There’s a good article in Workforce Management (you may have to register, but it’s free) detailing why having excellent strategic vision, confidence and communication skills can kill your ability to lead instead of guaranteeing it.

‘[If you want] employees to embrace and adopt a new strategy, those who take their vision, confidence and communication skills to an excess can actually erode the commitment of their people…

…securing employee commitment requires dividing leaders’ job of gaining commitment into two categories: issues of content and context…

There are two basic content issues for leaders: demonstrating to employees that the plan is valid…and communicating the plan in language and concepts they understand…

If employees don’t feel the plan is valid or don’t understand it…they will not commit themselves to implementing it…

The context issues are the perceptions of those who must implement the strategy…Four fundamental perceptions set the context: credibility and sincerity; …courage…competence…and their care and concern for those who will be affected by it.’

• Achieving buy-in means involving staff—the more the better.

• It’s about listening—not just talking.

• It’s about hearing—and being willing to change when appropriate.

Running a company in today’s corporate doesn’t lend itself to edicts and pronouncements—unless you enjoy the constant challenge of hiring.

How do you achieve buy-in?

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Ran into a great link to Ethispherhe Magazine’s 100 most influential people in business ethics on Sox First.”The selection panel used some rigorous criteria: impact on government rules and regulations, business leadership, design and sustainability, handling of whistleblowers, thought leadership, culture, investment and research and corporate culture.”

Four of the Top 10 fell in the category of “Business Leadership – Did the individual substantially transform a specific business’ operational practices consistent with profitable ethical leadership, forcing competitors to follow suit or fall behind?”

It makes perfect sense to me that GE’s Jeff Immelt is number 3 and that Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy is number 7 and Fluor’s Alan Boeckmann is number 8, but how in the heck did Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott make fourth place?

“Scott became one of the most visible “green converts” back in 2006, and during 2007 he continued to put his energy-saving and sustainability initiatives into action. Under “Sustainability 360,” the company is working with suppliers to take non-renewable energy out of regular business operations and to reduce packaging by 5% by 2013- the equivalent of taking 213,000 trucks off of the road.”

And if history is any guide, the targets will likely be achieved through edict with little consideration or help to the vendors ordered to comply.

Who made the list that annoys you?

Your comments—priceless

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In honor of President’s Day, the Biz Channel’s intrepid editor Kelly, AKA Tax Girl, wrote an amazing post linking quotes from all 43 Presidents to an appropriate blog, which took a ton of work and is very cool!But as I read through it I had a sinking feeling and my stomach started getting queasy. I just knew it was gonna happen in spite of the fact that I Kelly and I like each other. I knew it, I just knew it—and it did, right at the end.

Yeah, you guessed it; I got the link from GWB, master of inchoate thoughts, bungled comments and abuser of the English language.

“I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together.”

All I can say it that I may write a leadership blog, but I’m no leadership!

So I wrote to our list and asked Kelly if I’d done something to annoy her, at which point, Miranda, of Yielding Wealth fame, jumped in saying that she’d take GWB with this quote,

“This is an impressive crowd — the haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

There are so many comments that display his cogent style, but this one, early on, showed his true colors.

“Bill [Clinton] wrote a book at Yale. I read one.”

Yeah, guy, it really shows.

What’s you favorite Bushism?

Your comments—priceless

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The article is fascinating, the implications terrifying and I hope the quotes are enough to get you to read the whole thing.

“Should research scientists who have financial stakes in the products they are writing about be forced to disclose those ties?…”

“More than 60 percent of clinical studies–those involving human subjects–are now funded not by the federal government, but by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries…”

“…studies published in scientific journals like Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine…are increasingly likely to be designed, controlled, and sometimes even ghost-written by marketing departments, rather than academic scientists.

Companies routinely delay or prevent the publication of data that show their drugs are ineffective. The majority of studies that found such popular antidepressants as Prozac and Zoloft to be no better than placebos, for instance, never saw print in medical journals, a fact that is coming to light only now that the Food and Drug Administration has launched a reexamination of those drugs.”…

“…Increasing numbers of studies that get published are actually written by PR firms, “medical communications” specialists, who then go out and recruit an academic willing to put his name on the paper, for a fee…”

” In 1997, when Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of public policy at Tufts University, surveyed 61,134 articles in some 181 journals, he found that only 0.5 percent disclosed a conflict of interest related to the topic of the article, an impossibly low number…”

“By the time medical residents enter private practice or the lab, the gifts from industry no longer seem like gifts, but entitlements…”

” When industry has penetrated every level of medicine from the lab bench to the FDA advisory panels, from the pages of the medical journals to your doctor’s prescription pad, how are physicians to make decisions about treating their patients?”

