel, a professor and innovation expert at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “It becomes more economically efficient to be open.”

IBM is not doing this naïvely. “The layer of technology that is open is going to steadily increase, but in going through this transition we’re not going to be crazy,” said John E. Kelly, an IBM senior vice president put in charge of this initiative in May 2004 by Palmisano.

“This is like disarmament. You’re not going to give away all your missiles as a first step.”

But IBM understood that by contributing its intellectual property, it could win over new markets and customers. And the gamble seems to have paid off.

What do you think? What is the source of Palmisano and IBM's success? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To read more about how companies make business out of giving back, check out my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders (co-authored with Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin), a National Jewish Book Award and Foreword Book of the Year finalist.

Does Power Turn Men Into Sexual Predators?

2011-06-22T15:54:00.005-04:00

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," Lord Acton used to say. Were Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger (and now Anthony Weiner) seduced by their powerful and patriarchal positions? Or were they predators long before they had their power perks?

(For some inexplicable reason this post, and with it all your insightful comments on both sides of the issue, were deleted from my blog without my doing. Apologies for any inconvenience. Nevertheless, please keep posting comments on this fascinating topic.)

Anthony Weiner Quits: "Pervert" or Private Matter?

2011-06-22T05:58:00.002-04:00

After weeks of hand-wringing and denials that he would quit, U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) resigned today over his lewd online exchanges with women constituents. Should Weiner be punished for being a "pervert" as some have put it? Or is his private behavior a matter between him and his wife Huma Abedin, since he has done nothing to break the law?

Starting last week, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York who was seen as a rising political star and possible mayor of New York City, had been in the news amid calls for his resignation over lewd photographs of himself he emailed or tweeted to women, including a New York stripper and a teenager in Delaware.

Pressure on Mr. Weiner to leave the House has been building for days, with top House Democrats, including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, coming forward over the weekend to urge him publicly to spare himself, his family and his party any more embarrassment.

The pressure only grew earlier this week when President Barack Obama publicly suggested that Mr. Weiner should step down and Ms. Pelosi told reporters that she was prepared to strip Mr. Weiner of his committee assignments unless he left office.

“Congressman Weiner exercised poor judgment in his actions and poor judgment in his reaction to the revelations,” the minority leader said in a statement. “Today, he made the right judgment in resigning.”

“I’m here to apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment that I have caused,” Mr. Weiner said in a chaotic press conference, adding that he had hoped to be able to continue serving his constituents.

“Unfortunately,” he said, trying to make himself heard over the heckling of audience members, one of whom yelled that he was a "pervert." “The distraction I created has made that impossible."

Mr. Weiner decided that he could no longer serve after having long discussions with his wife, Huma Abedin, when she returned to Washington on Wednesday after traveling abroad with her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Ms. Abedin did not appear by Mr. Weiner's side today.

Back in 2008, Weiner had told Associated Press that his personal life was off limits.

But is it?

Earlier this week, the House ethics committee opened a formal inquiry into Mr. Weiner’s conduct, including trading private messages with a teenage girl in Delaware.

What do you think? Is a leader's sexuality his own business, or do his followers have the right to expect that he walk his talk in his private dealings? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To read more about a leader's integrity and ethical dilemmas, browse in my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders (co-authored with Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin), a National Jewish Book Award and Foreword Book of the Year finalist.

Doctors vs. Nurses: Communicate or Die

2011-06-01T17:48:00.003-04:00

Some 200,000 patients are estimated to die each year because doctors dress down or intimidate nurses, nurses don't speak up, and hospital teams communicate badly, if at all. It's a drastic case of "Communicate or Die." What can be done to improve matters?

Already in 1984, researchers showed that on average, doctors interrupted eighteen seconds after patients began explaining their problems.

We have all been there: you walk into a doctor’s office, and the doctor asks, “What brings you here today?” You start to answer. Eighteen seconds later, the doctor interrupts you mid-sentence. The study found that fewer than two percent of patients got to finish their explanations.

When Dr. Wendy Levinson, vice chairwoman of the University of Toronto’s department of medicine, studied malpractice suits, she found that bad communication is a common theme. What often prompts people to sue their doctors “is the feeling that they were not listened to, that they didn’t have the doctor’s full attention.”

Problem physicians come in many guises, patients say: the arrogant or dismissive doctor; the impatient doctor with his hand on the doorknob; or the doctor who is callous and judgmental.

But doctor-patient communication is only part of the equation. What about the doctor-nurse relationship?

Theresa Brown, an oncology nurse at a Pittsburgh hospital, recounted in The New York Times how during one morning round, the whole medical stood in a patient's room, waiting for test results that turned out to be late.

The patient, a friendly middle-aged man, took it in stride. He jokingly asked the doctor whom he should yell at.

Turning and pointing at the patient's nurse, the doctor replied, "If you want to scream at anyone, scream at her."

The nurse being singled out and humiliated in front of her colleagues and the patient was of course Ms. Brown. "As we walked out of the patient's room," she recalled, "I asked the doctor if I could quote him in an article. 'Sure,' he answered. 'It's a time-honored tradition--blame the nurse whenever anything goes wrong.' I felt stunned and insulted."

Virtually every nurse has a similar story, "and most of us have several," Ms. Brown writes. A nurse she knows, attempting to clarify an order, was told, "When you have 'M.D.' after your name, then you can talk to me."

A doctor dismissed another nurse's complaint by simply saying, "I'm important."

It all sounds as if Dr. House of the medical drama "House" (see video) had all of a sudden stepped into the real world.

Worse, much of the bullying does not fit the stereotype of the surgeon throwing a temper tantrum in the operating room. It is passive, like ignoring pages or phone calls, subtle condescension, or sarcastic remarks.

Such behavior can have a chilling effect on communication among the hospital staff. A 2004 survey by the Institute for Safe Medication found that workplace bullying posed a critical problem for patient safety: Rather than bring their questions about medication orders to a difficult doctor, almost half the health care personnel surveyed said they would rather keep silent.

And 7 percent said that in the previous year they had been involved in a medication error in which intimidation was at least partly responsible.

The result: a rise in avoidable medical errors, the cause of perhaps 200,000 deaths each year.

Now do you still believe "Communicate or Die" is an overly dramatic a title for my book?

What do you think? Do you have your own story of witnessing doctor-nurse or doctor-patient interactions? And what can be done? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. This article is adapted from my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders (co-authored with Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin and a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Foreword Book of the Year).

Bob Dylan at 70: Is He a Leader?

2011-05-25T10:38:00.008-04:00

Bob Dylan is 70. Though his fans' main birthday gifts seem to be scoldings and criticisms, all agree that few people had more innovative influence on 20th-century music. One of the drivers of Dylan's reluctant leadership was the pursuit of what he called his "way home": the holy grail of being truly yourself.

“Where I was born was very far from where I’m supposed to be, so I’m on the way home,” said Bob Dylan in an interview.

In words that sounded like lyrics to one of his songs, he continued: “I had ambitions to set out to find – like an odyssey going home somewhere – I set out to find this home that I had left a while back, and I couldn’t remember exactly where it was but I was on my way there...”[i]

This ambition to be on a life-long search for “home” – or his true self – gave Dylan (whose real name was Robert Zvi Zimmerman) the courage and creativity to lead music into an entirely new realm.

Here is a video of Dylan, who is still on his "never-ending tour," over the years.

When he committed the heresy to play electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, his push to break through the boundaries of music was not exactly earning him roses. A full one-third of the audience that night booed him for destroying the folk music they knew and cherished.

While he walked back and forth on stage tuning his electric guitar, one heckler yelled, “Hey, traitor, why don’t you hear yourself?” Others cried, “Bobby, go home!”

When Dylan recalled the incident four decades later, he still struggled for words: “The booing didn’t really – it didn’t really – you know – I have a perspective on the booing because you gotta realize you can kill somebody with kindness too.”

At the time, he was undeterred. He smiled sheepishly like a naughty schoolboy, shrugging his shoulders as if he himself didn’t quite know what was happening, as if things were out of his hands.

Unperturbed, like an indifferent teenager who simply didn’t care what people thought, he abruptly started singing in his rough, snarling voice, turning his back to the audience, hunched over, cradling the guitar as if to protect his new “baby” from the audience and its outrage.

Looking back on the incident decades later, Dylan explained: “I didn’t want to give something away that was –” (he fell into a long silence, weighing whether to say the word) “– dear to me, or something,” He kept doing his own unique thing, escaping his own immense popularity that had become an obstacle, inventing a style that would transform for all time what was possible in music.

“I wrote a lot of songs in a quick amount of time,” Dylan said. “I felt like I discovered something no-one else had ever discovered, and I was in a certain arena that no-one else had ever been in before, ever – although,” he quickly inserted a disclaimer, “I may have been wrong about that.”[ii]

Wittingly or not, Dylan became a leader of his generation because he gave voice to what that generation needed to hear. At the source of his leadership was an intense desire to find his own power, a power not based on a job title or wealth or popularity.

No two humans are alike. Dylan’s task was not to emulate the heroes or sages of the past, no matter how great they were. Rather his job was, and is, to know himself, find his unique purpose in life, and stay true to that purpose until he fulfills it.

This concept, unfolding the unique you and doing something that has never been done before, is central to leadership. Dylan ended up reaping rich rewards for his courage to be himself. He became a star, and he rewrote music history.

What do you think? Has Bob Dylan been a leader? If no, why not? If yes, when did he lead, and when did he stop leading? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. This article is adapted from my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders (co-authored with Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin).

[i] “Bob Dylan – No Direction Home,” 2005. Director: Martin Scorsese.

[ii] “Bob Dylan – No Direction Home,” 2005. Director: Martin Scorsese. Part II.

McKinsey Consultant Involved in Billionaire's Insider Trading Scheme

2011-05-11T20:34:00.000-04:00

In a rare inside look into the rarefied world of hedge fund dealings, a federal jury in Manhattan has found billionaire investor Raj Rajaratnam guilty of fraud and conspiracy. A juicy and far-reaching detail in the case: Former McKinsey director Anil Kumar (picture) and two other McKinsey consultants helped the Galleon Group founder with stock tips based on insider information. How can such dirty deals by consultants be prevented?

When federal agents arrested Raj Rajaratnam at his Sutton Place apartment on Manhattan’s East Side in October 2009, the government had placed him at the center of a vast insider trading conspiracy.

Rajaratnam stood accused of using a corrupt network of tipsters to gain about $63 million from illegal trading in stocks including Google and Hilton Worldwide.

The case has since ballooned to insider trading charges against 25 defendants—21 of whom have pleaded guilty—including former executives at IBM, Intel and Bear Stearns.

In the trial, Raj's brother Rengan Rajaratnam, who had not been criminally charged, emerged—through wiretapped conversations—as a colorful figure.

On a call in August 2008, Rengan had told Raj about his efforts to press his friend, a McKinsey consultant, for confidential information.

Rengan called the consultant “a little dirty” and boasted that he “finally spilled his beans” by sharing secrets about a corporate client. (According to the government, the McKinsey consultant was Palecek, a classmate of Rengan Rajaratnam.)

A second McKinsey official, Rajat Gupta, was also named at the trial. Prosecutors said in opening statements that Gupta, the former worldwide director of consulting firm McKinsey, leaked tips to Rajaratnam about Goldman Sachs.

Gupta denies wrongdoing and hasn’t been criminally charged.

A third consultant, former McKinsey director Anil Kumar, was implicated in the insider trading scheme (see video).

In his testimony yesterday, Kumar said he worked closely with top officials at Advanced Micro Devices in late 2005 and early 2006 as the company worked to acquire Nvidia Corp. and then ATI, whose graphic computer chips would complement AMD’s.

Rajaratnam's company Galleon paid Kumar $250,000 annually for secret tips. Kumar said he regularly briefed Rajaratnam on the status of the talks with ATI, which intensified after the Nvidia deal collapsed, Kumar said.

“I told him this was red hot and not to be discussed with anyone,” Kumar testified.

Kumar said he told Rajaratnam that ATI would be acquired for about $20 or $21 a share, while it was then trading at about $16.50.

“He said, ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ Kumar said. “He said, ‘Wow, this is very useful.’”

Kumar said Rajaratnam wanted to stop paying him $250,000 per year and instead compensate him based on Galleon’s profit on illegal trades. Kumar refused, saying he wanted to retain the fiction that he was providing consultant services.

“I thought a consultant arrangement was more appropriate,” Kumar testified. “Seeing that shares were being bought seemed more like a crime to me.”

So Kumar knew that his dealings with Rajaratnam were both unethical and illegual. But he did nothing to stop them.

Ultimately, Kumar told Rajaratnam to pay him at year’s end whatever Rajaratnam thought Kumar’s tips were worth. That, said Kumar, was “standard practice” at McKinsey for lawful consultant work.

What do you think? Given that consultants are often privy to strategic intelligence or insider information, how can insider trading be prevented? (For example, my company has explicit rules forbidding consultants to use material information from clients for personal gain.) I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

Fukushima: Breaking Through the Rules

2011-05-03T04:39:00.004-04:00

When a Japanese worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant ran into a guard who stuck to the rules and refused to improvise, it revealed a lack of flexibility Japan urgently needs to get out of its crisis. Unfortunately Japan is not alone. All too often, companies get attached to rigid plans and cannot adapt to new facts on the ground.

Masayuki Ishizawa could barely keep standing when the ground started to shake under his feet.

Helmet in hand, he ran from a workers' standby room outside the plant's No. 3 reactor, near where he and others had been doing repairs. He saw a chimney and crane swaying like weeds in the wind. Everybody was shouting in panic.

Mr. Ishizawa, 55, raced to the plant's central gate. But the security guard refused to let him out. "Show me your IDs," Mr. Ishizawa remembered the guard saying.

And where, the guard demanded in keeping with the plant's procedures, were Mr. Ishizawa's supervisors?

That's when Mr. Ishizawa lost it. "What are you saying?" he yelled.

He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark shadow loom over the ocean. Then he asked the guard sharply, "Don't you know a tsunami is coming?"

Mr. Ishizawa was finally allowed to leave the plant and escape the tsunami that hit Japan (see video).

Having lived and worked in Tokyo, I am aware that Japanese companies have such long-term strategies (Matsushita, for example, reportedly still has a 250-year strategic plan) that they tend to be better prepared than anyone, but also too inflexible to improvise.

And it is possible that this lack of flexibility kept Japan from responding swiftly to the triple catastrophe when an earthquake combined with a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown.

But unfortunately, there are countless people in all cultures in the world who stick to prior rules and fail to adapt to the new imperatives when the unforeseen happens.

Look at the Swiss watch industry, which by 1968 commanded over 65 percent of the watch market worldwide, and over 80 percent of industry profits.

Throughout their undisputed reign, Swiss watchmakers had held on to tried and true rules of the game, doggedly producing the same first-class watches with high-quality and expensive manual labor.

But by 1970 their luck turned; nimble Japanese copycats dumping their low-cost, high-quality watches on world markets outmaneuvered them.

Unlike their skeptical Swiss competitors, leading Japanese watchmakers like Hattori-Seiko embraced the new quartz technology eagerly and benefitted from a massive drop in costs: The average production price of a quartz watch plummeted from $200 in 1972 to 50 cents in 1984.[1]

The result: By 1989 Seiko alone produced some 15 pecent of the 690 million watches worldwide, while Switzerland’s watch industry took a nose dive and 50,000 of 62,000 Swiss watchmakers lost their jobs.

