I find articles and interviews with executives, and just plain folks, about what drives them fascinating. They’re always so upbeat, civil—and sanitized. It’s as if our culture will only accept positive motivators for accomplishment, whereas motivators with a negative connotation are left unsaid, although they are easily discerned. I know from years of conversations with people at all levels that revenge drives many of them.

So it was great fun to read the Business Week article Sweet Revenge that really spelled this out. As Kenneth N. Siegel, a Los Angeles psychologist and coach to senior executives, says, “It’s one of the great undiscussable…”

Our society acts is if doing something to prove to someone that you can is considered OK, whereas doing it to get even for their saying that you couldn’t do it makes you not quite nice.

Bunk.

If constructive criticism is acceptable, then constructive revenge is also, but it must be constructive. Boards and bosses can’t stand idly by while knives fly and, metaphorically speaking, people die.

The difference between constructive revenge and destructive revenge is implicit in the two adjectives—the former builds and the latter tears down.

For six thumbnails, starting in 1853, of the positive results of revenge check out A Brief History Of Corporate Revenge and of course, the story of Mickey Drexler is absolutely classic.

One way to take the temperature of the labor market is title bloat and title creativity; based on that, it seems to be heating up.

It also means that I get calls from clients asking what to do, so here are five simple rules to address title innovation in your organization.

1. Absolutely avoid title bloat, especially where it contributes to compensation problems. For example, does giving someone a VP title, but not VP-level work, entitle that person to a bonus reserved for executives?
2. People aren’t dumb, so don’t try and con them. Being called an associate, instead of an employee, may seem more respectful, but it doesn’t offset pay or benefits.
3. Titles, even those that need some explanation, should be accurate enough that they don’t confuse internally or externally (vendors, customers, investors, etc.).
4. Titles that reflect a new function should be formally announced, e.g., Director of Culture at Southwest Airlines.
5. Be sure to ignore titles when you’re hiring. Lee Burbage, Motley Fool’s vice president of human resources says, “It’s the job description that matter…The only thing a title can tell me is a sense of progression.”

How important is it for the boss to be liked? It turns out that it’s very important these days.

Want proof? Look at the difference between Robert Nardelli and James McNerney.

Likability isn’t just for CEOs, it’s for bosses at all levels, in every type of business.

Likability is the basis for

• strong stakeholder buy-in,
• putting innovation in overdrive,
• achieving company goals and
• a culture that attracts and retains the talent it takes to grow.

Likability isn’t about glad-handing, backslapping or being nice.

Likability stems from your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™. It’s about

• respecting and valuing your people;
• knowing that good ideas come from all levels;
• being open and honest in your communications;
• never forgetting that you put your pants on one leg at a time, the same as everybody else; and
• remembering that your MAP isn’t set in stone.

Read an article on how the acronyms students use in text messaging are inadvertently showing up in other areas, such as schoolwork and email. It mentions a site called Netlingo that translates that offers acronym translation for the rest of us.

Much of the shorthand consists of using initials to represent “common” phrases, but I wonder how many young people would be horrified to learn that many of their beloved expressions date back to their grandparents or before; terms such as WOMBAT, SNAFU, and 86’d, the last two being listed on the Top 20.

I often try to leave my readers with weekend food for thought, although this may qualify more as food for nightmares.

For all you managers (unless you’re retiring shortly), soon-to-be-managers, and manager wannabes, these are the people you’ll be hiring in a just a few short years, who’ll be responsible for communicating with your customers, vendors, and the media.

Definitely food for nightmares!

Success is like a 3-legged stool—

Customers / equity-holders / employees

If one leg becomes too long, the stool tips over!

Taking care of the first two is a given, whereas, taking care of employees seems to be based on the labor market.

If the market is hot, people are showered with money and perks, as the market cools, so does employee care.

Yes, you can buy people and you can replace people, but it’s very expensive!

So, remember, people who join for money/stock will leave for more money/stock.

