“Excuse me”/“I’m sorry”

Cheryl offers:  I consider myself a pretty savvy business woman. I’ve read a lot of books, have an EMBA from SMU, had a great career at IBM, on and on. I have lots of reasons to tell myself so. And yet, with all the information I’ve read and know about women in the workplace, I find myself committing some of the very behaviors I advocate women release to make themselves more powerful. Take yesterday for example. I am in downtown Dallas at a busy street corner during lunch. As I approach the corner and start to cross the street, a young man approaches from a different direction and wants to cross to a different corner than I do. We do the imaginary “dance” of positioning to sort out our intentions without really speaking. As we “dance” he says “Excuse me” and I respond with “I’m sorry,” Whoa! I realize a few seconds later I’ve just committed one of those behaviors Gail Evans warns all women about in her book Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman. Evans claims women’s apologizing with “I’m sorry” is a “female addiction”; that sorry is a sorry word for us to use. Women need to drop all the apologies because in a business environment, a man hearing them infers a mistake has been made and it’s the woman’s because she apologized. This is one of those subtle ways we undermine our power and future opportunities.  I’m beginning to think she’s right and I’m working on retraining my brain and tongue. Oh, I’m sorry, did I offend anyone?

Is Reading Blog Posts Worth Your Time?

Here is an excerpt from a recent post by James Chartrand at Copyblogger. To read the complete article, check out other articles, and/or sign up for a free subscription, please visit http://www.copyblogger.com/subscribe/.

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If you’re a regular Copyblogger reader, you get good advice about five times a week. Excellent advice, really. Stellar. Especially on days when I’m posting. (Preens.) Wait, what was I saying again?

Oh, right. You get really good advice, for free, five times a week. Very frequently, this advice would cost you upwards of $150 an hour for a consultant to tell you the same thing. So when was the last time you actually put any of that advice into action?

Where’s your follow-through?

Are you all thought and no action?

Many of you might say, “I put advice into action all the time. Why, just last week I read a post right here about how using social media would help my blog, and I went and got right onto Twitter and tweeted all day. And it worked!”

Good for you. But did you do it the next day? Did you do it the day after that? Did you make a plan about when you’d get on Twitter each day, what you’d Tweet about, and how you’d tie that strategy to your business goals?

(And maybe just as important, did you come up with a plan to keep you from doing something other than tweeting all day?)

What about posts that offer advice on what you work at every day?

If you thought Jason Cohen’s post on how to write more magnetic copy seemed like sound advice, did you bring his 10-point checklist to your next blog post and double-check to be sure you hadn’t missed any?

Do you have Dan Zarrella’s post on the hard data behind Twitter headlines in your bookmarks, so you can pull it up and reference it when you want a tweet to spread like wildfire?

Most people don’t actively put a lot of thought into the advice they receive, other than thinking, “That sounds like a pretty good idea.” People read quickly and move on. They have good intentions, but they never do anything about them.

Note: In this same article, James Chartrand also discusses The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Make a plan, and Go a step beyond.

You may also wish to check out his blog, Men with Pens, for great action-minded freelance writing business advice. “You’ll find what you need to rev up your freelance business.”

Book Review: Seeing What’s Next

Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth
Harvard Business School Press (2004)

Together with Erik A. Roth and Scott D. Anthony, Clayton M. Christensen offers in this volume further development of core concepts previously discussed in The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. However, there is a substantial amount of new thinking and an abundance of new material. Although I strongly recommend that the two earlier works be read first, that is not a requirement to derive full benefit from Seeing What’s Next.

According to Christensen, “While the two previous books were aimed at managers inside firms who wanted to defend again or attack with a disruption, Seeing What’s Next is written for those who watch industries from the [in italics] outside, and who must make important decisions based on what they see. It will help executives, analysts, investors, and others who have a stake in a specific industry to evaluate the impact of innovations, the outcomes of competitive battles, and the moves made by individual firms — and to make smarter business decisions, forecasts, and stock recommendations based on those evaluations. The goal here [in Seeing What's Next] is to dramatically increase the odds of getting things right in the arena where wrong decisions could be devastating.”

