Tag Archive for: Leadership

Mongolian Beef and the Moment of Truth

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We all face moments of truth.  What do yours reveal about you?

 

This past Friday evening–at the end of what was a fantastic week–I decided to drop in on a local Chinese food restaurant for takeout before heading home to my family.

It was a regular drop in on a business I hadn’t been to in probably four months.  I placed a “robust” order to feed our family of 6, and then walked outside the restaurant to talk on the phone while my order was prepared.

When I walked back in, one earphone in my ear and the other dangling so that I could pick up my two sackfuls of Chinese goodness, the cook and proprietor of the restaurant pointed to the sacks and said “I made you a Mongolian Beef to make up for the one I missed last time.”

I was astounded.

“Last time,” as I noted above, had to have been four months ago.  I vaguely remembered, only after the cook pointed it out, that I had indeed arrived home one Mongolian Beef short of my full order on that trip.  I remember calling briefly and letting the shop know (without much fanfare…literally just “hey, wanted you to know we were short on this one…no big deal.”).

And the cook remembered better than me.

He, no doubt, had a moment of truth where his customer walked in, didn’t say a word about a past service miss, placed a big order, and then waited.  The moment of truth was that moment when he faced the choice of either to address a prior miss that hadn’t been remembered by the customer, or to just go with the flow and ignore it–banking on the customer’s ignorance.

On moments of truth

There’s a reality in customer service–all parts of business and life, really.  It’s that we all face moments of truth.  Moments of truth are moments that force us to reveal–at the very least to ourselves–who we really are.

It may be that moment when you ought to deliver hard feedback to a client but decide not to because it’s too, well, hard.

It may be that moment when you return that overpayment to your customer like it’s a hot potato because you are not about keeping your customers’ money.

And, yes, it may be that moment when you remember a customer issue from four months ago and go the extra mile to mitigate it when the chance, finally, arises again.

We all have moments of truth in our lives. Moments of truth are moments of truth because we quite often have discretion about which way we go.

We can choose.

We can hide from the truth and reveal that we are, in fact, cowardly (like in my feedback example above).  Or, we can face the music and see where it takes us.

The question we all should consider is this:  When faced with my moment of truth, what will it reveal about me?

We should all hope for the revelation of strength of character in such moments.

What do you think?

When Your Karma Runs Over Your Dogma

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What goes around actually does come around every now and then. Choose your methods wisely.

 

The recent U.S. presidential election and the veritable smorgasbord of delicious irony–current and impending–has me thinking…

This is not a political blog.  But, it’s hard to ignore the very real strategic insights that come from an election that gives us:

  1. A winning candidate whose methods of winning have left a lot of scorched earth to recover–whether you think him a buffoon, a fighter, a genius, or simply a flawed person (like all of us).
  2. A media sector whose methods have demolished whatever trust remained in it for the time being, leading up to the New York Times editorial board needing to redouble its efforts on “reporting America and the world honestly” (an astounding non-admission if there ever was one).
  3. A set of supporters of the non-winning candidate who now realize that the methods of powers that were behind some of the biggest “wins” for their side (budget reconciliation, as a starter…) probably could be used against them once power passes to someone they simply don’t like.
  4. A vastly smaller set of people who have chosen to protest, riot, and in general cry foul while breaking things in response to what was a fair outcome (not policy outcomes…the person, mind you).

So, what’s the insight?

I’ll give it to you simply, and it’s nothing original.  It’s this:

If you live by the sword, be prepared to die by the sword.

If you live by bullying, shouting down, ignoring, and using unique devices to get your way, then just know that turnabout, while not always fair, is in play.  Yes, in this case I’m referring to the healthy proportion of Democrat Party supporters who have taken off their “open minded, tolerant” masks to show that actually, it was really just either “our way or broken glass.”

But, the truth is we all resort to such conveniences without thinking about it.

We all choose what our dogma says we should, and ignore the blow-back that is likely to come later.  in the 2000’s, U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stemmed from a neoconservative dogma that everybody, eventually, responds to the big stick.  That dogma is flawed (and, ironically enough, proven wrong by the very existence of the United States of America).  The blow-back the U.S. has experienced both internally and externally since deciding to prosecute those wars is instructive of the flawed dogma.

The same is true in the private sector.

I know of multiple executives–some of whom are recently “returned to the market”–whose own arrogance, conspiracies, and secrecy-driven styles ultimately boomeranged on them.

The blow-back was real, and easily foreseeable for anyone who knew the nitty-gritty details.

