Also outstanding career advice
Jason Jennings
Given the current unemployment rate, additional lay-offs that are imminent, and competition is ferocious for the few positions that are being filled, the careers of individuals need the same “building blocks.”
I know of no one else who possesses more and better business wisdom than does Jason Jennings. Be sure to read his various books, especially Think Big Act Small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive and Hit the Ground Running: A Manual for New Leaders, both published by Portfolio/The Penguin Group.
1. Down to Earth: Modesty and humility in word and manner are most appropriate. Outstanding performance attracts attention (not self-promotion) and speaks volumes, silently but effectively. Those with the
healthiest egos have emotional intelligence (e.g. they consider it a privilege to serve others).
2. Keep Your Hands Dirty: Volunteer for the most unpleasant tasks, offer assistance to colleagues in need of it, share credit with others. Occupy the “trenches” and you control the “battlefield.”
3. Make Short-Term Goals and Long-Term Horizons: Often, progress consists of a series of “baby steps” to achieve an especially ambitious goal. The same is true of barrier removal during change initiatives. Generate momentum with incremental success.
4. Let Go: As Jennings suggests, “If it’s DOA, bury it.” Learn from the past but don’t let your mind dwell there. Grow, reach, stretch, stumble, get up, but keep moving in the right direction.
5. Think and Act Like an Owner: Take a proprietary interest in your organization. Eliminate waste (especially wasting time), focus on what’s most important rather than on what’s urgent, and be a builder rather than a spectator.
6. Invent New Businesses: Be constantly alert to what can be improved, what can be used in new ways, what can succeed in new markets with different customers. The #1 competitor? Who you are today and what your organization is today? Constantly improve or deteriorate and eventually….
7. Create Win-Win Situations: This strategy is especially important during negotiations and also applies to relations with competitors as well as with customers. Respect others’ rights; indeed, when necessary, protect and defend them.
8. Choose Your Competitors: Both organizations and individuals should know who they are…and who they aren’t. Leverage strengths. Know “when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.” And also know when to be bold, to be aggressive. Keep in mind that competitors are not enemies and these days, some competitors may soon become strategic allies.
9. Build Communities: Establish and nourish relationships with others by earning their respect for your expertise, then their respect for your character, and finally their appreciation of being associated with you.
10. Grow Future Leaders: Be unconditionally generous with the information, knowledge, and wisdom you possess as well as skills and techniques that will help others to success. Measure your own success in terms of the nature and extent of how well you collaborate with others on their success.
In addition to Think Big Act Small and Hit the Ground Running: A Manual for New Leaders, I also highly recommend Arlene Johnson’s Success Mapping: Achieve What You Want…Right Now!
Be sure to check out the following resources:
How to Face Your Critics
John Baldoni
When people criticize you, what’s the best thing to do? Show up and face the music.
President Barack Obama did just that when he met with Republican House members at their party conference last week in Baltimore. He met face-to-face with some of his sharpest critics, and in the process, demonstrated what it means to lead under fire.
In doing so, the President, whether you like or dislike him, provided a template for leaders to use when they need to face critics. Here’s what we can learn.
Show up. Let your critics see you for the leader who you are. Adopting a “hide in the bunker” attitude only plays to them. It gives them free rein to paint you however they like — demon, demagogue, or do-nothing. By showing up you demonstrate that you are not afraid.
Be open. President Obama invited the media; you can shoot video of your meeting and broadcast it over a controlled-access website. In doing so, you demonstrate transparency and show your willingness to engage those who disagree with you. Videotaping also challenges people to be on their best behavior because they are being recorded.
Be cool. When people criticize you to your face, breathe deeply. As an opponent’s voice rises, lower yours. Speak deliberately and with a sense of calm. The more control you have of your emotions, the stronger you will appear.
Acknowledge your shortcomings. Standing up to criticism is an opportunity to admit your own failings. Do it with a sense of earnestness, that is, demonstrate through words and passion that you have done what you think is best. At the same time, do not be defensive. Act with honest confidence, even when you admit mistakes.