In 1970 there had been 1,620 watch companies in Switzerland; fifteen years later there were 600, and their world market share was down to a meager 15 percent.

Ironically, the researchers who had developed the first electronic quartz watch were, of all people, Swiss. But when they introduced their cutting-edge idea at a 1967 conference of Swiss manufacturers, it was roundly rejected.

Yes, the quartz watch performed like a watch, it looked like a watch, but it lacked “real watch” components like gears and mainsprings. In short, it did not fit the Swiss watch paradigm.

What do you think? Will leaders of automakers, newspapers, airlines and other industries follow the example of the 1970s Swiss watchmakers and the Fukushima guard and stick to existing rules? Or will they emulate innovators like the late Nicolas Hayek of Swatch or Masayuki Ishizawa at Fukushima, who broke through the rules to make a change? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

[1] Lucio Cassia, Michael Fattore and Stefano Palleari, Entrepreneurial Strategy: Emerging Businesses in Declining Industries (Northampton MA: Edgar Elgar, 2006).

The Power of Words

2011-04-22T04:53:00.000-04:00

"Words are, of course," Rudyard Kipling once wrote, "the most powerful drug used by mankind." The video in this article shows that words can make the difference between a good business and a great business, between mediocre and transcendent leadership, between making small change and making real money. Communication is the best investment; but most of us use language poorly or not at all.

Check out the video below. It shows how your choice of words can make all the difference between making small change vs. making a ton of money.

Alas, most managers, and indeed most human beings, communicate poorIy. In his famous 1946 article "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell did an experiment. "I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Here it is in modern English:

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Of course the modern translation is a parody. But how much bland prose do we have to endure on a daily basis?

Orwell gives six simple rules that can save you from using language blindly, and instead use words as an instrument of leadership:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

Leaders go far beyond using communication merely to acquire information (“Want fries with that?”) and to convey it (“Yes”). They use communication as a vehicle for generating action.

In the 1940s, during the Chinese revolution, Mao Tse-tung told his comrades that Chiang Kai-Chek and his Kuomintang forces were an outwardly strong but inwardly weak “paper tiger.” This image of the paper tiger became so real for Mao’s followers that it gave them the confidence to bring about Communist victory in China.

What the football coach says to his players in a huddle can shape the play that results in a touchdown. Revolutionary leaders mobilize their troops through communication.

And when I consulted to the retail team of a multinational energy company, we worked on upgrading communications with the gas station owners. The result: the company produced 0.74 Euros more per customer (i.e. $74 million additional revenue).

As I put it in my book Communicate or Die: Getting Results Through Speaking and Listening, "if properly harnessed and skillfully used, communication (yes, mere speaking and listening) is the biggest bang for the buck, the highest-leverage return on investment in any organization - for the simple reason that it is also one of the most under-researched and under-utilized levers for breakthrough results."

What do you think? Which words have power, which do not? Are you using words effectively or unconsciously? What story do you have about the difference a right or wrong word can make?I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

Richard Branson Becomes Stewardess

2011-04-14T11:01:00.004-04:00

After losing a bet, Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson will have to don a red stewardess uniform and walk down the aisle to offer passengers drinks and food. The British entrepreneur's one-off action should become standard best practice for top managers.

British billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin group sponsors the Formula 1 Marussia Virgin Racing team, will finally honor his bet with AirAsia founder and Team Lotus co-principal Tony Fernandes on whose team would finish higher at the 2010 Bahrain Formula One GP.

Branson will dress and serve as a stewardess on Malaysian budget carrier AirAsia X on May 1 after losing a Grand Prix bet with Fernandes, the founder of the airline.

"We've come a full circle, Richard and I. Who would've thought my mentor will be serving as a flight attendant on AirAsia? I've got my razor ready, and I can't wait to shave his hairy legs," Fernandes said in a statement.

It's brilliant self-promotion in true Branson style, and the publicity stunt will further augment the Virgin founder's quirky brand. But there more to this than hype.

If you want to do good strategy, and if you want your strategy to be implemented, you better put yourself in the shoes of your frontline people on a regular basis.

Keeping your finger on the pulse of how it really is for the customer out there is critical for success.

Unless you get regular real-world feedback from the market, you will be like a pilot without an altimeter., to stay with the airline metaphor. And you may crash sooner or later.

In this video, Branson shares some other secrets of success.

One of his secrets is the humility to say he is sorry when his company has not served customers.

After a flight delay, the Virgin Atlantic founder once famously appeared at the arrival gate to apologize personally to disgruntled passengers.

In a world where the soldier in Sadr City might have access to strategic intelligence as important as the intelligence Pentagon planners have, where the receptionist or the tech support guy in Bangalore might have as much insight into customer concerns as the CEO, it behooves top managers to work like regular people, on a regular basis.

What do you think? What do you do, or what could you do, to find out what it's really like for the customers and for your front-line people? Or do you think CEOs should be big-picture people who cannot waste time with menial stuff?
I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

Can Google Build Better Bosses?

2011-04-05T06:49:00.001-04:00

Bosses have a huge influence on people's performance and job satisfaction (meaning whether they stay or leave), so Google has embarked on a bold initiative: to build better managers. "Project Oxygen" applies what Google does best (organizing information) to the unpredictable world of the human element.

"Project Oxygen" is perhaps more far-reaching than any algorithm the company has ever designed. Its "people analytics" teams went about finding what makes a good manager.

They gathered and analyzed over 10,000 observations about managers across more than 100 variables, from performance reviews, 360-degree feedbacks and nominations for top-manager awards. Then they coded the observations to find patterns.

In trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human behavior, "Google is really on the leading edge," said Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board.

At first glance, the list Google found by correlating thousands of phrases, words, praise and complaints is self-evident. In fact, it is head-slappingly obvious to the point of sounding trivial. Here is the detailed list including some pitfalls managers run into.

"My first reaction was, that's it?" said Laszlo Bock, Google's vice president people operations (which is Googlespeak for human resources). Indeed, the list has a certain "duh?" effect on readers.

But then Bock and his team looked at how employees had ranked the eight directives in importance, and found some interesting things.

For starters, "Be a good coach" is number one. (You and I could have told them that years ago and saved them the trouble. You mean, we should not act like Will Ferrell in this video?)

What employees valued most were even-tempered bosses whom they could meet with one-on-one, who did not give answers but asked questions designed to help people find their own answers, and who did not micro-manage but gave people freedom coupled with stretch goals.

And what is dead last on the list? Technical skills. This came as a surprise.

"We'd always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you," Bock said. "It turns out that that's absolutely the least important."

What do you think? Should bosses know their technical (or financial or operational) stuff to manage their geeks (or their finance or operations people)? And, should we forget all about those business books about management as zen or management as war? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

What Incentives Really Work (If Any)?

2011-03-31T05:34:00.000-04:00

Silicon Valley firms are again luring employees with special perks, from free iPads to haircuts to butlers, or even the promise to help them become the next Mark Zuckerberg. But what really motivates you, and what pulls for excellence from your people?

Incentive systems can take many forms. You have to stand in the shoes of your people and ask yourself, what would knock their socks off?

To lure Brett Shanaman from an old-economy company, WetFeet.com agreed to sponsor his hobby: racecar driving.

Soon after Kevin Vela had joined iThought.com, he got the key to a company car for the weekend, just for completing a project ahead of schedule. The ¨car¨ was a Hummer.

LoweringBills.com rewarded workers not only with stock options, but also by paying their recurring bills for one month and treating them to skydiving trips.

But "Gimmicks don’t make good people stay," said Dimitri Boytan, a co-founder and later CEO of Hotjobs.com. ¨Growth and opportunities are what makes the environment work.¨

Here is a fascinating video of what bestselling author Daniel Pink found about what really motivates us.

If you don't have time to watch the video, here is the bottom line.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did a study where economists gave students a 3-tier reward system for meeting challenges including memorizing strings of numbers, solving word puzzles, or throwing a basketball through a hoop.

They found that monetary rewards worked only for the most menial tasks. Once you get to rudimentary cognitive skill, the rewards did not work at all.

So how can you design incentives that really motivate your people?

The science shows that "you have to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table," Pink argues. "Pay people enough so they are not thinking about money but about the work."

Once that is done, there are three factors that lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: Autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy: Companies like Google, that get out of the way of their people one day a week and let them work on whatever they want to work on, get significant results in innovation, entrepreneurship and loyalty.

Mastery: Why do people play a musical instrument on weekends? Why do they volunteer sophisticated work for Wikipedia for free? Because it thrills people to become great at something.

Purpose: Why did I give 12 years of my career for an organization like The Hunger Project? Because its mission of ending world hunger is huge and meaningful.

Or as Steve Jobs put it to John Sculley, who was then at PepsiCo: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Speaking of Apple: One start-up, Square, offered software developer Eric Firestone an unusual incentive for leaving Apple: It promised him assistance in building his own startup.

Now Firestone is about to move on after helping to build a payment application for the iPhone; and that is just fine with Square.

The mismatch comes when designers have not thought through all the consequences of an incentive system.

We tend to forget the simple rule: People tend to do exactly what they are enticed to do. It is incumbent on the company to ensure that the actions and results it promotes with its incentives are in fact what it wants to achieve.

For example, I just saw it again at a global bank I consult to: If asset managers are compensated not based on maximizing their clients’ wealth, but with bonuses from their bank based on maximizing the bank’s profits, it eventually leads to suboptimal results, if not a financial crisis. (This is of course purely hypothetical. Wink wink.)

What do you think? What really motivates you to perform at your best, and what motivates your people? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

Does Facebook Boost or Cost Results?

2011-03-15T11:28:00.001-04:00

Some studies say Facebook use reduces workers' productivity (by 1.5%). Others say, on the contrary, a little surfing on social networks can reduce stress and sharpen the mind, and banning them would cost business (up to $8 billion). Who is right? And what is your experience, good or bad?

Thanks for all your feedback to my post on whether social networks are a good or a bad thing. Now, to focus in a bit more: What about Facebook's effects on people's results?

According to a study by Nucleus Research, 77% of company employees have a Facebook account and almost two-thirds use it during business hours, on average for 15 minutes a day, which translates into 1.5% lost productivity.

Presumably.

Another statistic: In a 2008 poll, senior executives at the 1,000 largest U.S. companies said that their lunch break was now 35 minutes, down seven minutes from five years earlier. And many executives work through their lunch "hour" at least three times a week.

Nevertheless, seven out of ten companies have banned access to social networks during work hours.

But PopCap Games found (perhaps not least in its own interest) that far from reducing performance, "electronic breaks" actually boost staff efficiency and morale.

The computer games manufacture warned that by banning access to the Web, companies would contribute to productivity losses of up to $8 billion.

On the other hand, "Allowing workers more freedom at the PC can benefit morale and boost company profits," said the psychologist Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a contributor to the study.

"In addition to allowing their minds to switch off from their work worries, employers can foster a more trusting and enjoyable environment."

Well, maybe. Judging from this video, intra-office use of Facebook might suck up huge amounts of time with idle and useless stuff.

My five cents: I have been quite passive in terms of friending people and I go on Facebook only in finely-dosed intervals (I guess it's a matter of discipline), but the social network has allowed me to connect with thousands of people I would not have met otherwise.

Facebook has been useful for building a community around my life mission to transform the practice of leadership.
Meanwhile, Birmingham City University in England is offering a one-year master degree in social networking, which led one blogger at Computerworld to wonder tongue-in-cheek "if the professors are required to deliver 140-character Twitter-style college lectures?"

What do you think? Is Facebook a boost or a bust for performance? What is your experience with social networks and their impact on performance, either your own or your people's? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my e- book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

Breaking Up By SMS: Cowardly or OK?

2011-03-09T09:20:00.001-05:00

The definitive guide for appropriate vs. inappropriate behavior in German-speaking Europe has officially ruled that relationships can be ended via SMS. But now its president has come under attack and several board members resigned in protest. Who is right? And what constitutes acceptable communication online?

Last week I wrote in these pages about the power of the Internet and social networks to produce either positive externalities like bringing down dictators, or negative externalities like destroying someone's name or life. (All your interesting feedback and ideas were much appreciated.)

What I did not write about is, What constitutes good behavior in cyber-space, for example in the treacherous minefield of communication?

Now Hans-Michael Klein, the president of the "Knigge," the organization that deems what are good or bad manners, has publicly pronounced that ending a relationship with a text message is socially acceptable.

The "Knigge" is named after the German writer and freemason Freiherr Adolph Franz Friedrich Ludwig Knigge, who lived in the late 18th century and is best known for his book "Über den Umgang mit Menschen" ("On Human Relations"), a treatise on the fundamental principles of human relations that became the authoritative guide on good manners, politeness and etiquette.

Only days after Dr. Klein's ruling, several of his board members resigned in protest.

Who is right? Is the breakup-SMS acceptable, or is it cowardly and devoid of dignity? "It is important that you split in a human and dignified way," says couples therapist Klaus Heer. "With 160 characters that is not possible."

Breaking up has probably never been easy (see video), neither for the person breaking up (except perhaps for a temporary feeling of relief afterward) nor for the receiver of the breakup message.

A quick internet search yielded a plethora of tips and examples of breakup messages. For example:

"Have I told you lately how much I am in love with you??? No?? Think about it, have a great life..."

"I get so emotional when your not around.. I think the emotion is called happiness."

"Look, I'm turning 16 soon, and I really just need my freedom!"

The last example brings up the idea that this is likely a generational thing. According to one German study, already 3 million people have kissed a relationship good-bye via SMS, most of them young people.

And the Berne Museum for Communication asked almost 15,000 visitors if a breakup-SMS was OK. 30% of people under 25 said yes. Of older people, 15% said yes.

What do you think? Is it OK to break up via SMS, or is it disgusting? Do you have examples of good and/or bad break-up text messages you have seen or used? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my latest book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.

Social Networks: Constructive or Callous?

2011-03-03T04:54:00.003-05:00

Is the Internet helping to disgrace scoundrels, expose scandals, and bring down dictators? Or is it a place of fake intimacy in which innocent people get cyber-mobbed, shamed, and attacked? Probably both. Facebook, Twitter or YouTube are two-faced technologies: fighting cruelty, causing cruelty. Which face will prevail?

There is an Ethiopian proverb that goes, "When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion." We hear a lot these days about the Web as a communication weapon that helps ordinary people bring down lions like ousted Egyptian president Mubarak or Libya's dictator Gaddafi.

In recent blog posts I wrote about how Google and Twitter helped the opposition movements in North Africa and the Middle East to organize, and I quoted Wael Ghonim that "If there was no social networks, it would have never been sparked."

Digital groups can also help bring down small-town criminals. As The New York Times reported, a cat hater in England was recently exposed on YouTube and Facebook after she left a kitten in a trashcan. Once she was found out, her official punishment was a $400 fine. But the unofficial punishment was meted out online and much harsher: public ridicule and death threats.

A few years ago in China, a high-heeled woman was captured on video stomping a small cat to death. The video went viral and drove countless indignant "Netizens" into an impassioned search for the evildoer.