One in particular was so dogmatic about a social Darwinist approach (and their own superiority to others within that worldview) that, when faced with feedback about their own behaviors and how such behavior could get them figuratively offed from the organization, just cruised right on into oblivion perilously ensconced in the calm self-confidence that such dogma can bring.

One might, in fact, call it karmic justice that the individual faced a sudden and unceremonious ouster from a cold, unfeeling, and similarly dogmatic (about other important character traits) boss.

It’s kind of like what we have witnessed in the “how could we be so wrong” set of 2016 election pollsters who were, in fact, so wrong about the election. The pollsters couldn’t measure the number of people in their polls who, uncomfortable with being called deplorable or bigoted for voicing their support for President Elect Trump (it’s still a stunning reality to write that, by the way), simply didn’t answer the polls correctly. The pollsters’ dogma was in the numbers and not the very real human elements of strategic prognostication.  Human character traits matter.

Sometimes, character traits that can only be measured in actions or lack of actions–not numbers–are the ones that carry the day. Executives who perform beautifully on the financial numbers but who ignore their own character flaws and how those might be viewed by other powerful people are similar.

They succumb to blind spots.

But, they are blind spots only to those who don’t understand the notion of living and dying by the sword.

If you are a strategic jerk–pitting customers and employees against one other for constant gain–then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and beats you at your own game.

If you are an organizational jerk–saying you hire and fire people for their performance but really only when you like and dislike them–then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and simply…doesn’t like you.

If you are a political jerk, using false promises and propanda to fool and lie to people in order to get them to follow you, then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and appropriates your own emotion driving style, and beats you at your own game.

The incoming Trump administration and pretty much any of us presiding as executives ought to take heed:  When your dogma gets run over by your karma…it ain’t pretty.

If you find yourself in a position of believing there is no way you are wrong, then you probably are already wrong.

Choose your methods wisely.

You’ve just taken the time to read this…now take the time to comment.  What do you think? 

 

Talent or Motor?

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Don’t underplay the intangibles–motor matters.

One of the more useful metaphors used in the American Football world is the concept of “motor.”

Anybody who has been inside of football at the highest levels has heard a very particular description of players that is, perhaps, the highest compliment there is to an individual’s character as a player… “He’s got a great motor.”

It’s actually kind of a funny phrase to think about, as if some guys have better engines inside their bodies than others. But, it’s one of the more honest assessments that can come out of a scout’s mouth.

Why?  Because it cuts through the crap.  A guy can be 6’6″, leap tall buildings and lift elephants; but if he plays with “no motor” he’ll be an also-ran.  Professional football’s history is littered with magnificent physical specimens who have been outplayed by shorter, fatter, weaker teammates with bad bodies, stiff joints, balding heads, and great motors.  In fact, one of the dirty little secrets of the National Football League is that for every “best athlete” on the field, there are probably a half dozen or more so-called “high motor” guys who couldn’t win a footrace.

Count on it.

High motor guys may not have the most talent, but they get the most out of what they have.  They are, in a broader vocabulary world, tenacious.  They are relentless.  They are dogged. They are aggressive, earnest, forceful, focused, incessant, persistent, ceaseless, and unremitting.

You get the picture.

Why this matters to you as an executive.

In forming highly executable strategic plans, we always end up in the discussion about talent.  A given organization having the talent to execute a given strategy is not…a given.  So, as practical practitioners, we focus in on the who once the what and when are coming into focus.

Unfortunately, talent discussions can focus in on tangible qualities of individuals and ignore intangibles.  In other words, talent discussions focus on a guy’s time in the footrace vs. productivity on the field.  Only, in a corporate environment, this looks like “where he went to school,” “what degree he has,” “who he has worked for,” and “what business he has been in.”  vs. “what he did to change things while there.”

People with motor in the business world make things happen as individuals.  They may be system players, but they rise above others and show what they can do through their tenacity and relentlessness.

And, you can see it from the earliest points in their career.  High motor professionals do things that others don’t.  They deliver work beyond their years.  They teach themselves.  They think about issues even when they are off the clock. They care about their work as a reflection of themselves. 

In your strategic planning, don’t forget the talent.  In your talent planning, don’t forget the intangibles.

Motor matters.

What do you think?

How Do You Know When It’s Over?

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How do you know when it’s time to move on?

 

“They never reach out when they’re giving up.” – Better than Ezra, A Lifetime

I once observed a poor manager become keenly and demonstrably irritated at the thought that one of his charges didn’t come to him for advice.

“[He has] turned away, and I’ve offered advice over and over again.”