Criticize gently. The spotlight may be on you, but the heat is also on your critics. Give as good as you get, but do it with a sense of diplomacy. A good-natured jibe here or there is good for you as well as others. It reveals your humanity.
Smile frequently. Lighten things up by relaxing your facial muscles. This demonstrates that you are in control. Smile when appropriate, but never smirk. Don’t let them see you sweat, either. Smiling keeps you on a more even keel.
Leave them wanting more. Know when to close the engagement. You can ruin a good thing by hanging around on stage. It may be appropriate to meet and mingle off stage, in fact that’s a great idea, but know when to get off the stage and let others talk.
When the heat is on, showing your face to your sharpest critics is a great way to demonstrate that you are in control of yourself as well as your message. Standing up to those who oppose you is a strong measure of demonstrating that you have what it takes to lead.
John Baldoni is a leadership consultant, coach, and speaker. He is the author of eight books, including Lead Your Boss, The Subtle Art of Managing Up.
To read other articles and resources and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.
“Nobody Knows Anything” – Malcolm Gladwell sweeps through a large swath of the 20th century of American Business in a Tour de Force
Malcolm Gladwell
If you read this blog, you know that I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. And as much as I like his books, I equally like his essays (all but the very most recent archived here).
Here are some excerpts from his essay entitled The Risk Pool. (I re-read this essay after it was linked to in this article by Timothy Noah at Slate.com). It’s about – everything. Pensions, health care, technological advances, Peter Drucker… reading this feels like en education in 20th century business.
Excerpt number one – the dominance of Bethlehem Steel:
“In 1956, Eugene Grace, the head of Bethlehem Steel, was the country’s best- paid executive. Eleven of the country’s eighteen top-earning executives that year, in fact, worked for Bethlehem Steel. In 1955, when the American Iron and Steel Institute had its annual meeting, at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, the No. 2 at Bethlehem Steel, Arthur Homer, made a bold forecast: domestic demand for steel, he said, would increase by fifty per cent over the next fifteen years. “As someone has said, the American people are wanters,” he told the audience of twelve hundred industry executives. “Their wants are going to require a great deal of steel.”
Excerpt number two — GM’s President makes a lot of money – and pays a lot in taxes:
The president of General Motors at the time was Charles E. Wilson, known as Engine Charlie. Wilson was one of the highest-paid corporate executives in America, earning $586,100 (and paying, incidentally, $430,350 in taxes).
Excerpt number three — Peter Drucker rightly observes/predicts, confirming Taleb’s (The Black Swan) truism — “nobody knows anything” (except maybe Drucker):
The most influential management theorist of the twentieth century was Peter Drucker, who, in 1950, wrote an extraordinarily prescient article for Harper’s entitled “The Mirage of Pensions.” It ought to be reprinted for every steelworker, airline mechanic, and autoworker who is worried about his retirement. Drucker simply couldn’t see how the pension plans on the table at companies like G.M. could ever work. “For such a plan to give real security, the financial strength of the company and its economic success must be reasonably secure for the next forty years,” Drucker wrote. “But is there any one company or any one industry whose future can be predicted with certainty for even ten years ahead?” He concluded, “The recent pension plans thus offer no more security against the big bad wolf of old age than the little piggy’s house of straw.”
Here are some “lessons” one might draw from this essay:
1. There was a time when the rich really did pay higher taxes. And this is from a period when America really flourished. There may be a connection.
2. Technology really does endanger worker’s jobs, and change really does endanger the long-term health of companies. Both Bethlehem Steel, and ultimately General Motors, went bankrupt. There was a time when no one (except Drucker) could have imagined that these behemoths might someday face the end of their reign.
