David Goldsmith: An interview by Bob Morris, Part 1

David Goldsmith is a consultant, advisor, speaker, telecast host and author. He is the President of Goldsmith Organization and holds an MBA from Syracuse University. Through his work with leaders from around the globe, David is the developer of the Enterprise Thinking Model, a holistic approach to leadership and management based on the activities and tools that all decision makers need to solve challenges and create opportunities. He had taught this course at NYU SPCS as faculty for 12 years.

His expertise and advice are sought by leaders and managers worldwide, in businesses of all sizes, nonprofits and associations, and organizations including the military, government and education.

David was named by Successful Meetings magazine as one of the Top 26 Hottest Speakers in the speaking industry. He received NYU’s SPCS Excellence in Teaching award for developing and teaching two core courses, and his history of business success earned him The Citizens Foundation of Central New York’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Central New York 40 under 40 Leadership Award.

He serves on the national board of directors of the Institute of Management Consultants and hosts the organization’s telecast series, Consultapalooza. David is also the founder and telecast host of the New York State Chapter of the National Speakers’ Association. In addition to authoring more than 500 published articles, he is a regular columnist for several organizations and publications. His book, Paid to THINK: A Leader’s Toolkit for Redefining Your Future, was published by BenBella Books (October 23, 2012).David resides in Manlius, NY with his wife and two sons

Here is an excerpt from Part 1 of my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.

* * *

Morris: Before discussing Paid to THINK, I have a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth, and how so?

Goldsmith: I get asked this question quite a bit, actually, but there’s not been a single person who has had the greatest influence, rather, there have been many people over the course of my life who have contributed to my personal growth. Certainly, there are the typical sources, like an early mentor named John Gillespie who I name in the book, and there was my 7th-grade science teacher who was encouraging when he noticed my interest in oceanography and fish, leading me to have a salt-water aquarium. But there have also been people both in my everyday life and in my travels who have influenced me and contributed to who I am today.

Morris: Who would you say has had the greatest impact on your professional development?

Goldsmith: The answer is pretty much the same. There is no one person; there has been a collection of people from my professional and personal lives (which I consider to be meshed into one life, really) who have impacted my thinking. A conversation on a plane with someone I’ve never met before can have a huge impact on how I choose to teach or learn about a topic, and a family member can have just as great an impact. For example, I have two sons who are now young men, and there are times when they will say something to me in a personal setting that would equally apply in a professional setting. I love to learn and awareness and knowledge come from all places.

Morris: Was there a turning point, if not an epiphany, that set you on the career course you continue to follow?

Goldsmith: I can’t say that there was one epiphany, but I am certainly on a career path that I wasn’t supposed to be on. When I was born, the doctor hit me, and my parents said, “You’re going to be a doctor.” Throughout my entire upbringing, the message was always, “You’re going to be a doctor…You’re going to be a doctor…You’re going to be a doctor.” So, I was on a pre-med track in college, I volunteered in hospitals, experienced work in operating rooms and elderly and pediatric wards. I also worked for U-Haul and McDonald’s in my youth, and regardless of where I was or what task I was charged with, I was curious about all aspects of the process or experience.

However, when I neared the end of my senior year in college, I started getting these headaches, and for me, something was definitely “off,” because I don’t get headaches. At the same time, I was taking a bio pharmacology course with this professor who gave both written and oral exams, and during one of the oral exams, he asked me this ridiculously-difficult question at a time when he was asking other students much simpler questions. I asked him why he asked me such a hard question, and initially, he said, “I expect more from you than anybody else in this class.”

A short time later, he admitted that this wasn’t the only reason, saying that he thought I was “faking it” in terms of wanting to be a doctor. He noted that as much as I enjoyed the volunteer work and the people I had met in hospitals, those headaches were telling me that the life of being a doctor wasn’t the right path for me. This professor told me, “The medical profession is not suited for you. It’ll be very mundane and routine. You seem like a person who needs something more.” I told him that I wanted to be an ear, nose, and throat specialist combined with plastic surgery and facial reconstruction, and that I figured those directions would keep me busy and intellectually stimulated, but the professor persisted that I should seek alternatives. So, like I said earlier, although there is no one person—say, no single relationship—that has tremendously influenced me, where I am today is a collection of experiences that I’ve had over the course of my lifetime.