It was brilliant theater with fantastic words, but the truth of the matter was this:

The manager’s charge had given up on him long ago.  After months of watching the manager make silly decision after silly decision, the direct report was done.

How do you know when it’s time to go?

How do you know when it’s time to find a new boss, or a new employee, or, bluntly, a new CEO for your company?

It’s when your interactions with your boss or employee shift from a dialogue of active discovery and discussion to a dance of passive avoidance.

Colin Powell once said the following:

“The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them.  They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.”

The same can be said of followers…  Once your boss stops coming to you with problems to solve, you’ve probably lost her confidence and failed at the task of being a productive team member–or you’ve shown you don’t care.  I’m not quite that categorical…after all, I’m not suited to solve all my people’s problems and they aren’t suited to solve all of mine. But, I am bought into the core notion.

And, you know what? Unlike my original example where the leader failed (frankly, was a failure), it’s actually not always the leader’s “fault.”

It can be nobody’s fault.

It can just be time to move on.

Taking the time to realize when things aren’t clicking is integral to any leader’s thought process. Sometimes, when you no longer seek discovery and discussion, it’s better to seek greener pastures.

Sometimes, when your direct reports no longer engage with you, you need to self-reflect on whether they and you belong together.

Because they never reach out when they are giving up.

What do you think?

That Dead Guy In Your Organization

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Put it in their belly, not their back.

You ever have an experience where a senior manager called the death of a living and breathing individual?  I don’t mean literal death, I mean figurative death. I mean like when Michael Corleone tells his older brother Fredo, “You’re nothing to me now.”

Here’s that epic scene…

You get it?  Harsh. Right?  “You are dead to me.”

Except what about the executive who doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to actually face up and admit it to the other party.  Have you ever met him (or her)? I have, and it isn’t pretty.

I once served a senior executive who, when faced with people who would not comply with his wishes, would literally say, “They are dead to me.”

Get it?  They won’t take my advice?  “Dead to me.”

Won’t see things my way?  “Dead to me.”

Said no to me? “Dead…”

It’s a hollow way of looking at the world, to be sure; it is, quite possibly, one of the most self-centered utterings out there.  And imagine when it’s done by people in senior positions, but without it being stated to the party who has just died!!!

That means that not only is the other party “dead,” but that he or she is still walking around the organization with a death mark hung on them.  Their career in the organization might be over, and their opportunities for advancement might be nonexistent, but the senior exec doesn’t have the nerve to admit it.   He may have just created a dead man walking, and stated so to other influential people, but he lacks the courage to counsel the dead man out.

In life, we have the opportunity to do two things with our disappointments about other people.  We can backbite and undermine, or we can work them out in front of those who disappoint us.

If you know a dead man walking, then you probably work for or with a person whose moral compass is haywire.

If you’re going to voice your displeasure, have the courage to put the knife in their belly–not their back.

 

Cheese, Change, and Cheyenne

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Your signature characteristic as an executive will be how you respond to change.

 

Here’s a bit of verse for you, courtesy of country music legend George Strait:

She said, “Don’t bother comin’ home
By the time you get here I’ll be long gone
There’s somebody new and he sure ain’t no Rodeo man”
He said, “I’m sorry it’s come down to this
There’s so much about you that I’m gonna miss
But it’s alright baby, if I hurry I can still make Cheyenne
Gotta go now baby, if I hurry I can still make Cheyenne”

This post is about Cheyenne, and getting tangled up, and moving on, and dealing with unexpected change, and keeping on.

…

“Well, that didn’t go so well, did it?”

Have you ever had a meeting, project, job, or career move that resulted in such a polite evaluation?  Probably so. Things happen.  It’s how you react to things that will define your leadership profile and quite likely your career. It’s how you react to unexpected outcomes that will define you in front of your family, your friends, and your fellow professionals.

Life is full of surprises. Some of them are good, some of them not so good. We all have choices to make in how we respond to surprises.  Unfortunately, it’s human nature to do two things with surprises:  First, we like to take credit for favorable ones.  Second, we like to lay blame on others for negative ones.  These tendencies–taking credit and placing blame–are probably all around you, even if only in nuanced fashion.

How do we ignore credit and blame and just work to move on?

First, let me say that it’s hard.  A defining aspect of my role in the business community is that I have the opportunity to listen to many people who are in transition.  Executives are moving around all the time, and it’s easy to hear from them when your network is deep and your ears are open.  They really fall into two categories:

Category 1 transitioners are people who are focused on “why this happened.”  They fall into a cycle of diagnosis of what got them where they are.  They are focused on what they did right or wrong.  They get bogged down in blame and misunderstanding and pain. They find reasons that they were right and that others were wrong.  I’ve been there.