The woman lived in relative obscurity among 1.3 billion Chinese people, but within six days the Web militia found her: Her name was Wang Jiao of Luobei in Heilongjiag Province. The result: She was fired from her government job and driven out of her town.

"We have always wanted to shame people who did bad things," said the author Malcolm Gladwell. "Now it's cheap to do it. It's easy to break down the barriers."

Brett Ligon, the district attorney of Montgomery, Texas, regularly posts the names of drunken drivers on Twitter. "There is an embarrassment factor, the scarlet letter of law enforcement," Mr. Ligon told The New York Times.

But given their anonymity, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter can also lead to base behaviors.

Some people, from the comfort of their keyboards, went to new levels of malice when CBS senior correspondent Lara Logan was surrounded by 200 people and sexually assaulted on Cairo's Tahrir Square (see video).

After Logan was detained by Egyptian police, one digital sniper on the conservative blog Mofo Politics wrote: "OMG if I were her captors and there were no sanctions for doing so, I would totally rape her."

"She got what she deserved," one Yahoo comment went. "This is what happens when dumb sexy female reporters want to make it about them."

The anonymous nature of the Web can bring about a callousness that computer scientist Jaron Lanier has called a "culture of sadism."

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, says that technology is amoral, giving rise to instincts both good and bad. The real danger might be the weakening of compassion.

"If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn't have occurred before."

What do you think? On the whole, do the good influences of social networks outweigh the bad? Will the technology produce net costs or net benefits? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my latest book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.

Should Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg Resign?

2011-02-24T17:22:00.000-05:00

Scandal in Germany: In an unprecedented step, the University of Bayreuth has revoked the doctorate of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, accusing him of plagiarizing most of his dissertation. Should the popular German defense minister, at under 40 a rising political star in the conservative coalition, tough it out? Or should he take the consequences and resign?

The German minister of defense, whose full name is a mouthful Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg (and yes, I copied that from Wikipedia), has come under severe fire not only from the German opposition but also from his own party.

Earlier this month critics accused the young star of German politics to have plagiarized much of his work. After an evaluation period, yesterday the University of Bayreuth deemed that Guttenberg had "clearly violated academic principles in the framework of his dissertation," as the university's president Rüdiger Bormann put it.

Guttenberg had failed to attribute quotes to their original sources and pretended that they were his own. And he failed to do so on at least 76 pages and borrowed from 19 authors without naming them.

A "GuttenPlag Wiki" on which countless volunteers post their findings of plagiarisms claims to find that even 63% of the body of the dissertation contain at least one plagiarism.

Such numbers are of course unreliable. And what speaks for Guttenberg is that he himself asked the university to remove his degree of Doctor of Law, according to Bormann.

And what speaks against the university is that it tested Guttenberg in an oral exam based on his thesis, and then rated his work in 2007 with "summa cum laude," the highest distinction you can earn for academic work.

(To boast for a moment: My mother got that distinction too, more years ago than she cares to remember, for her Juris Doctor degree. And her work was original.)

At least for now, Chancellor Angela Merkel is standing by her minister. "I appointed him as minister of defense," she told reporters. "I did not appoint him as an academic assistant or doctor."

What do you think? Should Guttenberg resign? Or should he try to weather the crisis that has befallen him and argue that his transgression has nothing to do with his capacity to serve as a minister of defense? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my latest book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.
P.P.S. Integrity is the chief capital of leaders. To read about how to build it, check out The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders.

Wael Ghonim, Google Executive and Revolutionary: A New Type of Leader?

2011-02-17T06:12:00.002-05:00

One of the unlikely heroes of Egypt's revolution is Wael Ghonim, Google's head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, who sparked the protests through Facebook and Twitter. Is Ghonim a new type of 21st-century leader?

Ghonim took time off from his Google job to travel to his home country. He was the anonymous administrator of the Facebook page "We are all Khaled Said" in honor of a 28-year old Egyptian man beaten to death by police.

When Ghonim went missing on January 28, he became a rallying symbol for demonstrators.

Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged two days ago that the company is "very, very proud" of Wael Ghonim and his leadership.

The 30-year-old Google manager and others "were able to use a set of technologies that included Facebook, Twitter and a number of others to really express the voice of the people," Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "And that is a good example of transparency. And we wish them very much the best. I have talked to [Ghonim]. We are very, very proud of what he has done."

In this emotional CNN interview after his release from detention, Ghonim choked up as he recalled scenes of the protests. "I am telling you, I am ready to die. I have a lot to lose in this life, you know... I work in the best company to work for in the world. I have the best wife and I love my kids."

"But I am willing to lose all of that for my dream to happen," Ghonim said, his eyes filled with tears. "And no one is going to go against our desire. No one."

This is the face of the new Egypt: A Google executive in a polo shirt and jeans who cries for his people on television. A man without a dogma or ideology. A man of humility who stands with the people on Tahrir Square, not with the rulers.

It could well be the face of 21st-century leadership.

In my book "The Rabbi and the CEO" I write that the Hebrew name for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which literally means "the narrows." Egypt has been a place of limitations, of constraining the human spirit.

But no more. Now Egypt could become a symbol of unleashing the human spirit, peacefully and for good.

Only history will tell whether the Egyptian uprising will lead to violence and war and bloodshed, or to freedom and democracy and human rights.

But this much is clear: It is Ghonim and other young leaders who have sparked the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Ghonim insisted that the anti-Mubarak movement is "the revolution of the youth and the Internet."

On CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Ghonim credited the Internet and social networking as the keys to the revolution.

"If there was no social networks, it would have never been sparked," he told "60 Minutes." "Because the whole thing before the revolution was the most critical thing. Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google, without YouTube, this would have never happened."

Above all, Ghonim displays humility. He also insisted that "I am not a hero."

"The heroes are the ones who protested, who are the ones who sacrificed their lives, who were beaten," he said. "I was just there writing on the keyboard."

What do you think? Does Wael Ghonim represent a new type of leader? Or is he a one-off exception to the rule of old-style tough top-down macho leaders? And do you know other leaders like Ghonim? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.

Women at the Top: A Struggle?

2011-02-08T13:27:00.000-05:00

In 2008, Siemens was the first company on the DAX 30 index of German blue-chip companies to appoint a woman, Barbara Kux, to its executive board. Do European women executives suffer from a "pipeline leak" or from an "upgrade problem"? And what needs to be done to close the gender gap in European C-level positions?

Compared to other companies in Germany and much of Europe, Siemens has made path-breaking moves in terms of corporate gender diversity.

When the company named its second woman, Brigitte Ederer, to the board last summer, it raised the share of of women in the Siemens executive suite to 25 percent.

That is almost triple the average of 8.5 percent in German companies. It is double the European Union average of roughly 12 percent.

By comparison, in the United States, roughly 40 percent of all private-sector managers are women, according to The New York Times, which cites Government Accounting Office statistics.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, has put the percentage of women in C-level positions at "15, 16 percent." In this video she spoke about the issue at the Davos World Economic Forum.

Elsewhere, Ms. Sandberg said that of 200 heads of state worldwide, nine are women, and 13 percent of parliament members are women.

People who think the discrepancy stems from women taking maternity leaves or building families should think again. Eileen Taylor, global diversity manager of Deutsche Bank, mentioned "these assumptions that the reason the pipeline is leaking is because the women are going off to have babies."

But an analysis by the bank in 2010 showed that no more than 5 percent of its women were on maternity leave at any given time.

"European companies are waking up--but most are just starting these efforts," said Herminia Ibarra, a leadership professor at Insead, the European Institute of Business Administration, in Fontainebleau, France. "They are realizing that it's really about changing the culture."

When the World Economic Forum conducted a survey among 600 large companies last year, managers most often cited a "masculine or patriarchal corporate culture" and "lack of role models" as among the biggest obstacles for would-be female leaders.

Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner, has hinted at mandating a 30 percent board quota for women across the EU by 2015 if companies fail to get there on their own.

Quotas have worked well in India, where one-third of panchayat (local governing council) leaders must be women by law. In the last election, one million women won seats as panchayat leaders.

But quotas are not enough to transform a culture. Ms. Taylor at Deutsche Bank recently began grooming talented women by pairing them up with top managers. Since September 2009, the bank has provided 30 women with mentors from its executive committee -- all twelve of them men.

What do you think? What's missing for women to get into leadership positions? What can be done? And what have you experienced? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.

Google & Twitter Sidestep Egypt's Internet Blockade

2011-02-01T05:03:00.000-05:00

Egypt's government has virtually shut down communications among the protesters: The last Internet provider has just been paralyzed. But the opposition is getting unexpected help: Now Google makes it possible for Egyptians to tweet via phone.

Egypt's opposition movement wants to mobilize more people than ever; on Tuesday, it expects one million to hit the streets of Cairo and force President Mubarak to step down.

But the Mubarak administration is fighting back. It has systematically clamped down on communication networks. All Internet providers are down already, and the mobile phone networks are said to be next.

The protests have continued unabated (see video). And now the protesters are getting help from an unexpected side.

"Like many people we've been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground," Google writes on its official blog. "Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection."

Engineers at Google, Twitter and SayNow, a company Google acquired last week, designed the service, which allows people in Egypt to tweet others by dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail.

Anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail on one of three international phone numbers (+1.650.419.4196 or +39.06.6220.7294 or +97.316.199.855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

Naturally Google's announcement of the special speak-to-tweet service is quite a PR coup for the company. But if it makes a difference for people power, why not?

What do you think? If Egypt's opposition succeeds in wresting power from President Mubarak, what will be the consequences for the region? Good or bad? I look forward to your comments on my blog.

All the best,

P.S. To download my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.

The Idiot Factor and Brain Boosters

2011-01-26T09:18:00.000-05:00

In my previous post ("New Year, New Habits") I wrote about the quiet power of choosing your regular practices deliberately. Now we go to the next level: Any old practices are not enough. The question is, What practices? Brain research tells us that you have to go beyond your comfort zone and into unknown territory to get performance breakthroughs.

A Dow Corning manager in one of my "Culture Clash" workshops told me that his colleagues use a term they call the "Idiot Factor": The farther someone is from us, the more we will think of them as idiots.

We tend to believe that those who think the same way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with group-thinkers and yes-men. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are the company lacks intellectual diversity.

In this way, people are no different from organizations. Brain research has shown that in puberty, the brain shuts down about half the brain's capacity, keeping only those modes of thought that have seemed most useful during the first ten years (more or less) of life.

So how can you reawaken that hidden capacity? One way is to go about it like the brain surgeon in this video:

But perhaps that is not the best way. The answer is, you keep your brain vibrant through activities that are unfamiliar and may even feel weird.

“Try lacing your hands together,” said Dawna Markova, author of The Open Mind (Red Wheel/Weiser, 1996). “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.” (By the way, the original meaning of the word "confusion" comes from Latin and means "joining together.")

Going beyond your comfort zone can pay off handsomely. One managing director at a large multinational was an inspiring speaker, but I saw in our very first executive coaching session that the guy simply did not stop talking.

After I had listened to his monologue for some 15 minutes, I told him, “Mr. So-and-so, do you realize that you don’t listen?”

He was flabbergasted: “Nobody ever told me that. How did you know?” I smiled: “Sir, it didn't take a Ph.D. to figure it out.”

During the Coaching-In-Action process, the executive set out to develop his listening skills. He rated himself on his listening performance after every meeting and every phone call.

In debriefing each conversation he had with a colleague, he asked himself: Had he truly listened, or had he merely waited for the other person to stop talking so he could finally say his own brilliant ideas?

Within three months, he had built his active listening muscle. The result: more speaking by his subordinates, more ideas, more initiative, more leadership, more results ($74 million more sales, to be exact).

“It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases," wrote M.J. Ryan in This Year I Will... (Crown Archetype, 2006).

"No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

What do you think? What unfamiliar practices do/could you or your company experiment with? I look forward to your comments on my blog.

All the best,

P.S. If you have not yet downloaded my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), do so now. For your free personal copy, go to Leading-Leaders. Enjoy!

New Year, New Habits

2011-01-14T10:38:00.000-05:00

A new year calls for new habits. Habits and routines have a negative connotation; but researchers have found that new habits are good for the brain, innovation, even creativity. Taking stock of your regular practices might raise your leadership game to a new level.

“Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” said the poet William Wordsworth already in the 19th century. If leadership is about choice, about self-determination, about being in charge, then automatic habits are the opposite of leadership. Habits are for robots.

But brain researchers have discovered that when we adopt habits consciously, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. This in turn helps prevent Alzheimer's and keep the brain's atrophy at bay.

Routines don’t have to be dull; they can be creative, and they can boost performance. Committed to improving the quality of its customer service, Citibank Privatkunden AG in Germany sought to cut waiting time for customers calling in from 20 seconds to 8 seconds. The bank instituted a practice for each employee to take five minutes on a given day to achieve a “wow” effect by exceeding one customer’s expectations.

The researchers found that the more new things we try—the more we step outside our comfort zone—the more creative we become, both at work and in our personal lives.

Which might be useful when you start a new year. Much more useful, in fact, than sincere New Year's Resolutions (see video) that are history by mid-January (in other words, right around now).

Regular practices can be annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily. Here are some examples:

Annual:

On your birthday, take stock of your life accomplishment.
At the end of each year, look at what worked and what didn’t work during the previous year, acknowledge your accomplishments of the past year, and create your goals for the coming year.
Every June, go for a medical check-up.

Monthly:

Review and update your displays of your progress toward major objectives.
Pay your bills on the first of each month.
Answer your overdue correspondence on Facebook and other networks on the 15th each month.

Weekly:

Sundays, create your priorities for the coming week.
Mondays, declare what you will not do that week.
Wednesdays, finish unfinished business and take care of administrative details.
Fridays, speculate about new possibilities.

Daily:

Take a walk each evening.
Read something each day that gives you a new perspective.

I invite you to take an inventory of your own habits: Which ones have been good for you, and which ones bad? Which ones were useful for getting you to where you are today, but are obsolete now? And which ones do you want to keep for the foreseeable future?

What if, for example, you took a new, unknown way to work, the road less traveled, as it were? What if you changed a familiar work routine or sequence of activities? What if you made time for "What If" speculation about the future on Friday mornings?

What do you think? What habits can you schedule regularly to prevent them from being dropped out of your life? What regular actions will fulfill your life? What new habits have you scheduled into your life or work, and with what results? I look forward to your comments on my blog.

May 2011 bring you even closer to your dreams,

P.S. If you have not yet had a chance to download my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), feel free to do so now. The book is my New Year's gift to you. For your personal copy, go to Leading-Leaders. (Or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://www.thomaszweifel.com/Landing-Leading-Leaders.html)

"Leading Leaders": Your Holiday Gift

2010-12-20T06:11:00.002-05:00

I hope you've had a great year: productive, meaningful, full of valuable learning. As a token of my gratitude to 37,000+ loyal readers, please accept a year-end gift: my latest book Leading Leaders: The Art & Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP). May this small book help you (and your people) achieve your (and their) boldest dreams this coming year.

It is my great pleasure to share my latest (and shortest, at 45 pages) book Leading Leaders: The Art & Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) with you.

The book is my gift to you.

For your personal copy, go to Leading-Leaders.

(Or copy & paste this link into your browser: http://www.thomaszweifel.com/Landing-Leading-Leaders.html)

Enjoy!