What now. This isn’t just a dirty little corporate secret—or even a big one that can crash the economy like the sub prime mess.

This problem is legal, pervasive and grounded in the self-delusional arrogance of some of our most respected citizens.

What will you do if faced with the need to evaluate a drug for your child, loved one or yourself? What information can you trust? Whom can you trust?

What can we do?

Your comments—priceless

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“With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market for itself.” —Business Week, August 2, 1968

Now it’s your turn!

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“[By 1965] the deluxe open-road care will probably be 20 feet long, powered by a gas turbine engine, little brother to the jet engine.” —Leo Cheren (Editor and Publisher of the Research Institute of America), 1955

Now it’s your turn!

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Every Sunday I post three off-beat quotes (6 AM, noon, and 4 PM Eastern Time) from famous people or media and you respond with another stupid quote either from the same person or on a similar or connected topic—the further out and more outrageous the quote the better.If the connection isn’t fairly obvious it’s up to you to explain it.

“[The nickel-iron battery will put] the gasoline buggies …out of existence in no time.” —Thomas Alva Edison, 1910

Now it’s your turn!

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The difficulty of getting an appointment to see your doctor (wait time) is the bogyman thrown up to defeat universal healthcare, but the statistics don’t back that up. According a Business Week article citing a study by the Commonwealth Fund,“If you find a suspicious-looking mole and want to see a dermatologist, you can expect an average wait of 38 days in the U.S., and up to 73 days if you live in Boston…a knee injury… the average time needed to see an orthopedic surgeon ranges from 8 days in Atlanta to 43 days in Los Angeles. Nationwide, the average is 17 days.”… only 40% of U.S. doctors have arrangements for after-hours care, vs. 75% in the rest of the industrialized world… 51% of sick Americans surveyed did not visit a doctor, get a needed test, or fill a prescription within the past two years because of cost. No other country came close.”

In the Washington Monthly Kevin Drum cites the BW article and also mentions that “…the numbers are inflated because we don’t count the people who can’t get nonemergency surgery [such as hip replacements] because they’re uninsured…,” while the comments left by readers put real stories to the statistics.

Not all physicians are against a universal health program, which is smart since many Americans of more modest means are traveling in order to off-shore their healthcare needs—surgical and otherwise.

“Gary Hulmes, a furniture store manager from Florida who went to New Delhi to have spinal surgery done and paid a total of $9,000 including airfare, a five-day hospital stay, and a total stay of three weeks in India (with some sightseeing thrown in). If performed in a US hospital, the same procedure would have cost $36,000 – 50,000.”

In Europe healthcare is measured, evaluated and reported publicly by Health Consumer Powerhouse Euro Health Consumer Index 2007.

The report makes for interesting reading.

“All the 27 EU members are of course included in this year’s index as well as Switzerland and Norway.”

‘The 2007 Index is, just like in 2006, built up as a “pentathlon”, with indicators grouped in five sub-disciplines. After having had to surrender to the “lack of statistics syndrome”, and after scrutiny by our expert panels, 27 indicators survived into the EHCI 2007.

The indicator areas for the EHCI 2007 thus became:

Sub-discipline Number of indicators

• Patient rights and information 9
• Waiting time for treatment 5
• Outcomes 5
• “Generosity” 4
• Pharmaceuticals 4″

Dr. David J. Brailer is point man on the Administration’s “…effort to remake the $1.9 trillion U.S. health-care business by using information technology to save money and lives…Paying for the network will be the first major hurdle. Many cash-strapped hospitals and small-practice doctors have no interest in footing the bill for a medical Internet. One key reason is the mismatch between costs and savings: While health-care providers bear the cost of tech investments, Medicare and private insurers reap almost all the savings.”

Then, of course, there are all those cute, educational consumer ads for drugs to help things along.

Of course, any discussion of healthcare wold be incomplete without some reference to the insurance industry. An industry, to my mind, far more committed to executive compensation and investor profits than service to its policy holders. Rather than add to the thousands of commentary already out there, I thought I’d leave you with a visual that, to me, says it all.