Category 2 transitioners are people who are focused on “what is happening next.”  They are the ones who recognize change for the opportunity that it is.  They work to define the next thing as quickly as possible. They get off the dime.  They move on.  They look forward. They hurry.

You want to know a little secret:  You don’t have to be an executive in transition to fall into these two categories.  You are in sales?  Fight to maintain a Category 2 mindset.  You are leading a company through a strategic change?  Yep… Category 2 is your ticket.  You are choosing a CEO to lead your company?  Look for Category 2 characteristics.

Category 1 people are caught in the credit/blame cycle–a perfectly natural but fully unproductive place to get caught. I won’t try to insult your intelligence beyond saying that Category 2 folks are the ones who are more successful in normal businesses and organizations.  They are also a lot more fun to be around.

They have a concept of what is possible next.

They have their Cheyenne in mind.

They are in a hurry.

Oh, boss, you don’t think it’s going to work out between you and me?  Ok.  I really liked it here, but I understand.  Gotta go now.

Oh, prospective client, you didn’t like my last and final sales pitch?  Ok. I have an appointment to make for later today if I can hurry.

This is not a post about surrendering and leaving at first difficulty. It’s about knowing how to move on when it is, in fact, time to move on.  I’m not saying have no memory or accountability for the past. I’m absolutely not saying what in the past does not matter.  I am saying that if you let it define you it will sandbag your next steps more than you’ll ever realize.

Author Spencer Johnson has sold 26 million copies of his famous book Who Moved My Cheese?.  The book is a parable about a couple of rodents who get too used to eating cheese that is in the same spot every day.  One day, the cheese is no longer there.  One rat sits still and frets.  The other?  It ties on the running shoes and gets going.

Change readiness (perhaps change openness) is a simple concept.  It’s also a concept that will define you for better or for worse.

Gotta go now, baby, if I hurry I can still make Cheyenne.

What do you think?

A Song For Me at 23

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If I could tell my younger self what matters in professional life…I would tell him this.

I walked out of college a free man, but I didn’t know it.  I may have been a free man with a limp and a headache thanks to a few too many days on the football field, but I was free.

I had no money to speak of and drove my girlfriend’s car. Luckily, I now know, I also had no debt. Along with that, I think I had a healthy appreciation for hard work.

Still there are a lot of things I wish I had known at that age as they relate to business and executive life.  There are things you just don’t learn in school, and many of them relate to interpersonal or even personality-based observations. That’s why I’m writing this. I figured that I can put out a few points that I wish I had known at 23, and I figure they might help someone else along the way.

One thing is for sure, they will help you understand my professional worldview.  If you read this blog, you know that it’s about worldview, and these points represent scar tissue; none of them has been fatal (totally), and some of them represent processes that have made me the professional I am.  Read them, and then tell me where I’m wrong (or right).

____________________________

 

Dear 23-year-old self:

You are about to embark on a career.  It’s going to be fun, frustrating, and probably not as fast-moving as you would like, so I’m going to list a few suggestions here that will give you a leg up in your career, and perhaps in your life.  Many of them you won’t be able to understand until you’ve experienced the situations themselves, and that’s just life, but some of them might help you be better prepared for the situation.