Some core arguments of "Leading Leaders" can be found in this 8-minute video.

I hope you will make some time this holiday season to step back from the action, reflect on the past year, and see how the next year can bring you even closer to your dreams.

In this debrief process, seven simple questions have been especially useful to me, my students and my clients:

What have I/we accomplished?
What have I/we not accomplished?
What worked (and I will do it again)?
What did not work (and I will stop doing it)?
What opportunities emerged (and how can I leverage them)?
What leaders emerged (and how can I empower them)?
What's next (given my answers to the above)?

What do you think? I would love to hear from you once you have had a chance to read the book. Simply post your comments on my blog.

I look forward to our continued exploration of what it means to lead in the 21st century in the coming year. For now, I will leave you with this quote by the acclaimed author and naturalist Robert Finch in his book The Primal Place:

"True belonging is born of relationships not only to one another

but to a place of shared responsibilities and benefits.

We love not so much what we have acquired

as what we have made

and with whom we have made it."

--Robert Finch

Best wishes, and may the next year bring you even closer to your dreams,

P.S. To invite friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet this post.

$140+ Million Bribes: How to Hold Blatter & Co. Accountable?

2010-12-07T04:24:00.001-05:00

The biggest corruption scandal in sports history just got bigger when BBC Television disclosed evidence that FIFA officials had taken $100 million in bribes. How can Sepp Blatter and his cronies be held accountable for their Qatar (rhymes with "gutter") politics?

According to documents revealed by the English TV station BBC, at least three members of the world football (soccer) federation FIFA received bribes in the millions of dollars from the former sports marketing agency ISL/ISMM.

They are Ricardo Teixeira, chief of the Brazilian Football Confederation that will stage the 2014 World Cup; Nicolas Leoz of Paraguay, chief of the Latin American football confederation CONMEBOL; and Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, the president of the African confederation CAF, who is also a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOK).

(Two other recipients of kickbacks are also members of the IOK, which will have a lot of explaining to do: the FIFA honorary president Joao Havelange of Brazil and Lamine Diack, president of the track & field world federation IAAF.)

A secret document lists 175 payments to officials. Teixeira, the top earner, received some $9.5 million in 21 payments through a front company in Liechtenstein called Sanud.

That was up to 1999. By 2001 Teixeira cashed in another $2.5 million. And if that were not enough, in his dual roles as president of Brazil's Football Confederation and chief of the 2014 World Cup organizing committee, he made contracts with himself that guarantee him vast portions of an eventual profit.

Leoz was named in court papers for receiving $130,000. But now a secret ISL document lists another $600,000 Leoz got in three installments of $200,000 each.

Teixeira, Havelange (who happens to be Teixeira's ex-father-in-law) and Leoz were already known for previous transgressions. Now Hayatou and Diack have joined the list of offenders.

Will FIFA president Sepp Blatter fall over this scandal, as he did physically in the video below, to the delight of gleeful Italian commentators?

The $100 million in bribes now documented are likely only the tip of the iceberg.

And the BBC documents show that most of the secret payments went via front firms and foundations in numerous countries in an ingenious and labyrinthine system that involved lawyers, tax advisers and renowned auditing firms.

Far from promising action to bring the scoundrels to justice, Sepp Blatter rose to defend them.

In a statement, the FIFA president said that a 2008 court case had largely exonerated ISL officials, and that "no FIFA officials were accused of any criminal offence in these proceedings."

The FIFA president argues in his press conference below that if six people out of 300 million football/soccer lovers are corrupt, that does not mean that the whole of football is corrupt.

With all due respect, Mr. Blatter's reasoning is a bit flawed. If top cabinet members of a country of many million people were found to commit illegal activities, they would have to resign.

If the evidence showed that top managers of a large company are corrupt, they would have to resign. And so would the CEO under whose watch the wrongdoings happened. Witness Enron.

Under no circumstances would a president cover up illegal activities of his senior officials and get away with it.

Why should FIFA be any different?

What do you think? How can corrupt senior FIFA officials be brought to justice? What should be done, and who should do it, to return integrity to football? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For ethical leadership tools, check out The Rabbi and the CEO. For democratic governance tools, check out International Organizations and Democracy.

From Starbucks to Barbucks: A Venti Chardonnay, Anyone?

2010-11-22T05:37:00.000-05:00

Hard hit by the recession, lagging sales, and fast-food competitors at its heels, the coffee giant is testing a new approach: Sell local wine and beer. Will the scheme help open new markets and revive sales, or will it turn off core customers?

Starbucks, which faced a sales decline in the third quarter 2010 and had to close hundreds of stores since 2008, has embarked on a bold move to revitalize its business.

The action comes none too soon, as McDonald's has lowered its Wi-Fi fees from $2.95 for two hours to zero in an attempt to encourage customers to linger, just like Starbucks has done for years.

The experiment in brand rethink, dubbed "Olive Way" internally, will change from its iconic green-and-tan color scheme and will offer not only alcohol but a broader food menu and plush seating too.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said: "This is a time when every business can no longer embrace the status quo and do everything they can to get as close as possible to the customer."

For now the company is testing its new "Coffee Theater" approach in a few selected locations only. But there have already been strong reactions to the pilot program. Basically there are three kinds:

The first view: Morning coffee sales alone cannot carry the business anymore. McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts have been increasingly competitive, so the Starbucks plan, although controversial, makes sense. The good news is that Starbucks knows it must keep innovating.

The second view: The new push could easily backfire. "Personally," says Dave McGurgan in PhillyBurbs.com, "I feel if i want to have a glass of wine, I'll likely do so at dinner or at home. I know Starbucks for one thing and one thing only: Coffee."

Starbucks is a place where you can engage people socially without fear of offending them, and "I don't see them bringing in new customers with booze without offending their core coffee customer base."

The third view: Worry about the redesign, not the alcohol, says Carol Tice on BNET.com, since "lots of poeple hang out at Starbucks to do business--working on laptops or calling clients from cellphones." Will the new store design leave no quiet space for that proposal you're writing?

What do you think? Will Starbucks' gamble on alcohol work as a brilliant move to re-energize the chain? Or will it be a fiasco? Or what else? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For business leadership tools, check out my new book Leadership in 100 Days.

Craziest Campaign Speech Ever?

2010-10-29T07:44:00.011-04:00

Phil Davidson really wants to be the treasurer of Stark County, Ohio. Really. It's a textbook case of how not to speak to your audience. What could Davidson (and ultimately all of us) learn from Martin Luther King's ¨I Have a Dream¨ speech? The Do's and Don'ts of passionate speaking.

If you have seen this video before, it's good (and amusing) to see it again.

Phil Davidson announces his candidacy for treasurer in Stark County, OH, and his passion is getting the better of him, with hilarious results.

Should you not have time to watch all 6 minutes, it gets intense at around 1:34 minutes.

Before giving his next speech, Mr. Davidson might want to do some homework. For example, he should check out the speech below by Martin Luther King, Jr. on August 28, 1963, to more than 200,000 supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

Most people have seen at least parts of this video before too; watching it gives me chills of inspiration every time.

The video is long, more than 17 minutes, but you will see (around 4:25 minutes) something that most analysts of great oratory miss.

King switches from his prepared remarks and starts dancing with his listeners.

Up to that point, his speech is mostly just another political speech. But this moment, when he dares veer off his prepared words and say not merely what he had to say but what his listener need to hear, turns his speech into a transcendent speech that makes history.

I call this crucial skillset Listening to the Listening. As I wrote in Communicate or Die,

¨In your own leadership, train yourself to listen to how others listen to you. Develop the skill of hearing the subtle signals and signs that show you the way and show you what to say.

In short, try to address the listening present in the room or on the call. You obviously cannot do this by sticking only to prepared remarks.

If you can sidestep your written agenda, your words will come from what your listeners need and want, and your speaking will be in tune with what needs to be said at any given time to produce the outcomes you and they need.

Remember that even King, in his history-making “I Have a Dream” speech, had to stray from his prepared speech and allow himself to dance with his listeners. Only then did his dream create a furor in America.¨

Phil Davidson is not alone. We can all take a cue from Martin Luther King.

What do you think? The next time you do a presentation or sales pitch or phone call, see if you can listen to the listening. What are your observations? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For tools on managing across cultures, check out my book Communicate or Die: Getting Results Through Speaking and Listening.

P.P.S. What do you want me to blog about? Where in your life or work do you need leadership? Where does it hurt? The reader/leader with the best comment gets a free e-book of your choice.

Eliot Spitzer: Sinner Recovers With Own TV Show

2010-10-07T12:25:00.002-04:00

In 2008, then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer was brought down by his trysts with high-priced callgirl Ashley Dupre after pledging a new era of morality and clean government. This week, he launched his own television talk show. Is the former ¨Client 9¨ entitled to his comeback?

Once upon a time a fallen politician could recoup his reputation by helping, say, widows and orphans. The British defense minister John Profumo, who had to resign because of a hot affair with the callgirl Christine Keeler, became a friend of London's poor classes.

No more. Now politicians like Eliot Spitzer, the ex-governor of New York, use the media as their personal rehab. And given our short memory span, or perhaps because we can't bring ourselves to care, we let them get away with it.

In case you have forgotten, here is the 2008 story as I put it in The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders:

The brainy kid who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, the ambitious Spitzer rose to national prominence as an avenging state attorney general who hunted down Wall Street malefactors, exploiters of immigrant workers, and mobsters with moralistic fervor. Everywhere the self-styled defender of the American investor found “betrayals of the public trust” he called “shocking” and “criminal.”

In 2007, Spitzer swept into office pledging to usher in a new era of clean government; a year later, in March 2008, two days after having been linked to a prostitution ring, he announced his resignation. The stunning development came after authorities and court documents showed that Spitzer, a father of three teenage girls, had been caught on tape arranging a liaison with a high-end call girl, and may have spent as much as $80,000 on prostitutes. Ironically, one of the industries Spitzer had aggressively prosecuted had been prostitution services.

Fast forward to this past Monday, together with the award-winning columnist Kathleen Parker, Spitzer launched his own CNN talkshow named ¨Parker Spitzer.¨

He is quite a charming host, although he talked too much and condemned Parker to silence. And he advised President Obama to fire treasury secretary Timothy Geithner (¨Call me! I have a few names!¨).

Unfortunately the launch of ¨Parker Spitzer¨ attracted a mere 455,000 viewers compared to Bill O'Reilly's audience of over 3 million on Fox.

Meanwhile, Spitzer's former callgirl Ashley Dupre is doing her own media rehab: She is now a columnist at the New York Post on the hot topic of relationships.

What do you think? Is Eliot Spitzer entitled to his make-over as a TV host, and eventually his come-back (forgive the unintended pun) onto the political stage? Or has he lost his chance and should stay out of the limelight indefinitely? I look forward to your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For more on Eliot Spitzer and tools on leadership ethics, check out my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders and/or the ¨Rabbi & CEO¨ workshop.

Is HP ¨Vindictive¨ or Right to Sue?

2010-09-14T11:50:00.000-04:00

Mark Hurd continues to catalyze conflict. HP ousted Hurd amid allegations of sexual harassment. Now it is suing him for violating his non-compete agreement when he signed on with competitor Oracle. Oracle's Larry Ellison calls HP's lawsuit against its fired ex-chief ¨vindictive.¨ Who is right?

Mark V. Hurd's relationship with Jodie Fisher, a 50-year-old former reality show contestant and sometime soft porn actress, put an unsavory end to one of the great executive runs in recent U.S. business history.

Tripped over Fisher's allegations of sexual harassment, Hurd was forced to resign as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, the ¨patriarch of Silicon Valley companies¨ (New York Times).

But HP's messy ouster of Hurd got even messier when Hurd agreed to work as a top executive at rising competitor Oracle. Now HP sued Hurd, and possibly Oracle, for implicitly violating a confidentiality clause he signed to get his $35 million-plus severance package.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison criticized HP's suit as a "vindictive" sabotage of the two companies' business partnership. Is HP really worried about Hurd's ¨threatened misappropriation of trade secrets," or is something else going on? Here are the possibilities:

One, HP is just trying to pester Hurd: The whole Hurd-HP-Oracle soap opera is puzzling, said Mike Masnick in Techdirt, but the most credible explanation is that HP's board ousted the thriving Hurd as payback for his investigating of the board in an earlier scandal. HP's almost-certain-to-fail lawsuit, then, is just an "incredibly childish" revenge tactic by the board.

Two, Ellison drove them to it: HP is right to be worried, said Robert Cyran in Reuters' BreakingViews. Oracle's hiring of Hurd is a deliberate, shrewd act of war by Ellison, a disciple of famed Chinese strategist Sun Tzu. HP is also right that Hurd's most valuable attribute to Oracle is his intimate knowledge of its business plans and clients. As Sun Tzu says, "know your enemy." Now Oracle does.

Three, Fight! Fight! Fight!: "If HP didn’t sue, that would have been a surprise," said Om Malik in GigaOm. So Hurd must have "an ace up his sleeve" to risk his $35 million settlement by joining Oracle. The Machiavellian theory for this lawsuit is that Ellison and Hurd were expecting it, and will let the legal hostilities distract HP until its business is in chaos. Whatever the cause, with a "fight this juicy" breaking out, "I am ready for the show!"
What do you think? Is HP right to sue Mark Hurd, and possibly Oracle? Or is the lawsuit childish and vindictive, and Oracle was entitled to hire Hurd? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For tools on managing ethical dilemmas, check out my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders.

Million-Dollar Whistleblower Rewards: Good or Bad?

2010-08-18T10:19:00.006-04:00

Through a new reward program for whistleblowers, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission offers multi-million-dollar payments for reporting fraud. Innovative crime-fighting program or state-sponsored bounty for disloyal employees?

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law by U.S. President Obama on July 16, created a reward program that offers individuals who provide ¨original information¨ to the SEC up to 30 percent of any successful corporate penalty that exceeds $1 million.

The potential size of rewards -- the German conglomerate Siemens paid a record-breaking $800 million in 2008 for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act -- raises questions whether the program will enhance corporate crime-fighting or whether it simply enhances the wealth of disgruntled and greedy employees.

The details of the program are still to be hammered out during a 270-day rulemaking process. But Just last month, the agency awarded $1 million to the ex-spouse of an executive at Connecticut-based Pequot Capital Management.

"The way that the act is structured,¨ said Ross Booher, a partner at Bass, Berry & Sims in Tennessee, ¨some employees may perceive that it is in their interest to very quickly report any perceived problems directly to the SEC as opposed to quickly informing their own employers or compliance officials."

In a recent example of this, pharma giant Astra Zeneca settled for paying about half a billion dollars on the basis of information provided by whistleblower James Wetta, who a few years ago had achieved a similar settlement with Eli Lilly and shared a settlement of $100 million with a few others.

This time Wetta stands to receive over $20 million.

Michael Mann's 1999 movie ¨The Insider¨ portrays Russell Crowe as a whistleblower. By going public with sensitive inside information despite pressure by corporate managers to stay silent, tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand showed how whistleblowers can and do act in the public interest. As I tell the story in The Rabbi and the CEO,

Jeffrey S. Wigand ¨had all the trappings of a successful corporate executive¨; then, in March 1993, in the blink of an eye, he went from $300,000 a year plus stock options to a high-school teacher's salary of $30,000... He claims he even received anonymous death threats. His marriage fell apart when his wife couldn't deal with the pressure.