In a single volume, the authors guide and inform decision-makers in all manner of organizations as they embark on the three-part process by which to (1) identify signals of change, (2) evaluate competitive, head-to-head battles between companies loosely classified as “attackers” and “incumbents” (please see the Glossary), (3) formulate appropriate strategic choices that can influence the outcome of competitive battles, and (4) meanwhile establish and then sustain an effective relationship between innovation and non-market forces such as government regulation. Christensen, Anthony, and Roth are to be congratulated for what I consider to be a brilliant achievement. Since it was published five years ago, Seeing What’s Next has become a business book “classic.”

Where will People Work? — reflections and excerpts, The Atlantic’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America by Don Peck.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.
(From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck)

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Where will people work?

This is what keeps me awake at night, in regards to our country and our overall economic health.

Though there is some, but much less, worry for the college-educated among us, with skills that are needed in the new economy, and with the ability to keep learning new skills, and, equally important, to be a true self-starter, nimble, ready to change, the greater worry is for the others — the lesser educated.  These others are definitely having the most difficulty.

I’ve written about this before, especially in this post:  What I’m Not Reading – and why I’m bothered by it (should companies focus, much more, on nurturing jobs?) I hope you will consider reading it.

But this post is about a quite disturbing article.  In the latest The Atlantic, there is a serious attempt to tackle this question:  How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America by Don Peck.

I don’t usually provide the lengthy excerpts that I will provide here – but I felt I needed to give you enough to let the article speak.  In my opinion, this is the challenge in our era!  I hope you read the entire article.  Here are the excerpts:

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come…

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill…

IN HER CLASSIC SOCIOLOGY of the Depression, The Unemployed Man and His Family, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained—and in many cases fundamentally altered—family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and 1936, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of 59 white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. “It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,” said one father. “A man is not a man without work.” Another said plainly, “During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” Noted one woman of her husband, “I still love him, but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.”

Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility…

IN HIS 1996 BOOK, When Work Disappears, the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson connected the loss of jobs from inner cities in the 1970s to the many social ills that cropped up after that. “The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness,” he wrote,are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work…

“The point I want to emphasize,” Wilson said, “is that we should brace ourselves.”

In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, the economic historian Benjamin Friedman argues that both inside and outside the U.S., lengthy periods of economic stagnation or decline have almost always left society more mean-spirited and less inclusive, and have usually stopped or reversed the advance of rights and freedoms. A high level of national wealth, Friedman writes, “is no bar to a society’s retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead.” When material progress falters, Friedman concludes, people become more jealous of their status relative to others. Anti-immigrant sentiment typically increases, as does conflict between races and classes; concern for the poor tends to decline…

We are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come. We have a civic—and indeed a moral—responsibility to do everything in our power to stop it now, before it gets even worse.

I think business leaders and managers and thinkers need to put their best thinking caps on, and ask – what can we as individuals, and what can our companies, do to tackle this challenge?

The Three Primary Derailers (for a business, and an individual) – these can really bring you down {more insight from Susan Scott’s Fierce Leadership}

(A note from Randy:  it is common to see me “revisiting” points from books, or the books themselves, on this blog.  This is partly due to the fact that I present my synopses of some of these books multiple times.  And sometimes, the books have enough different points, and are just that good, that I keep thinking of new points to blog about.  Well, Fierce Leadership is just that good, and I keep thinking of new points to blog about.  So – here goes).

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What will knock a company, or a person, off their game, and may lead to serious failure?  In Fierce Leadership, Susan Scott identifies “three primary derailers:”

1)  difficulty handling change

2)  not being able to work well in a team

3)  poor interpersonal relations

I think she is right.  Throughout the years of the First Friday Book Synopsis, change management and innovation rise to the top of the list of themes covered by the best business books.  And the evidence is clear that not playing well with others/inability to work well in a team is a killer – thus the continuing popularity and value of Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  And as Susan Scott herself says, “your most valuable currency is relationship, emotional capital.”

How are you doing in these three areas?

And, here is my opinion – nobody actually likes to change, so difficulty handling change may be the most difficult one to fix.

The other two are “fixable” – but you really, really have to work at cultivating interpersonal relationship skills.

We do not and will not get better by accident – we have to work at it.