  1. Invest the time on your own or in a class to learn principles of accounting and finance cold.  I know it’s an odd “reflection” to start with on a list like this one, but it’s true. Sure, your liberal arts education is valuable because it helps you to think…Sure, whatever.  But what’s really valuable is knowing how to assess organizations’ financial health, understand the time value of money, and peer into how decisions are made vs. how they should be made based on the numbers. No matter where you sit, knowing the numbers gives you a leg up, so you need the tools to learn how to know the numbers.  If you don’t know what a T-account is or can’t explain why a company would invest in a project that will lose money for five years, you need to go back to school.
  2. Acquire a healthy skepticism for title and wealth. These are not always an indication of the quality of person you are dealing with.  Like British accents, titles and wealth can lead you to a false sense of security that the person you’re working with is smart and accomplished, and that is in fact often the case, but not always, and the same goes for degrees and credentials–the guy with the engineering degree from State can often run circles around the Harvard MBA.
  3. Beware anyone who thinks work hours are defined by the calendar.  “My” holidays and “my” vacation are signs of a paycheck player.  If you’re on a professional track, opportunity comes at all times in all shapes.  That guy who calls you at 9 pm on a Friday?  He probably has something important to say.  I once had a manager answer the phone in Europe at 2 am local time when I called from the U.S.  I had no idea where he was, and he made no protest during the call.  I didn’t find out until later that week, after he had returned to the U.S., that he had even been in Europe when I called. I asked him why he answered, and you know his response?  “Might have been important.”  I love that guy.
  4. Working harder than other people does not guarantee you success or wealth.  It might provide you with some dignity, however.  Remember Boxer from Animal Farm?  He was the noble horse who always worked hard for the cause, no matter the direction.  The work didn’t take away from his nobility, but it did kill him–he literally worked himself to death.
  5. Learn and understand the snowdrift problem in game theory.  This one is kind of nerdy, but it’s real everywhere. There will always be people whose first move in a tough situation will be to wait for somebody else to do the hard work.  Be sure that you think about accountability carefully, and if you’re always the one shoveling snow, be bold enough to get out.
  6. Recognize that there are people without consciences, and they are probably better at the political game than you.  I once observed an executive execute the most deceptive game of bait and switch I’ve ever seen, and shortly after that, he offered advice and support to the person who had been baited.  The kicker?  The executive knew he was being deceptive–he offered his advice with the phrase “I don’t know why you would trust us, but here’s the advice.”  The nerve.
  7. Find a way to serve.
  8. Learn to manage for the short term, but get out of any situation that manages to only be short term, because your life will (hopefully) be long. It’s important to learn how to manage for the short term–to cut costs and rein in spending or maybe seek additional sales to cover a shortfall elsewhere. And it’s okay to manage to the short term–that’s where we all eat.  But it’s also important to realize that just as alcoholism is the diseased extreme of enjoying a good drink, short-termism is both a disease and a kind of addiction: The more you do it, the more it becomes insidious.
  9. Hotheads aren’t always bad.  I had a boss early in my career who was the greatest guy to ever throw his keyboard across a room; he was a tantrum machine, but he was also a guy who genuinely cared.  Know the difference between a grade-A jerk or asshole and a good person with a strong sense of duty but also a temper.  There is a difference.
  10. Where there’s no contract, there’s no contract.  Here’s a piece of advice that’s going to sound more cynical than it is.  No, I’m not saying “always have a contract”; I’ve negotiated multi-million dollar consulting engagements that were founded on the client’s trust and the consultant’s commitment to excellence, and I believe in the power of a person’s word and handshake. But, and this is an important but, many people like to use the ambiguity of no contract to gain advantage.  So my advice to you is to always know when there is no contract–know your counterparty/client/customer, and your boss (see what I did with that last one?), as well as you know yourself.  Don’t rely on contracts, but know when you don’t have one; no amount of flattery and gushy feelings at the start of a relationship will overcome the poor values of a counterparty who won’t define or fulfill commitments.
  11. Beware anyone who goes out of their way to say they are giving you friendly advice.  They probably are neither giving you advice nor being your friend.  True friends don’t have to reiterate the point; you know them by their deeds.
  12. Liquid net worth provides flexibility. Whether you’re a shop floor worker or a CEO, money is important, but it’s really liquid net worth that matters; I know plenty of senior executives who are miserable but completely locked down to a bad team, bad company, or bad leader due to their own financial choices.  Always keep enough liquidity on hand to be able to walk away without regret; that means you should accumulate a few thousand bucks when you’re just out of college, and it might mean hundreds of thousands of dollars once you’ve “made it.”  Financial handcuffs are tough, which brings me to my next point…
  13. People make really bad decisions when they’re under financial stress.  This can include executives cooking the books (or even “just” shading them surreptitiously) to make their bonuses, but it can also include things as innocuous as salespeople treating customers poorly or manufacturing workers doing their jobs poorly.  You really don’t want to have a workforce that’s worried about whether they can make their next grocery bill, and more than that, you don’t want a CFO who will make rotten financial and personnel decisions just to make a bonus.  The love of money is the root of all sorts of bad things–I read that somewhere.