Instead of making millions from reporting fraud, Wigand lost millions in corporate compensation, not to speak of his marriage.

After being fired, Wigand formed his own foundation, Smoke-Free Kids, to teach children about the dangers of tobacco. The foundation has a staff of one: him. But he got one thing out of the ordeal: he can look straight into the mirror without averting his eyes. ¨I am at peace with myself. I have a good name now. It's a very good name and I protect it very much.¨ He added: ¨My name stands for integrity. I can't describe to you what it is like to have that feeling.

Wigand decided to be a whistleblower not for personal gain, but because it was the right thing to do.

Some argue that Washington has taken the ¨whistleblower principle¨ too far, and that the SEC program threatens to destroy the moral legitimation of whistleblowers and give rise to a cottage industry of lucrative knowledge trading.

On the other hand, how often does a guy like Wigand come along? Perhaps in the 21st century, people do need to be helped along with some financial incentives?

What do you think? Will the SEC's whistleblower reward program help fight corporate crime, or will it backfire and generate lots of useless ¨information¨ by greedy disgruntled ex-employees? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For tools on leadership ethics, check out my book The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders and/or the ¨Rabbi & CEO¨ workshop.

Bibi Aisha: Face of Afghan Culture Clash or ¨War Porn¨?

2010-08-09T16:03:00.001-04:00

Is the disfigured face of the 19-year-old Bibi Aisha on the cover of Time magazine a symbol of what happens if the United States abandons Afghanistan, or the latest case of manipulative media ¨war porn¨?

Ever since Time featured the Afghan teenager's face without a nose on the cover of its August 9 issue, a debate rages over whether the magazine was justified in doing so.

Bibi Aisha (bibi is an honorific; Aisha requested that her family name be withheld) cannot read or write; she said she had not even heard of Time until a visitor brought her a copy of last week's issue, the one with the cover picture of her face, the face with no nose. (Mercifully her cut-off ears were hidden from view.)

Credit: Time

This weekend, thanks to the efforts of the Grossman Burn Foundation, Aisha arrived in Los Angeles and will undergo reconstructive surgery to rebuild her face. The foundation will provide the surgery for free.

Critics of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan call the Time cover ¨emotional blackmail¨ and even ¨war porn.¨

¨Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy,¨ wrote Priyamvada Gopal in the British daily The Guardian, ¨and the Time cover already stands accused of it.¨

Michael Shaw asked, ¨Isn't this title applying emotional blackmail and exploiting gender politics to pitch for the status quo -- a continued U.S. military involvement?¨

Some, like Harvard journalism student Nerman Sadat, have even argued that hacking off a girl's ears and nose can be seen as right or wrong, depending on the cultural lens that frames your core values and how you see things.

¨But who is virtuous and who has committed vice is often difficult to judge,¨ Sadat wrote. ¨Was Aisha's husband who cut off Aisha's ears and nose, upon the Taliban commander's order, the one who acted morally by punishing his wife for dishonor? Or was Aisha's initial escape from her abusive in-laws, despite 'violating' the Pashtunwali tribal code, acting justly by defending her universal human rights?¨

¨In Afghanistan,¨ Sadat continued, ¨women are considered a source of pride and one of the pillars in the core values of zan (women), zar (wealth), and zamin (property) -- all of which have the power to incite blood feuds.¨

In one such family feud, at age 12, Aisha and her younger sister were given to the family of a Taliban fighter in Oruzgan province under a tribal custom for settling disputes, known as baad. Aisha's uncle had killed a relative of the groom to be, and to settle the blood debt her father gave the two girls to the victim's family.

Once Aisha reached puberty, she was married to the Taliban fighter. Since he was in hiding most of the time, the two sisters were housed with the in-laws' livestock, used as slaves, and often beaten as punishment for their uncle's crime.

(¨Her 10-year-old sister is still there, and we have no idea where she is,¨ said Manizha Naderi, the Afghan-American executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs the shelter where Aisha stayed. ¨They're probably taking all of their anger out on her now, or even demanding another girl from her family to replace Aisha.¨)

Aisha fled, but her husband tracked her down in Kandahar a year ago, took her back to Oruzgan, on a deserted mountainside cut off her nose and both ears, and left her on the ground bleeding.

In Pashtun culture, a husband who has been shamed by his wife is said to have lost his nose. So from the husband's point of view he was punishing Aisha in kind.

Others counter that there is no need to put oneself in the shoes of a Taliban warlord, quite the contrary: that Aisha's face is living proof why the Taliban should never be allowed to return to power.

¨Aisha posed for the picture and said she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years,¨ wrote Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, in his editorial accompanying the August 9 issue.

What do you think? Is Aisha the victim of ¨emotional blackmail¨ and ¨war porn,¨ or the face of Taliban human rights abuses? Was Time justified in putting her badly disfigured face on its cover, with the caption ¨What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan¨ (without a question mark)? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For tools on managing across cultures, check out my book Culture Clash: Managing the Global High-Performance Team.

P.P.S. What do you want me to blog about? Where in your life or work do you need leadership? Where does it hurt? The leader with the best comment gets a free e-book of your choice.

Toyota: Guilty or Innocent?

2010-07-30T11:37:00.004-04:00

The U.S. Department of Transportation blames the spate of recent crashes not on the automaker but on driver error. Does that let Toyota off the hook?

Toyota and its stock have been hammered over the past year by reports that thousands of Toyotas and Lexus had crashed due to a terrible combination of sudden, automatic accelerations and unresponsive brakes. But it turns out, according to preliminary testing by the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the accidents were probably due to thousands of cases of human error.

Is Toyota just the victim of bad drivers, greedy lawyers, and U.S. politicians eager to champion U.S. carmakers, or is the company hiding something? As a friend of mine put it last night, Is Toyota innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven innocent?

Guilty: Recent reports show that Toyota executive Katsuhiko Koganei sent an email to his U.S. colleagues last January urging them to ¨not mention about the mechanical failures.¨ At the time, Toyota spokesman Irv Miller shot back: ¨We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet... The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean.¨

These internal memos give a strong impression that the carmaker hid problems with its accelerators. And blaming 3,000 drivers is ¨totally ludicrous,¨ says former NHTSA chief Joan Claybrook at consumer advocate Public Citizen. ¨They should be looking at the electronics in their cars and everyone knows it.¨

Innocent: Both U.S. federal investigators and Toyota executives said that ¨virtually all¨ the recent Toyota crashes were caused by driver error. The video below shows that many Toyota drivers put their foot on the gas instead of the brakes.

Toyota engineers did their own testing of 2,000 wrecked cars, and came to the same conclusion: ¨virtually all¨ crashes were due to drivers who hit the gas instead of the brakes. But as the company's president Akio Toyoda said, blaming customers is not part of the company's PR strategy.

So perhaps the entire scandal is just the latest result of sensation-hungry media that have blown the story out of proportion?

Ultimately it comes down to whom you trust. As my colleague Fernando Flores put it in his slim book Building Trust (Oxford University Press, co-authored with Robert C. Solomon), ¨In business, politics, marriage--indeed in any significant relationship--trust is the essential precondition upon which all real success depends.¨

In an age of complexity, when your financial advisor knows more than you ever will, when you work with people you may never see, when you strike up ¨friendships¨ on Facebook with people you've never even met, trust has become the quintessential commodity.

So how can you rebuild trust once it is broken? Flores and Solomon write, ¨Trust is a matter of making and keeping commitments.¨

What do you think? Is Toyota guilty as charged, or innocent? I look forward to your comments.

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For tools on tackling ethical dilemmas or building trust, check out my book The Rabbi and the CEO.

P.P.S. What do you want me to blog about? Where in your life or work do you need leadership? Where does it hurt? The leader with the best comment gets a free e-book of your choice.

Burqa Ban in France: Right or Wrong?

2010-07-15T05:49:00.000-04:00

In the latest culture clash, France's lower house of parliament this week voted 335:1 to ban the burqa-style Islamic veil in public. The debate rages across Europe: Are such bans good or bad?

The law would impose a fine of 150 euros (some $220) on women who wear the burqa in public places. Men found to be forcing women to wear the veil would face much harsher penalties: $43,000 and a year in jail.

France has the largest Muslim population: some 5 million of the country's 64 million people are estimated to be Muslim. Ordinary headscarves are common, but only some 1,900 women are believed to wear the face-covering veil.

The issue has been hotly debated in Europe ever since 2004, when France outlawed the wearing of the veil in French public schools. In 2009 President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in 2009 that ¨the burqa is not welcome in France.¨ Now Spain and Belgium have similar laws in the works, and the Netherlands is seeking a country-wide prohibition as well.

The burqa is an all-enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic traditions in order to hide the female body when out in public. A woman removes her burqa only when she returns to the sanctuary of her household, out of the view of men who are not her husband, father, brothers, uncles, sons or grandsons.

Proponents of the ban say that they respect the freedom of religion, but that the burqa is a prison for women and a symbol of their oppression. For them, burqas have no place in a liberal democracy. One French lawmaker described the traditional Islamic garment as a ¨walking coffin.¨

Opponents counter that it is not the burqa, but its prohibition, that goes against women's freedom to wear what they please and where they please. ¨I think this is against international law,¨ said Anissa, a French Muslim woman living in Paris who has worn her veil for two years. ¨But personally speaking, removing my veil is against my conscience, and I won't take it off.¨

In essence, the debate comes down to visions of freedom that are diametrically opposed: ¨freedom to¨ vs. ¨freedom from.¨ On one side lies the freedom to express your beliefs; on the other the freedom from coercion by men who would impose religious practices on subservient women.

What do you think? Should the burqa be forbidden or allowed in public? I look forward to your comments.

Wishing you a great summer (or winter, as the case may be--after all, I like to think of myself as a cross-culturally savvy guy),

P.S. To invite your friends or colleagues into the conversation, click on the ¨Share¨ button above and/or retweet it. For cross-cultural tools, check out my book Culture Clash or the Culture Clash-In-Action workshop.

P.P.S. What do you want me to blog about? Where in your life or work do you need leadership? Where does it hurt? The leader with the most useful comment gets a free e-book of your choice.

Crowdsourcing: In Search of Your Leadership

2010-07-09T04:50:00.004-04:00

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly well-known method for getting ¨crowds¨ to ¨source¨ solutions to a business problem. It beats top-down strategy hands-down. The question that nobody asks is, Could crowdsourcing serve to generate leaders?

This week I have been on assignment in the Middle East, working with the management of a high-tech company in a Strategy-In-Action process to align on a shared vision and strategy for the company's two flagship products.

The key words are ¨align¨ and ¨shared.¨ The CEO wanted a focused vision and strategy that all key stakeholders could own and that would lead to decisive action.

Perhaps because I had read an article about crowdsourcing on the plane, it dawned upon me that Strategy-In-Action works just like crowdsourcing, where you tap into the wisdom of crowds.

For examples of how you could use crowdsourcing, from logo design to branding ideas to product feedback, here are 10 kickass crowdsourcing sites for your business.

Over the last month I had interviewed some 20 key stakeholders from across the company, confidentially and anonymously, to get their unvarnished views of the current situation, what's missing, key blockages, key opportunities, as well as their vision and strategic input for the future.

I talked to the senior managers and board members, engineers and technical managers, marketing people and frontline people, academics and doctors who buy and/or use the technology.

Then, I wrote a whitepaper based on the interviews. The whitepaper was ¨blind,¨ meaning that nobody would know who said what, so that each stakeholder could say the unvarnished truth as they saw it, without fear of being penalized in the well-known corporate pastime of shooting the messenger.

This week, twelve of us met at the company's headquarters. We locked ourselves in the conference room with coffee, water and pastries, locked the doors, and vowed not to come out until we had a shared understanding. The idea was to give everyone a voice, reveal the sacred cows, and cut through unexamined assumptions.

And we did. It took two full days, it was hard work, and people had to stay late on the second day. But once we had confronted one or two elephants on the table, creativity and leadership exploded in the room. The participants brainstormed, designed, and launched 100-day catalytic projects to produce quick wins and jumpstart the future now.

What was most inspiring (and actually gave me goosebumps) was that each participant started behaving like an entrepreneur. Regardless of their position, title or authority, and without stock options, each of them owned the business.

Whether it's Strategy-In-Action or crowdsourcing, co-creation beats top-down strategy every time. Let's face it: No matter how brilliant the people in the boardroom are, they know a very thin slice of reality. And they frankly tend to drive with a rear-view mirror, which is a rather dangerous way to drive.

A colleague of ours even wrote a book using crowdsourcing. It is a gorgeous book with the somewhat uninspiring title ¨Business Model Generation.¨

The cool thing about the book is that it was co-authored by 470 strategy practitioners in 45 countries, so you get to see the topic from all possible vantage points, which can be a good thing in today's complex business environment.

But are all crowds really all that wise? Maybe not. Watch the video below of the flash mob in Chicago that came together to celebrate Oprah Winfrey's 24th season kickoff.

This flash mob was not really spontaneous; rather, it was orchestrated and rehearsed. This brings up a question: What turns people in a crowd into spontaneous leaders?

You are a leader. I invite you to provide leadership in this community. Please tell us what to write about in our next posts. What are you looking for? Where does it hurt? Where in your life or work could you really use a dose of leadership right now?
Take a moment to comment below this post. The leader with the most useful comment gets a free e-book of your choice.

I look forward to hearing from you.

P.S. If you like this article, click on the ¨Share¨ button above. And/or retweet it.

Roger Federer and Anger Management

2010-06-25T11:02:00.002-04:00

In the first round at Wimbledon, Roger Federer narrowly escaped a historic defeat, not least through anger management. Few people remember how the champion learned to regulate the temper tantrums of his junior days.

Roger Federer (who hails from Basel, my hometown) avoided one of the biggest upsets in tennis history when he came from two sets down to beat Alejandro Falla at Wimbledon this week. The defending champion came through 5-7 4-6 6-4 7-6 (7-1) 6-0 in an astonishing opening match on Centre Court.

"I definitely got very lucky out there," a relieved Federer told BBC Sport after winning in three hours and 18 minutes.

One of the critical success factors in Federer's feat to once again beat seemingly insurmountable odds was his ability to keep his cool.

How does he do that? The man considered the greatest tennis player of all time said "you have to draw from experience and physical strength."

Federer has become a master not only in tennis but also in anger regulation—and the latter might explain a lot of the former, since 90 percent of the game is said to be mental.

Although Federer still freaks out at times (see him break his racket in the 2009 video below), experience has certainly helped Federer stay calm under pressure. It wasn't always thus. Controlling his volatile temper was a problem that had plagued Federer throughout his childhood.

Back in the 1980s, just like many kids his age, Roger was often out of control on the court. (He describes himself as a “hothead.”) He erupted after hitting dumb shots and rarely went through a day without hurling his racket against the fence.

That's when Peter Carter entered the picture. A tough player from Australia, he took Roger under his wings. From the age of 10 to 14, Roger spent more time with Carter than with his own parents.

Federer and Carter discussed the mental side of the game—not just strategy and psychology, but also the importance of being gracious and diplomatic and reigning in your emotions. Carter was eventually able to get Federer to see how much energy he wasted during his outbursts.