However, if you

• do the right thing,
• treat them fairly,
• give them interesting work,
• enable their growth, and
• satisfy most of their intangible hot buttons

then they’ll be

• more productive,
• innovative,
• committed,
• caring,
• happier, and
• healthier.

What more can any boss ask?

People are up in arms regarding the outlandish paychecks that abound in both business and academia, not to mention the astronomical value in being fired.

More and more, employees are looking to join socially responsible companies, i.e., companies that do the right thing, and there is no reason that this shouldn’t apply to compensation.

Can you set compensation that measures up on the “doing the right thing” yardstick?

Yes. When compensation (be it cash or stock) is done “right,” there is an obvious, logical, elegant relativity between the pay of an MTS, a director, and a CEO.

Could following such a plan cramp hiring, making it difficult to land a particular candidate?

Possibly; but before you violate it, remember the old axiom, “Nobody can be duplicated, but [almost] anyone can be replaced.” Compare your candidate, relatively speaking, to the few, the very few, who are truly not replaceable—Steve Jobs being the most obvious.

The most common reason that managers hire outside their company’s salary curve isn’t that the candidate is truly a water-walker, but because in order to walk away they must be willing to continue the search—and they aren’t.

You can often overcome this if you take the time to explain your plan to candidates, including the values it represents and the logic upon which it’s founded; assure the candidate of the plan’s inherent fairness and that peer compensation is all in the same range; and that managers’ favoritism, or candidates’ charm and negotiating skill, is not the basis for compensation.

Finally, there’s an additional benefit to hiring the do-the-right-thing crowd. Generally speaking, you’ll find these employees to be more productive, more loyal, and more aggressively interested in their company’s success than the norm—attitudes that show up directly in your bottom line.

Google is the 10,000 pound gorilla, so anything it does is discussed, analyzed and frequently copied. That’s why managers everywhere are pondering the NYT story regarding Google’s latest approach to hiring. It’s understandable, considering that, “Google has doubled the number of employees in each of the last three year…no reason the company will not double again in size this year. That would increase the number of hires to about 200 a week.”

Google’s known for only hiring grads with a 3.7+ GPA, double 800 SAT scores and world-class interviewing skills—none of which are viable predictors of creativity or working success.

So Google decided that they would create a profile of the traits of current employees, then create a candidate test and use an algorithm to search for applicants who tested similarly.

Psychological profiling isn’t new; companies have been using various forms of it to improve hiring results for over 50 years. Granted, Google asked their employees 300 questions to develop a finer profile, as well as developing a proprietary algorithm with which to screen candidates.

Then they made the same error that so many others have made—before you can access the test you need to choose the position(s) that best fit you; only then can take the test to see if your profile is similar to the others who have succeeded in those positions.

Well, that’s one way to homogenize your company, but not necessarily a great way to bring in the best innovators.

Successful hiring always seems to have a touch of magic involved, and the best practitioners are viewed with a bit of awe. But it’s not magic, it’s what happens when a company sets out to make sure that every manager and employee is skilled at interviewing and the myriad of other actions needed to attract, screen and successfully hire and keep talent; in other words—making staffing, with or without HR, a core competency.

Even when their company doesn’t pursue hiring excellence, many mangers choose to do it themselves. Those who do are easy to recognize, because their groups are highly motivated, innovative, with great morale, low attrition, and they fill their openings fast—often with internally referred candidates.

So, no matter what you read, or what the 10,000 pound gorillas do, give yourself an edge by focusing your efforts on honing yours, and your organization’s, hiring skills; and don’t put your candidates in a box created by where they went to school, previously worked; the position held or even their current skills—at least not if your goal is to increase creativity and innovation.

I don’t know about the rest of you but 2006 has vanished and no one I’ve talked with (clients or contacts) seems to know where it went. Now we’re facing 2007 and the one thing most of us are sure of is that we better be well prepared! That means we need to plan and execute!

Over the years I’ve come to believe that the ability to plan and execute (p/e) are genetic traits that many of us are either lacking or they’re recessive. I say this on two levels, one very personal and the other based on years of interacting with clients and individuals.