  14. Care.  Yes, I mean that: Care.  You will be tempted (in fact, encouraged in some environments) to acquire social and emotional distance from the people some think you will have to hurt to be successful; it will come with the challenge to “do what it takes” to keep your job.  But don’t be fooled–care.  I was once offered a role that implicitly came with the need to fire a couple of people I had coached and mentored and whose capabilities were strong. It wasn’t the right thing to do, so I didn’t; I chose to leave.  On the way out, I was goosed with a comment and critique about not doing what it takes, but that’s just a consequence of caring.  You know what else is a consequence of caring?  Loyalty, love, the ability to sleep well at night.  In short, your life will be better because you took the time to care.
  15. Trust is cumulative…in both directions.  You will live life with a sense of trust in people you know you can rely on, but you have to learn to know when you have enough evidence to know you can trust someone, and also to know when you can’t. 
  16. Respect the dignity of other people.  There are a lot of instances in life when it’s easier to double cross, lie, shade the truth, and walk away–resist that temptation. Stripped bare, we all rely on others. So respect that, and you’ll go a long way.
  17. Life and business are not zero-sum games. You’ve made it through college, and maybe played some sports.  If so, you’ve gotten used to winners and losers, but life isn’t like that.  In life, there are winners of all sorts and losers of all sorts, and sometimes there are situations when everyone is a winner (or at least not losers).  Really effective executives I know think about when they are playing a zero-sum game and when they have the opportunity to grow the pie, so learn to realize the beauty of growing the pie.   Zero-sum games are in actuality very rare–we only make them common. On a related note,
  18. A spreadsheet can’t show you how to grow the pie.  Unfortunately, math without vision only leads to reductive incrementalism.  Very, very few spreadsheets would have predicted the rise of Standard Oil, the emergence of digital music, or the turnaround of Apple Computer. Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t think either. Vision has to be injected into that spreadsheet; don’t mistake tools and math for strategic vision.
  19. When it comes to people, where they (and you) stand depends on where they sit.  Upton Sinclair famously noted that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on his not understanding it. Perspective matters, and if you get good at taking different perspectives, you’ll start to understand how other people think, although it does take time and practice.  By altering where you sit and then thinking about where you stand, you start to think interesting thoughts when it comes to business strategy.  Funny thing is, you also start to think differently about the world.  Perhaps John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil) really did save the whales; perhaps Steve Jobs is actually the cause of a generation of hearing loss and an epidemic of traffic fatalities; and perhaps, just perhaps, what you’re being paid to do isn’t good for the organization or the world.  Get beyond your salary when it comes to what right and wrong look like. Stretch your thinking, and be bigger than your smallness.
  20. No matter how much garbage they eat, seagulls are not really good creatures to have around. Seagulls fly in, beg for food, take a dump, and then cackle a lot; some people are enamored with them, but in reality, they’re just rats with wings (as we used to say back home on the Gulf Coast).  Seagulls live at the beach and the dump, and in human form, they often live in corporate environments.  My advice for you is to learn to be a problem solver, not a problem finder; cultivate a constructive approach to life, not just an observational one. Justify your existence, and don’t be a seagull.
  21. Know how to incrementally assess situations.  The incidence of “good from far, but far from good” in people and companies is increasing because the channels of communication are increasing; it’s far easier for companies to cultivate high-profile brands that cover up lowlife cultures.  On the flip side, it’s far easier for motivated individuals to learn a lot about any situation in a short time frame. Learn to assess situations at first glance, after a few minutes, after a few days, and after months.  Learn to take the time to sleep on decisions, and do your due diligence, but also trust your gut.  This is especially true about people: If people look and smell unethical even though they’re wearing ethics as a badge, disregard the badge and go with look and feel.
  22. Don’t be a “yes” man, but realize that being a “no” man is just as bad.  Yes men are common in any culture; they go along to get along.  It’s a fact of life, but not a very edifying existence, so find a way to have your own point of view or else you’ll be redundant.  But the opposite position is equally bad; the “no” man rarely encourages growth or expansion.  Try to think about growth as coming from a combination of yesses and nos, and live in the mess between the absolutes.
  23. Be exceptionally careful about “following orders.”  Just following orders can give you a mental freedom that allows you to ignore basic ethical principles, and ultimately it can corrupt your values.  Have the self-respect to reflect on orders, and recognize that they shouldn’t supersede your humanity.
  24. Your network is everything, but you have to know what a network is.  A real network is not the number of people you’re connected to–it’s the number of people who will do something for you if you’re in need, and there is a huge difference between the two. In my early days, people thought networking was collecting business cards; nowadays it’s probably LinkedIn connections–but both are wrong. Networking is finding reciprocal relationships that help you by your helping others.
  25. If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know this, but reading is a highly underrated skill.  I’d argue it’s second only to listening.
  26. Finally, and perhaps as a wrapper…Preserve your self-respect.  There will be plenty of times in your career when you’ll be faced with choices that can erode your self-respect; sometimes it’s just as simple as taking a call in the middle of a family event, and sometimes it’s worse. You’ll find months of your career that are bad for your health–it is going to happen. But even if one day you find that you have to make a choice you know is wrong but you have to do it to preserve a broader agenda or position, just be sure you know the stakes.