In 1997, Peter Lundgren, a former ranked ATP player from Sweden, joined the staff and worked with Roger on occasion. He helped hammer home Carter's self-regulation message.

In the rare outbursts that remained, Federer, unlike older colleagues like Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors or John McEnroe (see video below), was never rude to umpires, linesmen or opposing players. His anger was mostly reserved for himself.

In 2002, Federer managed to creep into the Top 10 for the first time. But in long matches he was still vulnerable and lacked a certain mental toughness. He knew that after four- or five-set losses, he would go back to the locker room and weep in frustration.

That August, Federer lost a first-rounder in Toronto. He stuck around to compete in doubles, but basically just partied nights instead of preparing for his matches. One evening, he went out for beers with some other players, and ignored Lundgren’s repeated calls on his mobile.

Finally, his coach got through to Federer. Peter Carter was dead, Lundgren told him. His vehicle had veered off the road on a South African safari and fallen into a ravine. He and the driver were killed instantly.

Federer lost it. He bolted into the street. When he couldn’t find a cab, he panicked and just started running. He ran more than a mile until he gained his bearings and made his way back to the hotel. He returned to Switzerland to make arrangements for Carter’s funeral. The body arrived in Basel on his 21st birthday.

Carter’s death forced Federer to focus on his life, his game and his relationships. As a young pro, he had brushed aside some of Carter's lessons about being a good player and a good man. Now he took them to heart to honor his old friend.

It didn’t happen overnight. But that September, in a Davis Cup tie against Morocco, Federer teamed with George Bastl to win the doubles and beat Younes El-Aynaoui to wrap up the series. In each match—they both ended 6-3, 6-2, 6-1—it was like watching a tennis God toy with mere mortals. Someone had flicked on the switch.

Not permanently. As I write in The Rabbi and the CEO (¨Commandment 6, Thou Shalt Not Kill: Anger Management¨), Federer had won 48 of 49 matches since his U.S. Open victory in August 2004, but during the Nasdaq-100 Open finals at Key Biscayne in April 2005, much like this week in Wimbledon, he found himself in trouble. His archrival, the Spaniard Rafael Nadal, exploited almost every one of the top-ranked player’s shots and won the first two sets, an almost impossible situation to get out of.

In the third set, at the end of the ninth game, came the final straw: Federer missed a break-point opportunity. In a decidedly un-Swiss outburst he slammed his racket to the ground.

“I was really angry, so I threw it out,” Federer said later. “I was very disappointed. I was missing one opportunity after the other. I really felt like I’m climbing uphill all the time, and I had an opportunity and I missed it again, and I just had enough. Who knows, maybe it did me good, and I kind of woke up.”

Here was the decisive difference compared to the temper tantrums of his youth: Federer was not a slave of his anger. He used his fury like a wake-up call to rouse himself—and then he went on to win the match.

P.S. This article is based on The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st-Century Leaders (SelectBooks 2008). If you like it, click on the ¨Share¨ button above. And/or retweet it.

BP Chief in Perfect Storm: Root Cause Was Stupid Strategy

2010-06-21T14:22:00.004-04:00

BP chief Tony Hayward is in the hot seat. But things went wrong much before the ¨Deepwater Horizon¨ oil spill. The root cause of the crisis is an outdated strategy approach.

Already the largest human-made disaster in U.S. history, the ¨Deepwater Horizon¨ oil spill could run up to $100 billion in total costs, not to speak of the 11 people who have died. The oil spill is an epic human and environmental calamity. It is also an epic fiasco of stupid strategy.

Tony Hayward, the leader of BP, was castigated yesterday by U.S. House committee on energy and commerce chairman Henry Waxman, who charged that ¨BP's corporate complacency is astonishing.¨ ¨There is a complete contradiction,¨ Waxman said, ¨between BP's words and deeds.¨

The congressman blamed Hayward for forgetting that he had been brought in to maximize safety, and instead leading BP to take more and more unreasonable risks.

To be fair, Hayward should be commended for his crisis management. He has shown grace under super-human pressure, he communicated in a balanced manner, he stayed on message, he has been at the scene. He has pushed for all possible options, some of which are truly out of the box, such as Hollywood star Kevin Costner's company, or Ultra-X-Tex, an oil-absorbing fabric developed by HeiQ Materials, a Swiss company (see video).

True, the BP chief committed some major communication gaffes, for example when he said, ¨The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.¨ Statements like that do not exactly instill trust in BP.

But such faux-pas can be forgiven in the midst of a crisis, when you get barely any sleep and find yourself at war with an ongoing disaster, and simultaneously in the fishbowl of public scrutiny, day after day for weeks on end.

No, BP's and Hayward's short-term crisis management are close to faultless. But where they get bad marks is in their long-term strategy approach. Why?

Just like in this spoof video, BP and its top management have been forced to be reactive. Why are they not more proactive?

20/20 hindsight is easy. But one thing Tony Hayward and BP can learn from this moment is that their mistakes happened much earlier. It all started when BP's strategists used an obsolete planning approach. Their planning was mechanical and top-down. Worst of all, they failed to build a shared understanding.

As late as early March, when Hayward delivered BP's annual strategy presentation to analysts and investors, his talk was all about growth, cost-cutting, and efficiency improvements. He uttered not a word about a vision shared by stakeholders across the company.

BP's exploration plan fared no better. Published in 2009, it claimed it was ¨unlikely that an accidental surface or sub-surface oil spill would happen from the proposed activities.¨ In the unlikely case that an accident would occur, PB insisted, ¨no significant adverse impacts are expected... due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented.¨

Had BP strategists built their strategy with representatives of stakeholder groups from across the company, they would have known that such claims were over-confident. They would have been able to take an unvarnished look at reality.

A shared vision must include all stakeholders -- not just those from within the company that will readily agree with you, but all of them, even the ones you dislike and would rather ignore. Especially those.

Here is how it works. You lock representatives of all stakeholder groups in a room, you lock the door, and you don't come out until you have a shared understanding, a shared vision, a shared strategy.

Building a shared strategy is a painstaking process. You begin by asking questions like, What's missing? What are the blockages to fulfilling our long-term mission? What are the opportunities?

And once you have a shared vision and strategy, when you have alignment and buy-in by all stakeholder groups, you shore up the strategy by asking the most important question of all: What could go wrong?

The seven-step process is called Strategy-In-Action. Companies of all stripes have used it since 1997 to build strategies where all stakeholders have a voice. It's called ¨In-Action¨ because you test your strategy in the action, on a low-cost and low-risk scale, to see if your assumptions are valid, before you go ¨live.¨

That's what my colleagues and I did with a top-tier global energy company. And BP did not.

If Hayward and his senior managers had engaged all stakeholders and built a real joint strategy, they might have avoided the excessive risks that brought about the current crisis.

The good news is, they can still learn from the calamity.

P.S. If you like this article, click on the ¨Share¨ button above. And/or retweet it.

P.P.S. Download a free article on conventional planning vs. Strategy-In-Action.

The 2010 World Cup: A Laboratory of One World or Culture Clash?

2010-06-10T17:37:00.002-04:00

The 2010 World Cup is a great chance to learn about national cultures and how they play out in football/soccer. Because the World Cup is one event where globalization comes alive. And where cultures clash, sometimes in hilarious ways.

For a whole month, it is the place of intense international rivalries, but it is also the place where strangers hug, where Brazilians dance wildly in the streets even when they've lost (as I witnessed it at the 2006 World Cup in Berlin, after Brazil had been ousted by Italy), where every nation puts their best foot forward (pardon the pun).

Through triumph and defeat, the World Cup is a modern example of one world fused with nationalism. In ¨How Soccer Explains the World,¨ Franklin Foer wrote that national teams create a tribal sense amongst fans who show their pride with football shirts, scarves and flags. Ironically, the World Cup is also a symbol of one world.

People typically associate different skill-sets with different regions. For example, speed is typically associated with African players, ball control is seen as a South American trait, and strength is typically seen as the European way.

If you don't mind these obvious clichés, and if you would like a quick mini-workshop on Culture Clash, watch this video clip.

You could say that the culture that gets the best rap in the video are the Brazilians. They are elegant, they are playful, they simply love football, and they dance in the streets even when they lose.

One culture that gets a rather bad rap are the Swiss, who are so careful and detail-oriented that they forget about winning and end up putting the ball into their own goal. (As a Swiss-American dual citizen with Swiss loyalties, I take offense; but since we are supposed to be neutral, I'll let this one go.)

Speaking of hitting your own goal, does the name Andrés Escobar still ring a bell? He played as a defender for Colombia in the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, and was known to his fans as el caballero del football (¨the football's knight¨ or ¨football gentleman¨).

On July 2, 1994, ten days after the World Cup that year (which was won by Brazil), Escobar was shot to death by a gunman right outside the ¨El Indio¨ bar in a suburb of Medellin.

Why? Because he had put the ball in his own goal, leading Colombia to a humiliating defeat against, of all people, the United States, who are known as a greenhorn in the sport they alone, in their typical exceptionalism (the Swiss would say it's an Extrawurscht or special sausage), insist on calling ¨soccer.¨

The United States went on to win the match 2:1, and Colombia was eliminated from the World Cup in the first round and in national disgrace.

It was reported that the killer shouted "Gooooooooal!" for each of the twelve bullets he fired at Escobar, mimicking Latin American sports commentators for their calls after a goal is scored.

For an illustration of how Latin television announcers do that, see the short video below.

To be fair, the Latin Americans are not alone with their unbridled passions. You surely remember the 2006 World Cup final, when French star player Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi after verbal taunts and insults from the Italian.

And whenever their team has lost, disgusted Italian fans have been known to throw their television sets out the window into the streets of Rome or Rimini (I saw this when I was in Italy during the 1982 World Cup).

During this World Cup, we are bound to see not only culture clash but also a clash of the sexes. Men versus women, to be exact. See the video below.

In true Swiss neutral fashion, let me wish each and every one of you that your favorite team wins the 2010 World Cup. And if not, may you still dance in the streets. Enjoy!

P.S. If you like this article, click on the ¨Share¨ button above. And/or retweet it.

P.P.S. For more on managing effectively across borders, check out the ¨Culture Clash¨ book and/or the Culture Clash-In-Action workshop/process.

Time to Abolish Performance Reviews?

2010-06-04T12:06:00.056-04:00

New research shows that one of the greatest sources of stress is the annual performance review. Under the guise of ¨constructive criticism,¨ evaluations can be used by bad bosses to dominate and undermine workers; they can instill fear; and they might end up making people less effective. Should companies do away with workplace evaluations?

On May 28 I wrote in these pages that 40 percent of U.S. workers said in a survey their workloads had grown over the past year. At the same time 36 percent of employers reported they had tightened pressure on workers to be more productive.

During the recession, businesses produced 3 percent fewer goods and services, but they did so with employees working 10 percent fewer hours, squeezing dramatically higher output from every worker.

Now I want to turn to one culprit that produces extra stress: the annual performance review.

Annual reviews, says Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, not only create a high level of stress for workers but end up making everybody—bosses and subordinates—less effective at their jobs.

He argues reviews are so subjective—so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss—as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” Culbert said in an interview with the New York Times.

Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job.

“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.”

Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”

Mark Shahriary, president and CEO of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job.

“People confuse the review with who they are,” he said. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ”

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., said office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker.

“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000).

“It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”

That is the operational word: coaches. Bosses who aspire to be great bosses may want to consider adding coaching to their leadership repertoire.

According to my colleague Mick Crews, former vice chairman of Cunard Ellerman, ¨coaching is one discrete activity of managing.¨ As an effective manager, you have to know when to put on your coaching hat.

This is especially true in today’s information society, where your intellectual capital leaves the company every night. Bill Walsh, the celebrated former Stanford University head coach who died in 2007, said once: “Some of the most talented people are the ones who are the most independent.”

In the old industrial paradigm, managers could get by without coaching. Command-and-control was good enough.

But in the age of independent knowledge workers, when your company’s intellectual assets leave the door every night, the best managers are no longer the ones who treat their people like objects to move around and manage; the best managers are committed to their organization’s “leadership pipeline,” and use coaching to widen their funnel of leadership.

Fortunately more and more companies and leaders employ coaches. In a 2008 Fast Company survey, 63% of organizations said they planned to increase their use of coaching over the next five years. Most telling, 92% of leaders being coached said they planned to use a coach again to keep polishing their leadership.

And leadership is that elusive quality that you can never have enough of. How many real leaders (not just managers) does your company have right now?

Imagine it had double the number; what would be achievable, and achieved, that is now a frivolous dream? That type of leadership explosion is what true coaching, not annual performance reviews, can bring about.

P.S. If you like this article, click on the ¨Share¨ button above. And/or retweet it.

See also ¨Time to Review Workplace Reviews?¨ New York Times, May 17, 2010

Foxconn Suicides Just Tip of the Iceberg: Why 55% of Workers Are Stressed Out

2010-05-28T13:33:00.010-04:00

The wave of suicides at China's Foxconn is the latest and most alarming result of rising workplace stress. But elsewhere too, the global crisis seems to have taken a toll on workers' emotional well-being; the threat of losing your job or home or financial stability is deeply unsettling. Now researchers have found at least two other causes of stress.

Ten suicides of workers at Foxconn, the company that produces the iPad, Dell laptops, and other products that feed our hunger for the latest low-cost gadgets, have rocked both China and the global community in recent days. And already the name that sounds like ¨fox¨ and ¨con¨ might be fodder for late-night comedy shows.

But instead of getting outraged by (admittedly bad) conditions at Chinese factories, we would do well to admit it: Stress has grown in other places too. For example, 40 percent of U.S. workers surveyed by MetLife said their workloads have increased in the past 12 months; and 36 percent of employers said they have put greater pressure on workers to be more productive.

Worker satisfaction is at an all-time low. A recent report by the Conference Board shows that less than half -- 45 percent -- of U.S. workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. Employees under 25 expressed the highest level of dissatisfaction: Roughly 64 percent of workers under 25 said they were unhappy in their jobs. The recession has been especially hard on young workers, who face fewer opportunities now and lower wages, some analysts say.

Unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours.

But it's not about the long hours per se. People who work overtime are not necessarily unhappier than people who work less, and many happy workers don't mind putting in extra time to get the job done and reach for their dreams. In fact they might get so sucked into the challenge that they forget to have dinner.

The question is, Where do they work, and for whom? Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment.

The poison in the air (the temper tantrums, the egos, the buck-passing, the bickering, the blame game, the rumors, the water-cooler gossip) is all too often a result of “destructive leadership.” Supervisors play a significant role in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss.

Even if bosses rarely assault their subordinates physically like in this video, bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.

Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Robert I. Sutton'snew book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success.

“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

A second source of enormous stress is—the annual performance review. Culbert's new book throws a spotlight on the culprit: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!¨

But more about that in my next post.

How you can use the ¨Communicate or Die¨ book or workshop to shift from a toxic work climate to a high-performance environment.

What is the future of MBA education?

2010-05-20T03:46:00.006-04:00

Business schools are at a crossroads. For 50 years they have focused on analytical skills, models, and statistics. But if the global economic crisis did not make it clear, its aftermath makes it painfully obvious: The existing MBA curriculum is insufficient for the challenges of the 21st century.