Planners, i.e., those with the gene, aren’t necessarily the best teachers for us non-planners because they have this weird idea that planning is logical, it comes naturally—how else can you get the results you want when going from A to B, (in this case January to December) they ask—all it only takes a good plan to follow.

(They really can’t imagine not doing it—which is what I call weird thinking. Now, I’m a good p/e teacher for those without the gene, because I don’t have those basic “of course” assumptions.)

But planning alone isn’t enough; it’s only the starting point. Granted that p/e-defective genes aren’t all equal; a person can be far stronger in one area than the other, however, difficulty with planning frequently is the harbinger of faulty-to-no execution. I say this based on both personal experience and observation of the several thousand managers and individuals I’ve met over the years; a pretty fair sampling that might even be statistically significant.

Through client contact and business reading I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two identifiable factors present in varying intensity every time a company or a person did plan for something. Not desire, not even need; the critical factor that drives planning seems to be fear. In other words, whether it’s me, a small company, or Lou Gerstner when he took responsibility for IBM, planning is done most often and comprehensively when one’s back is to a wall and the fire’s closing in.

However, a plan is only a dream if it isn’t executed. So if it’s fear that drives planning, what drives execution? That’s easy, execution is driven by terror, i.e., fear to the nth power, or, continuing the analogy above, the fire has closed and one is getting scorched. At that point, most people become Olympic executing champions; they take responsibility, they make it happen, etc.

And therein lays the danger. When planning is based in fear, and execution is driven by terror, manager’s are more likely to become micro-managers who try and control the actions of all those below them to be sure that everything gets done, instead of empowering and enabling them to buy in at the planning stage and then trusting them to actively help drive its execution because they believe in it.

The way to change this isn’t gene-corrective surgery, rather it’s teaching yourself to move early, preferably before the first hints of fear and terror. This gives you more time to think and discuss, and your organization more time to offer input, be comfortable with the plan and believe in their ability to execute it.

One of the most culturally blind CEO’s is gone. Robert L. Nardelli was terminated by his Board—albeit with a $210 million exit package. (For interesting reading check out his employment contract) A companion article claims that Nardelli’s ousting should serve as a warning to other CEOs, but I find that debatable. His Board backed him for six years, unlike the 100 day window, pushed by Wall Street.

But the article I found really interesting was an analysis on how well the vaunted GE managers do when transplanted.

Although business similarities were cited in moves that worked, much of it came down to culture. Change is difficult even when the CEO is promoted from within—think Jeff Immelt moving GE to a culture of innovation.

Nardelli combined a stomp-the-culture attitude with a mind-boggling level of arrogance for results that were terrible for investors, customers and employees—but great for the competition.

Success often comes down to culture, not just for the CEO, but also for the company.

In today’s fast moving business environment and global competition, the best CEOs mind their metrics and their cultures.

There is an ongoing debate in academic, and other, circles as to whether or not humans have free will.

Reading the latest arguments made for an interesting break, but my final reaction was, “Who cares.” However, the manager with whom I was discussing it was thoroughly upset and demanded to know how I could think that. He said that if he had no free will then all his efforts to improve had no value, since the results were predetermined, it didn’t matter what he did. (Hey, we all have bad days.)

When I explained why I thought his reaction was way out in left field, he said I should blog the answer, that it would do other’s a lot of good, so I did.

Primarily, I don’t care because I’ve found that everything is a matter of perception, and that for every person who proclaims TRUTH (in capitals), there is a counter perception held just as vehemently by someone else.

When people seek to improve/change skills, attitudes or whatever, they do so because they perceive a benefit in doing so, whether there actually is one of not is beside the point.

Fortunately, or not, no matter what the perception, one can find like-minded people who share it—the Earth is round, but not to everybody.

Life lasts a certain amount of time and all lives have highs and lows, but it’s the perception of the individual that determines which is which.

In other words, the choice is yours.