I’m sure you’re off to a fantastic career.  Enjoy it, and maybe one of these points will save you from a scar or two.

Sincerely,

Your much older self

All In

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We say we are “all in,” but do we mean it?

 

In 1519, the explorer Hernando Cortes scuttled his ships off the coast of Mexico.  He did it to ensure that, for his expedition in the new world, retreat would be extremely difficult.  The only way through was forward.

What does it really mean to be “all in?”

I think that’s a question all of us have to wrestle with at some point in life.  For sure, a big part of being a strategist is calculating the risks…knowing the outs in a situation.

But for those among us who only focus on the outs, the outs become the ends.

I can recall a management team focused on constantly ensuring their outs.  The default approach to management was to pad.  Pad the numbers, pad deadlines, pad assertions in conversations. In the spirit of Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice (and I’ll save a salvo for anecdotalists like Collins to be delivered another day), the management team took the case study of a climbing team on Everest packing extra oxygen to ensure two summit tries–a real life and death situation–and applied it to everyday management. There were conversations on “extra oxygen” that related to padding of cost estimates, deadlines, etc. It was, like it probably is in your organization, art. The “outs” became the ends, because when everybody is padding their estimates, nobody is engaging on the truth.

The issue with that anecdote is that “extra oxygen” for one person is, quite literally, “sandbagging” to another.  If I only focus on my extra padding, I never actually get to the point where I can execute a real thrust.  Imagine our friend Cortes, sword in hand and wrapped in layers of padding.

He couldn’t win a fight that way, and neither can you.

Which brings me back to my question…  What does it really mean to be “all in?”

On the sports field, you can tell the ones that are all in by their actions.  Athletes who are all in know one thing:  Somebody, somewhere is working hard, possibly harder than them.  Athletes who are all in burn their figurative ships every. single. day.  They train until they hurt, and they play hurt.

On the football field, I never saw a truly great player…one who was all in…who didn’t play with significant injury.  That went for my best friend the kicker as much as it went for the most pounded on defensive tackle on the field.

While sports metaphors are perhaps a bit overplayed, I think they provide a picture of “all in” that is at its purest.  The athlete lives a life within a life.  From the moment a great competitor achieves greatness, her skills are deteriorating.  Time is undefeated. Athletes know that their time is limited.  They know that their skill will go away one day, and that they will be left to remember them.  So, elite athletes are simply better at role modeling “all in.”

Sure, it’s sometimes to an extreme… NFL Safety Ronnie Lott famously chose to have the tip of his finger amputated to preserve his opportunity to play in the Super Bowl.  That’s all in. I’ve seen athletes play with broken bones, torn ligaments, twisted joints, and crushed hands.  Why?  Because time is running out.

And that, my friends, may be the best lesson of all on being “all in.”  At some point, time runs out on all of us.  Whether we are serving a client, or playing in the Super Bowl, we know that time is undefeated. Being all in means having the grace and fortitude to suck the marrow out of our skills.

My favorite anecdote actually comes from Hollywood.  In the movie Rocky, the titular character gets a shot at the best fighter in the world while dealing with his own decline from never-really-got-there.  In the midst of the fight, Rocky is beaten, bloodied, and blind from the swelling on his eye.  Sitting in his corner, he utters a famous and altogether meaningful plea to his trainer…

“I can’t see nothing.  Gotta open my eye.  Cut me, Mick.”

Faced with the ravages of time and a shot at going the distance (not winning, mind you) with the champ, Rocky burned his ships.  He asked his trainer to demolish his face by cutting it with a razor to relieve the swelling…for one more chance.

Most of us will never be faced with a choice like that…The choice to seek the knife or the needle just to perform one last time.  But we do face choices as to how hard we play. We do demonstrate how badly we want to get what we can from our skills.

What does “all in” really mean in a professional setting?  I can’t say for you.  I can say that, for me it means making the most of what you have, and not letting the “outs” dominate the “ends.”

I’d love your thoughts on this one.

 

 

 

Have it M.A.D.E. With Your Team

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A short primer on how to lead yourself and your team.

Remember when you followed somebody else who really wasn’t great at managing process? Remember how you used to talk about how no one knew what to do or where to go next?

Remember when you finally had to lead other people, and you realized how hard it is to manage other people toward a goal?

Yeah, me too.  I have found that the best leaders combine a keen intellect–thought leadership–with a keen sense of process leadership.

You can find process leaders out there who are world class, and you can find thought leaders out there who are world class, but the Venn diagram doesn’t overlap as much as you would think.  A world class leader understands the content, intent, steps, and closure point for an initiative.