That's at least the core finding of a new book, based on a wealth of interviews and statistics: ¨Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads¨ by Harvard Business School's Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin and Patrick G. Cullen.

Why? Because, said co-author Professor Datar in an interview, ¨The landscape of business is shifting from leaders who had high authority and faced low conflict to leaders who have lower authority and face greater conflict. Leadership skills that worked in the old model are unlikely to work today.

¨MBAs need to understand how to work "through" people, how to motivate and inspire. That takes skill and practice. MBAs need to ask themselves, "How do I engage people to accomplish a task while I remain in the background?"

So what skills do MBAs need? ¨They need to have a global mindset, for example,¨ Professor Garvin said. ¨The single strongest theme we heard in our interviews,¨ he added, ¨was the need for MBA students to cultivate greater self-awareness. Executives said, 'The more an MBA understands his or her impact on others and vice-versa, the more effective he or she will be.'

¨The second theme we heard was the need for practical skills: how to run a meeting, make a presentation, and give performance feedback. The third theme was the need for MBAs to develop a better sense of the realities of organizations within which leaders operate. Politics—issues of power, coalitions, and hidden agendas—are part of that reality.¨

One of the problems is that if MBAs are trained with an analytical focus, they will try to find the "right" answer. But organizations often prefer a "good enough" answer, as long as they can implement it effectively.

Read the interview with Professors Datar and Garvin here.

It's always satisfying to find out that one has been right all along. Since 2000, I have had the opportunity to teach a Leadership-In-Action approach at Columbia University, University St. Gallen and other business schools--precisely the leadership skills stressed by the co-authors of ¨Rethinking the MBA.¨ Download the free syllabus. And if you have contacts in business schools or universities, feel free to forward it to them.

Together, let us transform the paradigm and practice of leadership.

Original article at Harvard Business School >>

Papal Pressure in Portugal Over Gay Marriage

2010-05-14T05:42:00.011-04:00

The Pope today spoke out in Portugal against a planned same-sex marriage law. Instead of pressuring governments on their policies, here are three steps the leader of the Catholic church could take to break the church's conspiracy of silence.

More on the tools in the video can be found in the books Communicate or Die and The Rabbi and the CEO.
http://www.euronews.net/2010/05/14/papal-pressure-in-portugal-over-gay-marriage/

The 9 Keys to Powerful Feedback

2010-04-22T09:40:00.004-04:00

A key competency of a leader is giving effective feedback. If a colleague riles you up, how can you give feedback in a way that leads not to World War III but to a mutually acceptable solution?

Upon my return to New York recently, the high-speed internet connection at my home office had stopped working. It eventually dawned on me that both lines — phone, fax, and internet connection — were down. What started with a simple call to my phone provider turned into a communication fiasco.

First, there were interminable wait times in the labyrinths of automated customer service menus (you've been there, I am sure). Once I finally connected with a live operator, three different companies (the phone provider, the internet service provider, and the internet connection hardware operator) had to coordinate efforts to make sense of the issue. Three different technicians came from the phone company alone, each throwing his arms up in the air and complaining about what his predecessor had done wrong. The last one, who finally fixed the fax line, said about his superiors: "I told them a thousand times what to do. But they just don't listen to me. To them, I'm the stupid guy."

If communication fiascos happen with small technical issues like this, you can imagine what happens if you face real strategic or team challenges. Is your team in danger of missing a key organizational performance goal? Are you trying to motivate a colleague who has been procrastinating for too long? Is your boss acting out in a way that you entertain psychopathic thoughts whenever he opens his mouth? Or are you in the middle of negotiating with a potential alliance partner? Is your team lacking alignment on a strategy that you know is right for the organization? Is a client or prospect not calling you back or not being forthright with information? And how about that employee who is way too quiet — or too vocal — and is throwing the group off-balance?

All these challenges have one thing in common: to meet them, you must be a great communicator. And believe me, you are not alone. Bad communication causes problems all over the place. Companies go down, mergers fail, wars break out, families break up and people burn out — simply because people have stopped communicating.

Take the big office equipment company whose software engineers spent hours each week preparing for weekly meetings with their boss — though they all thought these meetings were a complete waste of time. Despite the lost hours and frustration caused by these meetings, none of the engineers would take the initiative to communicate with the boss. Worse, even the boss thought the meetings were useless, but he didn't want to cancel them; he feared that would discourage engineers from bringing new ideas to him. Both sides' inability to voice their true feelings cost the company thousands of man-hours of lost time, loss of productivity, and lots of overtime for engineers.

So despite the common belief that talking back to superiors is more difficult, it is just as hard for managers to communicate with their employees. Say you are leading a team: how do you keep your employees motivated, how do you have them take the infitiative and not free-ride on the work of others? Teams can simmer with intrigue. There are personal issues, competitiveness or even jealousy, and disagreements on how to get things done. And although sometimes you grow frustrated and feel like wielding power and making decisions unilaterally (after all it's a pain in the neck to work with other people), you know that this is not the way the workplace works now. In a world dominated by knowledge workers and free agents, dictating orders from above may work short-term but is not sustainable and virtually suicidal long-term. Full and forthright communication with employees, giving them useful feedback and asking for theirs, and giving them autonomy in how to get the job done, are keys to keeping free agents and knowledge workers satisfied and productive.

Of course, a participatory workplace brings its own problems. Not everyone is happy with decisions made; some people are brighter and more verbose, others are quieter and less active. Inequalities and differences of personalities and backgrounds can lead to discord and discontent. As a manager, your job is to minimize unproductive chatter and pull the best out of every team member.

The 9 Keys to Powerful Feedback
Here are some best practices for giving feedback that promotes solutions rather than escalating the issue:

Don't withhold feedback—but time it wisely. Ask if the person is open to feedback.
Talk straight and without judgments. Be specific and stay away from statements such as "that presentation was a disaster."
Avoid characterizing people. Don't say "you're indiscreet" but rather "you spoke indiscreetly in the meeting."
Avoid words like "always" or "never." Limit the feedback to one incident or behavior.
Don't talk about what they did to you — talk about your perception, your experience. Not "you make me angry" but "I feel angry."
Clearly distinguish between facts, your interpretation, and your or others' feelings.
Make your expectations clear. State clearly what you expect from the colleague. Leaving things ambiguous results in unintended outcomes. If you are telling an employee that you are disappointed about her performance and would have expected more of her, but don't clearly specify what you expect, you are unlikely to get the results you want.
Ask if they would be willing to work out a solution with you.
Thank them.

In the end, what you say is what you get. Take Fernando Flores, who became Chile's minister of economics at twenty-nine &mdsah; one of the youngest in any country ever — and minister of finance in Salvador Allende's democratically elected government: "We don't realize how much we create reality through language." It took Flores several years in prison &mdsah; he was jailed after the government was overthrown in a military coup and he faced execution several times while his wife and children waited anxiously — to become crystal-clear on the power of communication to shape things. "If we say that life is hard, it will be hard."

All the best,

This article is based on Thomas D. Zweifel's book Communicate or Die: Getting Results Through Speaking and Listening.

100-Day Catalytic Projects for Quick Strategic Wins

2010-04-14T11:03:00.011-04:00

Mahatma Gandhi once famously said, ¨We must be the change we wish to see in the world.¨ How can leaders integrate strategy and action? By designing catalytic pilots that embody the future - on a low-cost and low-risk scale.

Instead of moving in a linear fashion from the present toward the future, Catalytic Projects are typically 100-day, small-scale, low-cost, low-risk projects that "force" participants to think and act as if today were tomorrow. These projects act as pressure-cookers to produce quick wins and alter the landscape of what is possible. The new landscape then informs – and transforms – the process by providing rapid feedback. They test the strategy in action so you can get immediate results and see whether your strategy works.

Catalytic Projects differ sharply from traditional planning. They typically focus on filling gaps in existing processes to eliminate duplication of efforts and save resources; on convergence of existing initiatives; and on opportunities to spark improvements. Projects can be of two types. Ground-breaking projects explore innovative ways to achieve your objectives. Proof-of-principle projects show with sufficient authority that successful innovations can be scaled up.

The ground rules are simple. Pick easy actions first; quick wins strengthen confidence and a sense of momentum. Ask periodically, "What could go wrong?" to anticipate and prevent future breakdowns. Take risks and innovate. And talk straight and make bold promises and requests.

You might say, What does all this have to do with me? Our answer: a lot. That's the beauty of Strategy-In-Action; every participant is a key agent of the strategy. Here is what you can do. Craft your own 3-year vision, alone or with your colleagues. Some of our clients craft their own fundamental commitments or a fictional newspaper article about their organization five years out. It doesn't matter what tool you use; the key is to have a future that is a magnet for action today.

Once you have a compelling vision, create a 100-day Catalytic Project. How can you live the future now, in the next 3 months? To be truly catalytic, your project must be (a) bold, visionary and unpredictable (not based on the past); (b) measurable, with clearly defined goals, (c) inclusive, meaning that it forces you to go beyond your personal agenda and lead others.

Here are some examples of Catalytic Projects our clients in all sectors – private, public and nonprofit – undertook, with results that were never given by the past or even by current resources:

The company above launched eight Catalytic Projects, such as recruiting internal "ambassadors" for the strategy, coaching their communication skills, and having them communicate across the firm; and setting up focus groups to engage employees, create a common language and genuine two-way communication.
Another company brought a new product to market in record time and produced $6+ million.
One multinational produced $70 million in additional sales through a new channel.
Participants in our "Leadership en Action" and "Communique ou Meurs" workshops in Haiti launched and carried out 80 Catalytic Projects, for example a clean-up of a slum, reforestation, a school, latrines, civic education for youth, and an educational radio show for children.
Participants in the UN Development Programme's Virtual Development Academy implemented Catalytic Projects in 21 countries focused on democratic governance, for example fighting corruption in Kuwait and Ecuador, empowering people with disabilities in China, training judges in Serbia, strengthening women's participation in Saudi Arabia, reforming the police in Bangladesh, or fighting poverty through decantralization after the Tsunami in Sri Lanka.
A Columbia leadership student, a young entrepreneur, took on his dream of financing and opening a new restaurant, hiring and training the staff, and designing the menu. Another went for persuading the governments of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to apply for jointly hosting the 2025 Olympic Games in Jerusalem.
A nongovernmental organization (NGO) increased fundraising by 1,000 percent.
One division of a mid-size high-tech company went for delivering a new product, independently tested, and getting it out the door with zero defects.

And the list could go on. Again and again, these catalytic projects show that when you combine strategy with people power, the results are extraordinary. So don't wait. What fruits can you garner before the end of 2006? The time is now to achieve your vision. As the sage Hillel said already 2,000 years ago: "And if not now, when?"1

All the best,

¹ Pirkei Avot 1:14

Why Traditional Planning Is Bankrupt and What to Do

2010-03-31T05:03:00.023-04:00

Traditional strategic planning works for building a house or the sewage system of Mumbai, but it is obsolete for at least 5 reasons. How can you end the divorce of strategy and action, stop treating people like objects, and end business-as-usual?

As I write this, I'm sitting in the Business School library at Columbia, where I teach. I look up from my laptop at a Chinese student; pinned to her backpack is a sticker with Gandhi's face and his famous dictum, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." The truth is out there...

But it's easier said than done. Yes, if you want to be president, you have to think and act presidential now, even while you are a candidate. But if you want a systemic change in your organization or society, how can you embody that change in the present, before it happens? How can you be the future now?

To answer, we have to go backward first. One afternoon, my colleague Richard Radu and I sat down with a senior technology executive at a financial services firm. He told us that the company faced a tough organizational challenge that involved moving thousands of people offshore. "People are overwhelmed," he said; "they don't know how to manage the change. They're afraid of losing their jobs." How could he and his senior management team minimize the human costs, allay people's anxieties, and still get the job done with maximum cost savings and speed?

Interviews with him and other key stakeholders revealed quickly that there was no shared vision or strategy for the proposed change. People said things like, "We are wedded to the past... There's lots of discussion, but no direction... There's apathy, complacency... And many people don't know how to manage across cultures – they have no competence in cultures."

It was the type of situation we often encounter in organizations. When a strategic challenge is intermingled with people, communication and culture issues, things become complex and unpredictable, and traditional planning falls short. Why? Because conventional planning is often riddled by multiple shortcomings, and this company was no exception:

Conventional planning is divorced from action. "Top management is fully on board," said another manager, "but below they are not." Top-level planners had expected the lower echelons to implement their blueprint. This works well for capital development projects, such as a bridge, a pipeline, or a canalization system for Mumbai; but it breaks down in any living system that depends on the human element: initiative by all stakeholders. In the words of one focus group we asked: "There is no understanding of the strategy below the top. People don't even know that this is our intent."
Conventional planning kills the human spirit. At Swiss Consulting Group we are always suspicious of buzzwords like "cascading down" or "buying into..." They mean that people are recipients or even objects, not stakeholders or owners, of the strategy. Because planning was top-down, there was "weak identification with the firm and its vision." Planners were about to steamroll their plans through the organization, without giving those affected the chance to participate, let alone lead the change. Top-down planning can kill off the most precious asset of the organization: people's ideas, creativity, and leadership. The result: demoralized employees and brain-drain.
Conventional planning misses opportunities. Because planners did not communicate well – and especially since they did not listen or seek input from those affected, in all countries and cultures where the company operates – they ignored strategic opportunities to integrate already-existing initiatives. "There's silo thinking," said one manager. "We are fragmented. We have totally different processes." The result: lack of focus, in-fighting, culture clash. "We do everything, but nothing right," said another executive. "We have 25 initiatives!"
Conventional planning is slow and costly. Planners had little regard for the changing entrepreneurial landscape created by their actions. This sacrificed the firm's ability to turn on a dime and take entrepreneurial leaps. The result: sometimes massive sunk costs (you build a heavy and costly infrastructure that nobody wants to use) and always inefficiencies. "Our IT is expensive," complained one manager. "The firm is not competitive."
Conventional planning misses the root-causes. Since top managers did not stand in the shoes of the people and cultures affected, their plan got stuck on the surface. It attacked symptoms with a fix-it approach and missed systemic root-causes of problems and hence comprehensive solutions derived from the active involvement of all stakeholders. The result: bottlenecks and quality issues.

What to do? Our answer is Strategy-In-Action, a 7-step dynamic process linking people with strategy, and strategy with action. The approach was pioneered by The Hunger Project (www.thp.org) in 1990 in a joint venture with India's Planning Commission on a strategy for ending hunger in India, and is based in part on Hamel and Prahalad, "Strategic Intent" (Harvard Business Review, May-June 1989, pp. 63-76). Strategy-In-Action has been called the most systematic and scientific approach to strategy. The difference between conventional planning and Strategy-In-Action (see Table) is not theoretical – it can be the difference between failure and success, or between billions of dollars in sunk costs and large-scale profits. When Motorola launched its infamous Iridium infrastructure, it paid a heavy price for its traditional planning: a $1 billion loss. Iridium became one of the 20 largest bankruptcies in U.S. history.