Even Paid to THINK has had various experiences that have shaped it into what it is today. We started out with a different publisher, and the editor assigned to our project wanted us to dumb down the book. Edit after edit, we would get our material returned to us where the ET “model” was unraveled and parts of the copy were not only unrecognizable, they were jibberish. For example, the chapter on global awareness was shaved down to six bullet points and placed into another chapter. I was talking to a colleague named Orville Ray Wilson about how I didn’t want that rendition of the book to be out there with my name on it, and he said, “You will die with this book attached to your name.” That simple sentence made my next steps crystal clear. I parted ways with that publisher, which extended the production of the book by three more years, and found a publisher who was more respectful of the material and allowed us to produce the book that Paid to THINK needed to be.

Morris: Although we touched on your education already, to what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life so far?

Goldsmith: Oh, okay. Uh, I could really bash education here, because both domestically and abroad, I think that there’s a lot wrong with the way that it’s being handled. So, let’s focus on my education, first. I earned a dual undergraduate degree from Syracuse University in biology and psychology and an MBA, also from Syracuse University. I can’t say that the content of the education has been invaluable to what I’ve accomplished in life so far, but I can say that the experiences have certainly shaped my views on topics like education and leadership. And some of the most influential experiences were not positive ones, either. I mention this incident in the book, but I don’t assign the experience to myself there. I remember going out into nature to do research for a paper about animals. I sat for hours until I got a deer to trust me enough to come up to me, and I took photos of it, too. I wrote the paper on deer, and because I was so interested in the topic, I wrote two more papers—one on aerodynamics of flight after observing birds as they flew in circles over a parking lot and submitted all three at once.

Apparently, the professor was unimpressed by my curiosities and my tendencies to go above and beyond, and the initial assignment came back with his handwritten note: “When it looks like bullshit and reads like bullshit, then it is bullshit. If all you wanted was a good grade, then all you had to do was just do one paper.” And he did not really understand that I really didn’t care for the paper. I really wanted to know if I was doing the right thing. Was I learning? And he had a student who was so engaged, that he could have gone in so many different directions. And to me, that’s poor teaching. That’s a poor teacher.

So the educational system is based upon grades, upon rote. It’s not based upon thinking, and learning, and experiencing, and I think that’s why something such as the Kahn Academy is doing well, just because there is a natural progression to learning and the Academy seems to honor that.

I’ve mentioned to people that my formal Spanish lessons are restricted to one year in school, but because I had a natural desire to learn the language beyond what was taught in that one year, I took the initiative and learned more on my own. When the mechanism for translation went down during a speaking presentation a few years ago, I was able to switch from speaking English to Spanish for the audience of about a thousand people, and I was able to carry the presentation forward for ten minutes or so until they got the technology up and running again. But I learned Spanish for myself, not because I was told to do it within an educational setting.

Insofar as earning an MBA was concerned, my parents’ response to my decision to skip med school was, “If you’re not pursuing that goal, if you’re not going into medicine, you need to commit yourself to something else.” And an MBA was that “something else.” I began work on my MBA and that was a big challenge because the course content was designed not to teach you to actually do a job, but to get the MBA. There was no integration of data, no integration of information. And I remember sitting down with a professor, my accounting professor, and I said, “I don’t understand what it’s like to have $1 billion in receivables. If I had $1 billion in receivables, I’d be out collecting today, and I don’t think anybody in the class knows what $1 billion in receivables are.” And he said, “I have to teach this, because that’s what the companies pay us to do. That’s what we’re required to teach.” And I know that they don’t understand those things.