And…everything is an initiative.

But how can us mere mortals define reality for our teams?  I’ll put it in four points you must define.

First is your mission.  The mission is the message.  What is the intended result…not the action steps, but the outcome.  You have to start with this.  We expect to increase margins by 200 basis points.

Second is, oddly enough, the activities.  You have to give at least some definition to the steps you will take.  They may not be exactly right, but you have to prime the pump. We will investigate discounts offered on our key accounts by pulling the last 6 months’ data.

Third is the deliverable.  Yes, it’s an aggravating word for me as well, but it’s a useful one.  What are you going to deliver?  We will propose specific actions to achieve the mission.

Finally, you need to define the endpoint.  When is the word actually done, because the deliverable isn’t always it. We will consider ourselves finished when changes to key accounts are accepted by the key accounts manager. 

Mission
Activities
Deliverable
Endpoint

It’s a simple framework for leading pretty much anything.  You might say you can have it M.A.D.E. when you use such a simple process to define reality for your teams.

Good luck out there.

When Your Story Misses The Point

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Narratives are fantastic…as long as they don’t skirt the point.

 

A couple of nights ago, I had the opportunity to watch the musical Les Misérables in NYC.

This was not the first time I had enjoyed the production.  I have fond memories of seeing the show about 15 years ago in San Francisco.  It was, however, the first time I’ve seen the show since actually reading the expansive and impressive book by Victor Hugo that the musical is based on.

The musical production was outstanding. If you’ve never seen it, it’s well worth your time. The music, the characters, the settings, and the story all combine into a moving experience.

But it got me thinking about something that might be relevant to our strategic management lives.

At the risk of going full literary nerd, I’ll try to keep this short.  Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables is a scathing polemic. It is a tour de force that takes apart real social issues of justice (and grace), poverty, class, politics, sanitation, and struggle.  The novelist went to great lengths to describe not only how things were in France, but why they were and perhaps what needed to change. This latter point he rarely takes on directly…leaving it instead to the reader to interpret his often sardonic references to things that just don’t make sense. He used characters to bring his narrative to life. And, he did that well. Hugo’s own words introducing the book show his purpose, and here they are.

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Victor Hugo had a point.  He had an aim in writing the book (while in exile from his own country, I might add):  Illuminating the often senseless mechanisms of government and culture that conspire to destroy lives.  On some level, his illustrations ring as true today as they did 150+ years ago.

The musical play takes the characters and makes a stunning production–a stunning narrative–out of them, but only touches on the rest of Hugo’s point.  The play takes the characters–who were many ways incidental to Hugo’s point–and makes them the point.  And that ok, but only because one is a book and one is a play.  Which brings us (finally) to the point of this post.

The point…

Narratives–even really beautiful narratives that are moving and exciting and stimulating–can miss the point. This is true for a musical play on Broadway as much as it is for your leadership or business strategy.

The only difference is that people can still get their money’s worth from the Broadway play that is off point from the original work, while your business can run off the rails (and have you run off on  a rail) if you resort to creative narrative that misses your strategic imperative.

What do I mean by that?  Well, let me illustrate a few painfully real examples.

Company 1 has a real financial problem driven by the decline in demand for its products due to a real change in customer preferences. In small group sessions, management knows this reality and calls it out as a crisis.  In forming their creative and stimulating narrative, management buries the reality under a glossy brochure of product leadership, employee engagement, and brand.  The “book” that management writes confronts the issue directly.  The “play” almost buries it.

Company 2 has a clear threat from a much larger company whose product might also be better. In small group sessions management admits that its product might not be up to snuff.  In the narrative delivered to the entire organization, their own “outstanding product” is front and center.  The narrative misses the point of a real need to improve the product–urgently.

These examples are out there every day.  Why is it that more people have seen the play Les Misérables than have likely ever read the book?  Well, it’s because watching the play is easier.  It’s easier to digest and then to go on about your business.

And, that’s a good thing.  It’s the reason we use narratives to communicate strategy.  That’s why engaging employees around a great presentation or video or brochure can actually be effective.

But…

The narrative has to be on point.  The story you form to communicate your strategy must not bury the point. It has to confront the elephants in the room.

I suspect that if Victor Hugo were to magically appear at a production of the musical version of Les Misérables he would be astounded and flattered…and he might see called out implicitly in the play some of the social ills he worked so hard to call out in his book.  But, he would probably also know how much the convenient and entertaining narrative leaves out.

And, sometimes, it’s what you leave out that matters.

I’d love to have your thoughts on this one.