Table: Conventional Planning vs. Strategy-In-Action

In interviews and workshops, we brought together people from across the company who needed to build a shared understanding, vision, and strategy – from the brilliant but opinionated strategy chief to the smooth human resources chief to line managers in several offices around the world. Some participated by videoconference or phone from their offices overseas. As facilitators, we made sure that no viewpoint was excluded from the process – especially stakeholders who would usually be ignored, or who might bring up difficult and unpopular issues. All too often forgotten, shared understanding is the crucial first step of Strategy-In-Action, the foundation without which strategy is built on sand.

So how will you ensure a shared understanding the next time you shape your strategy?

All the best,

The 10 Most Costly Sins When Working Across Borders

2010-03-17T03:17:00.018-04:00

Culture clashes can lead to serious strategic fiascos, as when Microsoft wanted to launch Windows95 in China. Here are the ten most costly sins committed by ethnocentric managers.

In The 19th-century Austrian Army, officers expressed their familiarity by addressing each other with the familiar Du form of “you” used elsewhere only for friends or servants, rather than the more formal Sie normally used in German speaking society. In World War I, when Austria allied itself with Germany, German officers, addressed by their Austrian peers with the intimate Du, felt themselves being insulted or, worse, propositioned.

Such cultural misunderstandings continue to this day. The Swedish manufacturer Electrolux was surprised to find that its vacuum cleaner was not selling in the United States. Why? Well, the company had marketed the vacuum with the slogan “Nothing sucks like Electrolux.” Coors translated its slogan “Turn it loose” into Spanish, where it was read as something like “suffer from diarrhea;” Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick,” a curling iron, into the German market, only to discover that “mist” is slang for manure in German: When Colgate introduced its toothpaste “Cue” in France, it insulted consumers because “Cue” is a French porn magazine.

Other cross-cultural mistakes are less funny and more expensive, sometimes running into billions of dollars – from lawsuits to government sanctions, from post-merger pains to losses in shareholder value. In an interconnected but also fragmented world, firms and managers that lack multicultural competencies are falling behind.

Motorola’s flameout was one of the more spectacular failures. The company deployed its Iridium global satellite system to offer truly global telephone service. When Iridium was shut down, its sunk cost to Motorola was $3.5 billion. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are the ten most costly sins companies commit when doing business in other cultures.

Sin #1: You think the world plays by your rules. Too often, people dealing with other cultures are blind to their own assumptions. GE has one of the best records of thriving in other cultures, but its effort to merge with Honeywell failed because Jack Welch and his colleagues did not fully comprehend the EU's anti-collusion laws, which have a lower threshold for monopolies than their equivalent in the US. This allowed the EU Competition Commission to veto a merger that threatened European state-owned industries.

Sin #2: You do what you always did in the past. Strategies that work in one context don't always work in another. When 250 people in Belgium reported nausea, diarrhea and other symptoms from drinking Coca-Cola in the summer of 1999, the company responded with characteristic American-style marketing optimism of the "Don't worry, be happy" variety. But European consumers were not happy. They felt left in the dark, and European governments simply ordered Coke off the shelves. Coke lost $2 billion in sales that summer, and its share value plunged along with its good image. The company has learned from that calamity. It recently collaborated with the French government and voluntarily recalled bottles in danger of contamination. More importantly, Coke now aspires to respect diversity and local leaders. "You can't apply a global standard of measurement to consumers," Coke's chairman and CEO Douglas Daft says, "because it reduces everything to the lowest common denominator."

Sin #3: You take English for granted. When the US-firm AT&T and the Italian firm Olivetti formed one of the first international corporate partnerships in the 1980s, AT&T did not have any high level managers who spoke Italian. Olivetti's managers were expected to communicate in English. The two companies simply could not communicate efficiently enough to overcome their other cultural differences and soon broke off the partnership. Had AT&T striven to understand the Italian company, it might have overcome these problems - or avoided the alliance altogether. "Of course managers can communicate in English," says Porsche's chairman Wendelin Wiedeking. "But that is not the case on all work levels. It gets quite difficult when it's about details, for example engine parts. But precisely in these matters, workers must understand each other perfectly." Remember that many international colleagues are doing you a favor when they speak English (if that is your native language). They may not express themselves as clearly in English as they would in their language, so you should make an effort to speak a bit of theirs. By knowing even a few words, you show respect for their culture and take a step towards understanding how they tick.

Sin #4: You don't respect the cultural pathways for making things happen. When Disney first opened its EuroDisney theme park near Paris, the American management team enraged the public with its hiring practices and decision to serve McDonald's-style food and—worst of all—no wine, an unacceptable fauxpas in the eyes of French customers. After a disastrous start, EuroDisney became profitable only after a new (French) company president took over. The lesson: respect local practices in the target culture, even if they seem inefficient or impersonal.

Sin #5: You don't stand in their shoes. If you fail to understand other people's goals, concerns, and fears, you will be continuously and unpleasantly surprised by how they act. The consequences are not just lost profits. Al Qaeda's planning for the September 11th terrorist attacks went unnoticed by US intelligence analysts who could not imagine the way Islamic terrorists saw the world. To be fair, it's not easy. "This is the toughest of all intelligence targets," said Lee Hamilton, the longtime chairman of House committees on intelligence and international relations and a member of the United States Commission on National Security. "You have to penetrate their language, their culture." So understanding the other side is not about being nice or polite; it is a strategic necessity.

Sin #6: You don't invest in relationships. In much of the world, you need to establish a strong relationship before getting down to business. In Japan, it can take months to gain the trust necessary for a successful joint venture, and business relationships are often cemented over drinks. But it's not just Asia. Most traditional societies require a personal relationship for business, and even in much of Europe, relationship is at least as important as expertise. But in the United States, a very large country with strong individualism, high mobility and short-term relationships, the court system, including the right to sue, often substitutes for deep relationships.

Sin #7: You jump from vision to action. In the United States, Nike's credo "Just Do It" reigns supreme. But "just doing it" can be disastrous. Even if you have a great idea, people in many cultures want to hear how you will go about achieving it before they will do anything. You can't skip the strategy, the How-to. One American banker wanted to buy a private bank in Europe. When he arrived for the first meeting with the bank's owners, he said that his train was leaving in an hour and asked that they get down to business. The owners just smiled politely and wished him a safe journey. Naturally, it never came to a transaction.

Sin #8: You take the village by storm. Enter a new culture or situation slowly. First impressions matter greatly. If you come onto the scene without knowing the culture and make a big show of yourself and your ideas, before you know it, it's too late, and people will not be open to you. Few companies have the prestige and self-confidence that the German firm Daimler-Benz had when it merged with the US firm Chrysler Motors. Although touting DaimlerChrysler as a "merger of equals," chairman Jürgen Schrempp pushed all but two Americans from the management board of the combined company and installed his trusted German aide Dieter Zesche at the helm of Chrysler. DaimlerChrysler paid dearly for this new brand of German imperialism: the company's revenue fell by 13 percent and its operating profit by some 75 percent the year after the merger, forcing it to eliminate 26,000 jobs and suffer major brain drain from the loss of some of Chrysler's most creative talent. Even today, German headquarters enjoys little trust in the US part of its company. A request by Chrysler executives to use a Mercedes engine in a new sports car was rebuffed for months before finally being accepted with major restrictions. Though Chrysler remains a powerful brand and has regained some of its market share, it still lacks the dynamic character it had before the merger.

Sin #9: You forget that your advice is noise in their ears. . Most people in most places have a good reason, at least subjectively, for doing what they do. Barging in and making changes will meet with resistance unless you can create a demand for your intervention. Our CEO Thomas D. Zweifel recalls, "When I was based in India, it took me months to realize that I was dispensing unsolicited advice. It dawned upon me that telling people what to do made no difference; I had not come to give answers but to ask questions and to listen."

Sin #10: You select the wrong people. "We don't do a very good job of selecting people for foreign postings," concedes Sir Brian Pitman, chairman of Lloyds Group PLC. The British bank sent a brilliant young executive to Argentina. "He only lasted one week," Pitman said. "He just didn't fit in." All too often, senior managers move executives to a target country based on their technical skills alone, rather than also on their cross-cultural expertise; or they get the mix of expats and local leaders wrong.

There are success stories worth emulating. Motorola learned from its Iridium fiasco: the company now uses a workplace simulation program, where trainees are thrown into simulated cross-cultural challenges, to identify and evaluate its international managers. So does Danone. General Electric has learned that it pays to train its managers in global competencies. The iconic former chairman of GE Jack Welch said a few years back: "We have to send our best and brightest overseas and make sure they have the training that will allow them to be the global leaders" GE needs in the future. GE backs these words with action. New hires at GE's Crotonville training center are given crash courses in global issues. Senior executives are routinely sent on 4-week trips to foreign markets, then returned to Crotonville to brief top executives. The intention is to build what Welch calls "a multipolar and multicultural company." GE Capital, which has integrated over 100 mergers successfully, sees integration management as a separate business function, just like operations, marketing or finance. The company seeks to address cultural issues head-on. GE Capital uses "Cultural Workouts" managed by outside facilitators to speed up integration and foster understanding of the partner. When you realize that 25% of managers leave their company within a year of returning from abroad at a cost to their companies of about $1 million per employee, GE's policies make sense. These companies recognize the power of global competency, but many others do not - yet. Few areas in today's business environment offer a greater return on investment. Today's leading managers know that for a minimal input, companies can make or save enormous amounts of money.

All the best,

Action

Take a moment to think about a chronic issue "large or small" in your organization.

What chronic problems are you experiencing in your dealings with colleagues from a different background?
What are the consequences? What are the costs?
Which of the 10 sins above might play a role? Where did things begin to go wrong?
What is missing?
What is the next step in resolving the issue?

Coaching Without Demand Is Just Noise

2010-03-03T08:01:00.008-05:00

Since soldiers in Baghdad (or the company's frontline people) have intelligence just as vital as the ideas in the Pentagon (or the boardroom), coaching has become an essential competence in all organizations. But how do you make sure your people want your coaching?

Winston Churchill was fond of saying that the higher you rise in an organization, the more you can see the big picture of strategy instead of mere tactics. He also said that "the higher the ape climbs, the more you can see of his bottom" -- but that is another matter.) Today, this is not necessarily true anymore.

Essential intelligence is now bound to lie at the organization's bottom and periphery - where the company meets the customer. Imagine a firm with seven reporting levels. If the people at every level report fifty percent of what they know up to the next higher level, the leader at the top will know less than two percent of what is actually going on in the organization. If control resides solely at the top, the consequences of being so out of touch can be disastrous for strategic decision-making. Imagine what happens if the leader bases his or her decisions on the wrong two percent!

The time when a few great leaders guided affairs with a firm hand is coming to an end. Reality has become such a complex jungle that no single leader, no matter how great, can cut through the thicket alone. Even men like Churchill or Gandhi or Kennedy, were they alive today, would be hard-pressed to lead.

For one thing, employees can no longer be treated as mere subordinates. Today, when a company's true assets - its human and intellectual capital - leave the office every night, traditional chains of command are largely irrelevant. One cannot look for leadership only at the top, and bosses cannot simply tell knowledge workers and free agents what to do. The celebrated former Stanford University head coach Bill Walsh says: "Today, in sports as elsewhere, individualism is the general rule. Some of the most talented people are the ones who are the most independent. That has required from management a fundamental change in the art and skill of communication and in organizational development." Ordering people around is simply not good enough anymore - not even in traditional hierarchies like the military. Coaching has become an essential competence.

So how do you coach leaders? It is becoming clear that coaching is a key success factor in exceptional performance, but the coaching process is often badly understood and largely absent from most management. The term "coaching" is often used to mask old-style methods like advice or criticism, or more sinister applications like manipulation or coercion. And unless manager-coaches understand the deep-seated and often subconscious experiences and psychodynamic structures of their team members, they will likely do more damage than help - even with the best of intentions. All too often managers have been promoted to senior management positions because they excelled in a specialized technical skill-set - for example finance or engineering - but never had the opportunity to develop their people skills, let alone their coaching capacities. But unless managers learn leading through coaching, they are unlikely to produce lasting change.

When there is no demand for your coaching, you are everything but a coach. Your coaching will not be recognized as such. Worse, whatever comes out of your mouth is merely noise in the ears of the players. Coaching becomes a virtual impossibility.

I learned about the crucial value of creating a demand for coaching the hard and painful way: by failing to do it. As I confessed in Culture Clash, in 1987, when I was assigned to India, the managing director of the organization I was to coach had left town when I arrived in Mumbai (then Bombay), and had sent her second-in-command to pick me up at the airport. Dazed, I stepped out of the plane into the onslaught of humid heat. We took a taxi from the airport into the city of Bombay. Suddenly there was a wall of stench. I was enveloped by rotten smell. Was it old garbage? Was it decomposing flesh? I didn't know, and didn't care. It was like being inside a garbage bag. Worse, after a few minutes I didn't even smell it anymore and I knew that the odor had completely pervaded me. I could feel the decay seeping into me, me becoming the decay, the stench, the death.

Upon arrival at the flat for visiting staff, I interviewed the deputy about the current status of the organization, about finances, recent results and training needs. It was a productive meeting. I felt that the deputy was eager for work, and I myself wanted to waste no time. I myself was eager to show how committed I was to making things happen immediately. That turned out to be one of my biggest mistakes ever. When the managing director returned, she must have felt that I had bypassed her, undermined her authority, questioned her leadership, insulted her, and sabotaged her. So she took the most logical step, given her interpretation of my action: she stalled. Consequently, people questioned every step I took. Nothing was what it seemed to be. I could rely on no one. Nothing I said made any difference. Many of my Indian colleagues saw me as an intruder who was meddling with their operation.

Only months later, after I had already moved on to New York, I could see with 20/20 hindsight that creating a demand for my coaching ahead of time would have made a huge difference. My trip had been set up on a short and perfunctory conference call with my boss, another senior manager at global headquarters in New York, the managing director in Bombay, and me in Munich. The senior executives in New York had announced to the managing director in India that I would come there to work, and asked, "Would you like that?" Put on the spot and confronted with the surprise, the managing director had said the polite thing to say in India: "Great!" I discovered later that she had never really endorsed or owned the trip. What I should have done was to call her alone, well before embarking on the journey, find out what she wanted, and build, or verify, a demand for my coaching. My failure to do so jeopardized the coaching effort even before I got on the plane. I ultimately still got the job done, but my impatience and insensitivity at the outset had thrown an unnecessary wrench into my coaching effort. And I would never forget my lesson: unless the player wants to get coached, it is next to impossible to coach.

I later learned from a colleague of mine who had been on a similar assignment that he had been much smarter. He told me that when he had arrived in India, there had been no meetings set up for him, no reception to welcome him, not even a phone call from the people with whom he had come to work. This had gone on for two weeks. He had kept himself busy reading, settling in, catching up with other work, and learning about India's culture. After two weeks, the phone rang. The managing director called him and asked, "What do you want to do with us?" He said, "Let's meet and see what you want me to do." He made it clear that he had come to be of service, rather than imposing himself and his agenda.

Of course, you don't always have the time my colleague had to wait for demand to build up. When players are not asking for your coaching, you could fall back on the default position - management (assuming you enjoy the organizational authority to do so). In the domain of management, you need no demand whatsoever; you are in control, you can tell people what to do, you can give orders, you can threaten to fire them. But beware of this fallback position: use management only as a last resort, for it may cost you your coaching relationship, and ultimately keep the leaders around you small.

All the best,