And I believe that education should not be as a means to being tactical, or to… like a trade. I don’t believe it’s like a trade teaching, but to some degree I believe that education should inherently take the human desire to learn, and leverage it so that they become excited about their future of learning. And I can share that.

We have two boys, and we home schooled them the first few years. And our boys wanted to know about everything — every single thing you could imagine. They asked questions wherever they went. I used to take them to a print shop or warehouse, and they were interested and excited. And they colored outside the lines. There were no lines. They just colored, and they did, and they enjoyed…

And then we ended up sending them to school for a variety of reasons that were personal that we both believed that might have been the best case. And they became more… They lost a lot of that for a while, because they realized that there were certain rules they had to follow within that environment. And then as they got older, and they had more control over their own time, they started to become self-learners, and today they are. But we wonder if that would be the case if they had started off out of the gates in that environment.

We have a household of learning, and it wasn’t, “You don’t get to watch TV.” We didn’t have any policies like No TV. A lot of people learn from watching TV. Yet, when we would talk with our boys and sit down at dinner, they had watched the YouTube about the news that was happening in another country. They could talk about different things that are happening in politics, or that could happen with disasters, or good things, and animals… They both have their own interests, and we helped them to pursue it without ever judging their desire to learn. And I believe that’s because both Lorrie and I have that innate desire to learn.

So I think education has its challenges, and I think that there were influences, but by and large, the majority of my education has been self-initiated.

* * *

To read all of Part 1, please click here.

David cordially invites you to check out these websites:

MetaMatrix Consulting Group homepage

His Amazon page

Amazon Paid to THINK page

Lincoln: A President for the Ages, a book review by Bob Morris

Lincoln: A President for the Ages
Karl Weber, Editor and Contributor
PublicAffairs/Participant Media (2012)

Even without Spielberg’s great film with which it is associated, this book would still be a stunning achievement

Those who have already seen Steven Spielberg’s film may be surprised to learn that this “companion volume” is much less about the film’s portrayal of Lincoln than it is about the content within which Lincoln lived and worked during the last weeks of his life. The literally momentous events are viewed from several quite different perspectives in 13 chapters, the first contributed by Karl Weber who also edited the anthology of essays and selected the “Lincoln’s Words” head note section that introduces each of Chapters 2-13.

As Weber explains, the chapters “chapters produce, in a sense, a new Lincoln; yet the cumulative effect, we think, will be to deepen your understanding of and appreciation for the politic al genius, spiritual wisdom, and profound integrity of the man so many consider the greatest and most representative American.” Weber later adds, we’ve also sought to give Lincoln the opportunity to speak for himself…excerpts from Lincoln’s own writings (which you’ll notice retain the original nineteenth-century spelling, punctuation, and grammar) and enjoy the opportunity to immerse yourself, at least a while, in the spiritually and intellectually invigorating currents of Lincoln’s mind.”

I am grateful to all of the 13 contributors for increasing my appreciation as well as my understanding of Lincoln’s efforts to secure what became Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House on January 31, 1865. Lincoln died 74 days later. These are some of the questions about President Abraham Lincoln to which contributors responded:

o Karl Weber: What are the nature and extent of Lincoln’s legacy?
o Gloria Reuben: What are the unique challenges of portraying Mary Todd Lincoln in a film?
o Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Had Lincoln lived to serve out his second term, to what extent would the Reconstruction period been different?
o Jean Baker: What in fact did he think of “women’s rights”?
o Daniel Farber: What do he and Theodore Roosevelt share in common? In which ways do they differ?
o James Tackach: Had he — and not Harry Truman — made a decision about using atomic bombs, what would it have been? Why?
o Allen C. Guelzo: What would have been his opinions about global organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations?
o James Malanowski: To what extent could Lincoln be accurately characterized as an “outlaw”? Why?
o The Honorable Frank J. Williams: How would he (if president) have responded to 911 and the war on terror?
o Douglas L. Wilson: How effective was he as a communicator?
o Richard Carwardine: How would Lincoln have viewed — and interacted with — a fusion of conservative religion and conservative politics?
o “The Real Lincoln Is an Icon”: An interview/conversation in which Andrew Ferguson and Karl Weber participate
o Harold Holzer: By today’s standards, why would Lincoln be “the unlikely celebrity”?

