“Get to Real as quickly as possible” — More Great Wisdom and Advice from Susan Scott’s Fierce Leadership

While delivering my synopsis of Fierce Leadership, the terrific book by Susan Scott, at a city management team session, Scott’s counsel to have honest and clear conversations seemed to be especially pertinent.  Partly because the City Manager is already so very good at doing this with his team.

Susan Scott put it this way, “The conversation is the relationship…business is fundamentally an extended conversation with colleagues, customers, and the unknown future emerging around us.”

Bruno Rumbelow, City Manager, Grapevine, TX

In the discussion after the presentation, this is what the city manager said:

“Get to real as quickly as possible.”
Bruno Rumbelow, City Manager, Grapevine, TX

That’s about as good a summary of an important concept as I have ever heard.

A valuable analogy for jobseekers

SuccessMapping

I regularly get together with clients and friends for breakfast or lunch. Invariably we discuss the current economy and how difficult it is for the underemployed as well as the unemployed to secure the position they seek. I have given this challenge a great deal of thought. One of my Christmas gifts is a copy of Stephen Ambrose‘s Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. I had read it when it was first published (1997) and after lending it to someone, it became an MIA. I recently re-read it and, while doing so, it occurred to me that an expedition such as Lewis & Clark’s shares much in common with a job search:

1. Success of both demands exceptional determination, persistence, patience, and confidence. A think skin also helps. Rejection and disappointment are inevitable.

2. Most of the obstacles, barriers, and challenges encountered are either unfamiliar or more daunting than anticipated.

3. Both require little (if any) waste of time, energy, resources, introductions, follow-up and follow-through opportunities, etc.

However, the Lewis & Clark expedition also suggests a significant difference: They were selected by President Thomas Jefferson (like Washington before him and Lincoln after him, a surveyor) to explore territory for which there were no maps whereas jobseekers have an abundance of resources to formulate a map that will guide and inform their initiatives. In my opinion, the single most valuable of these resources is Arlene Johnson’s book, SuccessMapping.

If you have no need of the assistance Arlene Johnson offers, congratulations!

However, if you know someone who has that need or if you yourself are underemployed, unemployed, or have only recently entered the job market, obtain a copy of her book ASAP.

I strongly recommend that SuccessMapping be read carefully, then read again at least once with the most relevant passages highlighted or underlined. I also suggest that the exercises be completed only after the second reading.

Seeking career objectives in today’s job market without a map is like walking 20 miles from your home while being blindfolded.

Is that an exaggeration? Yes, but only slightly.

The power of collective integrity

Anna Bernasek

In The Economics of Integrity: From Dairy Farmers to Toyota, How Wealth Is Built on Trust & What That Means for Our Future published in 2010 by harperstudio/HarperCollins, Anna Bernasek provides “a tool kit for creating more integrity anywhere in the economy. When policymakers are thinking about changing health care, reforming the tax system, or improving the financial system, they can systematically use these tools to build value.”

“Ultimate success will require broad and deep collaboration between and among everyone involved. Bernasek asserts that integrity has two components. “Te first could be described as trustworthiness – that someone [everyone] is following the rules, telling the truth, and being careful on the job. The second is trust – believing the seller’s trustworthiness [whatever is being sold or exchanged]. When you have both trustworthiness and trust, you have a relationship of trust and integrity. That relationship – that integrity – is an asset that produces economic value.”

“With all due respect to the integrity of each individual, it is imperative to institutionalize integrity. This is what Bernasek has in mind when affirming her faith in what is possible. “There are good reasons to be optimistic about the future of integrity. The Internet has changed everything. The DNA of integrity – disclosure, norms, and accountability – is fundamentally tied to systems for sharing information. And the cost of collecting, storing, and sharing information has been plummeting. As technology advances, we have the power to create wider and deeper trust across our society. And we can establish trust in places where it never existed before.

“By understanding the true nature of integrity, its DNA, it’s possible to guide the next evolutionary step in a positive direction. To succeed, it is vital to focus on the main goal.” However, as always, there will be barriers of resistance. “There are legions of entrenched interests eager to protect their turf. Each one seeks its own advantage through special pleading and sophisticated public relations, at the expense of the overall system…Applying the DNA of integrity yields a simple, systematic approach to invest in the integrity of our economy and our collective wealth. With it we can create a better, more valuable system that will bring additional wealth and prosperity to every member of our society.”

Bernasek’s use of first-person plural pronouns is intentional. The power of collective integrity is almost unlimited. That is our challenge as a society. That is also our opportunity…and yes, our privilege.

“Find the bright spots”

Chip and Dan Heath

In their latest book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard published by Broadway Books (2010), Chip and Dan Heath devote all of Chapter 2 to an explanation of how and why to find what they call “bright spots.” That is, “You are simply asking yourself, ‘What’s working and how can we do more of it?’ That’s the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.”

A second related question is, “Who’s really doing well and what can be done to have him or her do more of it?”

A third and related question is, “What can we learn from what’s working well and who’s doing well that can be shared with and applied by others?”

I agree with the Brothers Heath that, “Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.”

My take on all this is that bright spots are not solutions. Rather, they are positive (hence encouraging) indicators of what and/or who can help to achieve a series of small solutions. Meanwhile, keep in mind that certain mindsets are unwilling and/or unable to see bright spots or at least acknowledge their existence. Those who see them sooner than anyone else does — and then respond to them effectively — have what could be a significant advantage.

What we all lost when business lost respect

In an article written for the Harvard Business blog, Roger Martin suggests what we all lost when business lost respect. Here is an excerpt from that article. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org

Roger Martin

.

* * *

I want to explore the growing malaise around business, in particular in widely-held, publicly traded corporations. I believe we have migrated — quite by accident — to a set of conditions such that in order to operate their corporations, senior executives are pressured toward a form of existence that is substantially inauthentic. And in the course of leading inauthentic business lives, they lose their moral compasses and play games that make them feel ever more inauthentic. This will take several posts, so bear with me while I lay out the first tranche of the argument.

At our core, we are all social creatures. Community matters to us. This is why even when humans engage in profoundly anti-social activities; we do it in tightly knit social groups whether they happen to be called Crips, Yakuza or Al Qaeda. This is because as social creatures, much of our happiness is derived from our relationship with community — however that community is defined. We long to be: a) a valued member of a community; b) that we value; and c) is valued by people outside the community in question.

* * *

Undoubtedly there is no one reason for anything like the fall of Boeing. But a big piece of the puzzle was certainly the replacement of a community of long-term shareholders with short-term, opaque shareholders and the replacement of a sense of the purpose of the company as being to produce great products and great jobs with producing shareholder value. As a result, Seattle jobs could be destroyed to create shareholder-value-friendly Chicago jobs. Rules could be bent — or outright broken — to increase earnings for a dominant community of faceless, nameless, transitory shareholders. And if senior executives didn’t produce share price growth for these shareholders, they would be held to ridicule in the financial press.

So the dominant management community at Boeing came to be dedicated to satisfying a bunch of insatiable shareholders, who could dump their stock at a moment’s notice with no explanation. That just isn’t anything close to a healthy community. But as with Crips, Yakuza and Al Qaeda, everyone wants to be part of a community, however unhealthy. So corporate executives drink the Kool Aid of shareholder value and attempt to be valued members of a community that they value and is valued by the outside community of stock price aficionados by dedicating themselves to the community of shareholder value maximizers — itself a wholly inauthentic community.

More to come…

* * *

Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and the author of The Opposable Mind: Winning Thrugh Integrative Thinking and The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009). His website is rogerlmartin.com.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.