So what comes first?
Finding a way to pay for healthcare or knowing what we’re paying for?
Would the money being spent on pork and corporate subsidies be better spent on healthcare for all Americans?
If not, should the companies that currently pay no, or little, tax be the focus as opposed to small business?
What do you think should/can be done to fix this mess?

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Matt Weeks has held various management positions in the financial services/banking industry, started, ran and sold a small business, ran a successful consulting practice and currently is CEO/founder of stealth mode startup eyeTmedia.

“The idea of some sort of assessment or tax on businesses to fund health care for those citizens who are otherwise not covered is a bad idea.

While I agree that ER room medicine is not smart preventative, wellness-based medicine and is not good social or fiscal policy, we have to find a different approach other than force-funding it on the back of business. And take note, it will primarily fall on small businesses.

Most of the businesses in our Great Country are “small businesses.” When I was at Intuit, makers of QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax, my team launched the Online Payroll Service. In the course of understanding what our customers wanted, we discovered that most of the “small business” enterprises were in fact sole proprietors, or very small companies with fewer than six employees, counting the owner(s).

Now let’s reconcile that fact (check with the SBA and DOL -Department Of Labor) with the other reality that most “workers” in The United States are employed at these small businesses. Not huge corporations. Thus the main “driver” of employment as well as productivity in the country are these small businesses.

One final step: If we believe the Fed, when they tell us that the driver of our economy is spending in the retail sector, then we must look directly to the bulk of the employees and their families for that spend, presumably coming from disposable income. So it is circular, as the small business employees spend their disposable income at other small businesses. Thus we still live in villages to a greater extent than we may believe.

However, small businesses have a devil’s bargain. If they are burdened with an additional expense in the form of a tax or assessment (like an extra payroll tax), they will have to lay off employees, or drastically reduce their pay, or their pay increases, absent some dramatic increase in productivity or other business growth. I cannot connect the dots between less cash in the company and dramatic growth. Less cash is not a driver of business health and expansion.

So the net effect of this well-intentioned but ill-thought-through idea will be less cash in the economy, lower net wages for employees, and questionable coverage, which is not mapped-out.

You might say that this will not impact these “small businesses” and that we’ll focus on the large businesses. The problem here is that those large businesses that do not already provide a reasonably sensible benefits package are, by definition, stingy and mean-spirited. They are unlikely to have some epiphany about “doing the right thing” and are more likely to just move offshore. As in moving all the jobs they can move offshore. Not a good thing either. That just leaves us with fewer employed people to pay for this whole idea.

So large companies who are bad actors are not likely to be the source of this cash (and will likely cut and run), and the bulk of employees in the country who work for small businesses are likely to be in even more pain if their companies are forced to make meaningful payments to some centrally managed health care superfund. And who among us believe that such a superfund will be efficient or effective?

So I say “yes” we need to approach the problem, and keep the value of covering the non-covered. I just suggest thinking it through a bit more. Many people think “business” is the big bad corporation. In fact, our economy is based on small businesses, and perhaps the only true ethical accountability for “doing the right thing” exists there, at the local, in-person level. Let’s dig a bit deeper and find a more effective approach.

It’s a hard problem. I don’t have answers… But I do know that a blanket “tax” or “assessment” on a monolithic “business” category is wrong-headed and overly simplistic given the complexity of the problem.”

Does the US really need to raise taxes to fund healthcare or is the money actually there, but being incorrectly spent via pork, earmarks, etc.?

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My buddy Bob Turek writes Project Management 411 and we got into a discussion regarding Bob’s post on the difficulty ‘in they can’t get the multi-divisional executive team scheduled to sit down and make the “consensus” decision to go ahead.’

Bob wrote, ‘The problem is that there has not been a reason, up to now, to have a standardized process affecting multi-divisional consideration of projects, tactics and strategy alignment.’

I replied, ‘I’m not disagreeing with you. Good process, as long as it doesn’t ossify into bureaucracy, makes any project or action move faster. I just believe that processes are the structural underpinnings of culture, so without the right culture processes will be flawed and actions subject to the chaos of disparate egos.’

Processes created outside or in ignorance of the existing culture won’t work. It’s that simple.

That’s because the culture, whether created top down or allowed to percolate up from the ranks, is anchored by and tied to the CEO’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

If that MAP is tolerant of raging egos then the resulting culture will not be one of building consensus, sharing information or helping others.

Do the processes in your company take its culture into consideration?

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