Yes, several of the 13 contributors (e.g. Gates, Tackach, Guelzo, Williams, Carwardine, and Holzer) respond to “what if” questions about hypothetical situations but their observations are eminently plausible. Of course, Weber was well-aware this book project faced a daunting challenge: “…to offer a version of this familiar story. In an effort to meet this challenge — and to take seriously, even literally, [Edwin M.] Stanton’s encomium of Lincoln as a man who belongs to the ages” — we approached a collection of today’s most eminent historians, journalists, and students of Lincoln with a novel assignment: to offer their own best judgments, admittedly speculative but solidly in historical fact and generations of scholarship, as to how Lincoln might have responded to the political, social, economic, and military crises of times not his own.”

How well the contributors met that challenge is both obvious and compelling throughout the narrative. One man’s opinion, had neither Spielberg nor anyone else made the great firm with which this volume is associated, it would still be a stunning achievement wholly on its own merits.

Terry Leahy (Tesco) in “The Corner Office”

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Terry Leahy, the former C.E.O. of Tesco, the British supermarket chain. He asserts, “Stay focused, and your career will manage itself.”

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

* * *

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

Leahy: I joined Tesco pretty much right out of college. And actually I turned down my first promotion because I didn’t think I was ready to lead.

Bryant: That’s surprising.

Leahy: It was a tiny marketing department in Tesco, with just a few people, and we were crunching data. A senior guy found me buried under all these reports and obviously saw something, and he eventually suggested that I lead the department. I turned it down. I’m by nature a shy person, and I’d never had any responsibility, and I was daunted by the thought of it. But the next time he asked me, about a year later, I said O.K. I figured I can’t keep saying no; it wasn’t really that I suddenly felt I was ready.

Bryant: So what was your approach once you started managing people?

Leahy: I suppose the contribution I made was energizing people by setting an objective and making a big personal contribution toward that objective. The other thing was probably that I always had an innate sense of justice and fairness, so I probably treated people O.K. Because I’m a little introverted, I’ve never had personal favorites, so people always felt that they’d be treated the same as anybody else.

* * *

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.

Leadership lessons to be learned from a brilliant symphony conductor

Roger Nierenberg is a highly successful conductor who has performed with some of the most distinguished orchestras in America and Europe.

Through his interactive program, The Music Paradigm, he has taught hundreds of top companies around the world how to improve their leadership skills and teamwork.

You now have an opportunity to watch a brief but intertaining as well as informative film of Roger in action. Please click here.

I urge you to check out Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening is his first book, published by Portfolio/The Penguin Group (2009).

To read my review of Mestro, please click here.

To read my interview of Roger, please click here.

Lead By Greatness: A book review by Bob Morris

Lead By Greatness: How Character Can Power Your Success 
David Lapin
Avoda Books  (2012)

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Greatness” is one of the terms that have become essentially useless because their meaning depends almost entirely on the person who defines them. So I was curious to share what David Lapin has to say about those who “lead by greatness.” They are great leaders who make their organizations great. OK. “In this book, I set out to demonstrate the correlation between the greatness of  human character and business results” other than those financial in nature. OK.

Lapin organizes his material within three Parts: First, he shares what he has learned about how to change one’s self, to improve one’s self, to develop one’s values that, “at the deepest levels,” determine the decisions we make. Next, he explains how to have beneficial impact on others, helping them to complete the self self-fulfillment process. Then in Part Three, he shifts his attention to explaining how to widen and deepen the impact of a person’s character (i.e. values, decisions, behavior) on community, society, and even generations to come.