3. No company is really big enough to take care of the pensions and the health care of all of its workers and retired workers. Because, tomorrow, as is now quite obvious, a company (if it has survived) will likely have a smaller pool of workers. Here’s another excerpt:
When Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy (in 2001), it owed about four billion dollars to its pension plan, and had another three billion dollars in unmet health-care obligations. Two years later, in 2003, the pension fund was terminated and handed over to the federal government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The assets of the company—Sparrows Point and a handful of other steel mills in the Midwest—were sold to the New York-based investor Wilbur Ross…
4. The more we know, the more we will be prepared for the next surprise. I have long felt that this simple saying is important to remember: “the more you know, the more you know.”
And tomorrow will be different from today. And then the next tomorrow will be even more different. So, knowing the vast sweep of business struggles and change helps us not be as surprised by the next surprise.
Let me encourage you to read the Gladwell essay. It will make you think.
——————-
(To purchase my synopses of Gladwell’s books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, with audio + handout, go to our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com).
Beware of false assumptions and hasty conclusions
Note: What follows is shared by an obviously thoughtful and sensitive
musician.
As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper’s cemetery in the Kentucky back-country.
As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost; and being a typical man I didn’t stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch.
I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late.
Then I went to the side of the grave and looked down. The vault lid was already in place. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I’ve never played before for this homeless man.
And as I played Amazing Grace, the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, and we all wept together.
When I finished I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full.
As I was opening the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, “Sweet Mother of Jesus, I never seen nothing like that before and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years.”
Book Review: Hit the Ground Running
Hit the Ground Running
Jason Jennings
Portfolio/The Penguin Group (2009)
Through a rigorous process of elimination best explained in the book, Jennings and his associates selected nine exemplar companies and their CEOs and explains how each of the nine combinations (i.e. company and its CEO) demonstrates an especially important “Rule.” Jennings devotes a separate chapter to each of the ten, the last being “Be a Fish Out of Water.” His focus is primarily on the nine CEOs and suggests that the best way to measure the performance of a CEO and compare one anther to each other is to calculate the total amount of economic value they created. “We defined economic value as the sum of the profits generated, dividends paid, increases in sales and profits, and the increase in the company’s share price during the CEO’s tenure.” After all of the nine CEOs who took over companies because of death, retirement, resignation, or the poor performance of their predecessor, they hit the ground running and “almost doubled revenues, more than tripled earnings per share, nearly tripled EBITDA, and doubled their company’s net profit margins.” How did they accomplish these exceptional results? Jennings provides the answer in this book.
The focus in this book is primarily on the first-year performance of nine CEOs: Patrick Hassey (Allegheny Technologies), Marshall Larsen (Goodrich Corporation), Frederick Eppinger (The Hanover Group), Howard Lance (Harris Corporation), Jeffrey Lorberbaum (Mohawk Industries), Ronald Sargent (Staples), Keith Rattie (Questar), Mike McCallister (Humana Inc.), and finally, Tim and Richard Smucker (The J.M. Smucker Company). After lengthy interviews, Jennings notes an obvious connection between and among them, one overpowering characteristic that all the CEOs shared: “They told the truth. None of them deceived themselves about anything, nor did they surround themselves with executives who did; they all practice the Golden Rule; and as a result, they’ve become the best performing CEOs in the nation.”
All of them stressed the importance of others’ contributions to the success achieved. Each reveals highly developed emotional intelligence as well as a profound appreciation of those with whom they are associated each day. That attitude explains how Eppinger gained credibility when he became CEO of The Hanover Group and why Lance asked his associates for their assistance when he became CEO of Harris Corporation. As is also true of the CEOs of the eleven “Good to Great” companies that Jim Collins interviewed, the nine that were interviewed by Jennings and his associates (notably Laurence Haughton) indicate almost no personal ego. They seem almost totally obsessed with the success of their companies but insist that that success is not about them. This is authentic humility, not false modesty, and (in my opinion) helps to explain why certain CEOs who are otherwise rather ordinary people have led their companies to achieving and then sustaining extraordinary success.
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