According to Lapin, great leaders must become (i.e. develop certain character traits of greatness such as the eight that he suggests) before they can do (e.g. attract followers, pursue a shared vision, achieve common goals). I agree. He seems convinced that almost anyone can become capable of leading by greatness. In theory, I agree. However, I am among those who have become convinced that leadership greatness as Lapin defines it is very rare. I agree with Lao Tzu who observes in Tao Te Ching:

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

One of this book’s greatest strengths (among many) is Lapin’s clear and consistent focus on the importance to each person of completing a journey of personal discovery. Its purpose is to reveal all manner of potentialities but also to clarify – indeed affirm – certain values such as authenticity, humility, and generosity, three values that are also central to the leadership Lao Tzu celebrates in the passage cited. Lapin immediately establishes and then sustains a direct, personal rapport with his reader. Many will feel as I did that he wrote book specifically for them. They will never be alone during their often difficult and sometimes perilous journey of personal discovery.

I presume to share one final point. With all due respect to the importance of great leaders, the more compelling need – in my opinion — is for sufficient numbers of principled people whose lives are purpose-driven, who “follow by greatness.” Without them, the achievements of those whom we now view as great leaders would not have been possible.

A baker’s dozen of delicious quotations

"Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goethe

As you already know, there are endless uses for quotations. Here are thirteen that caught my eye.

“When you have learned something, that always feels at first as if you’ve lost something.”  H.G. Wells

“What the mothers sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.”  Henry Ward Beecher

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose one’s self.” Søren Kierkegaard

“Too many people over-value what they are not and under-value what they are.”  Malcolm Forbes

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Albert Einstein

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Always be a beginner at something.”  Bill Buxton

“I’m a great believer in luck, and find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”  Thomas Jefferson

“Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that, they’re dead.”    Twyla Tharp

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.”  Shunryu Suzuki-Foshi

“ I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”  Marshall McLuhan

“If you never allow your children to exceed what they can do, how are they ever going to manage adult life – where a lot of it is managing more than you thought you could manage?”  Ellen Galinsky

Small Business Job Creation Is Stronger Than We Think

Photograph by Matthew Staver/Landov

Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Scott Shane and featured by Bloomberg Businessweek. To read the complete article, check out others, obtain subscription information, please click here.

*     *     *

While small business job creation isn’t as strong as we’d like, it’s stronger than many people think. Since the recovery began, small and midsize companies have been producing more jobs than their larger counterparts and creating them at a faster pace than during the recovery from the 2001 recession. But because small business employment hasn’t yet caught up to where it was before the recession began, the perception that small employers aren’t hiring endures.

This matters more than you might think. Since big companies and small companies each account for about half of private sector employment, employment growth is usually strongest when both are creating jobs. Knowing which one is lagging the other helps Washington figure out what policies we need to boost employment growth.

Let’s look at the data. The ADP (ADP) Employment Report, a monthly analysis of employment at more than 300,000 private businesses using ADP payroll services, shows that companies with up to 49 workers employed 2.6 percent more people in March 2012 than they did in July 2009, when the economic recovery began. Similarly, businesses with 50 to 499 workers employed 3.2 percent more people last month than they did at the start of the recovery. Companies with 500 or more workers, however, employed 0.2 percent fewer people this March than in July 2009.

The Intuit (INTU) Small Business Employment Index, a monthly reporting of the number of people working at about 70,000 companies that have fewer than 20 employees and that make use of Intuit Online Payroll shows a similar pattern. The Intuit Index was up 4.7 percent from July 2009 to February 2012. By contrast, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ measure of U.S. non-farm employment, which includes employment at larger businesses and in the public sector as well as at small businesses, increased by only 1.9 percent.

Job creation at small companies has also been pretty robust when compared with the previous recovery. In the 33 months since the current recovery began, small employers added 2.6 million jobs, a 2.9 percent increase in employment, ADP figures show. By contrast, in the first 33 months of the recovery from the 2001 recession, small employers added 1.8 million jobs, a 2.1 percent increase.

*     *     *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Scott Shane is the A. Malachi Mixon III Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University.