To mY generation author Jim Gordon, the saga of George II is a perfect parallel to Shakespear’s Richard III. Join Jim over the next few weeks to see this saga play out. See all mY generation posts here.

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Convicted felons may not be able to vote, but when they’re just under indictment they can run for office, win the primary and maybe even win in the general election.

I’m not talking about some local or even state office; I’m talking about the US Senate.

I’m talking about 84 year old Ted Stevens; the Republican Alaskan’s have elected the last seven terms.

“Federal prosecutors allege Stevens lied on Senate disclosure reports to conceal more than $250,000 in home renovations and gifts from oil industry executives. He was caught up in a federal investigation of corruption in Alaska politics that has seen three state lawmakers sent to federal prison and two more awaiting trial. All five are Republicans.”

But I understand why he garnered 63% of the primary vote—as a friend said, “He does for constituents what he did for himself.”

Although what Stevens did for himself pales in comparison to the amount of pork he’s brought home over the years.

“According to Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington watchdog group, Stevens sponsored a total of 1,452 pork barrel projects worth $3.4 billion between 1995 and 2008, making Alaska the No. 1 state in pork per capita every year since 1999.”

Stevens House compatriot Don Young may even be worse. His achievements include

“…a $223 million check from the federal government, the bridge will connect Gravina (20-mile-long island, home to fewer than 50 people, has no stores, no restaurants and no paved roads) to the bustling Alaskan metropolis of Ketchikan, pop. 8,000 and $231 million for a bridge that will connect Anchorage to Port MacKenzie, a rural area that has exactly one resident, north of the town of Knik, pop. 22.”

Legal or not, the abuse of power is stunning. Pork like this may not be a felony, but it should be!

What do you think?

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Oh goody. More support for my decades of harping on the importance of corporate culture. I’ve been preaching that corporate culture was number one on candidates’ list of “wants” since the late Seventies (Good grief, where did the time go?)—long before most companies would listen.

Hollister, a Massachusetts staffing firm, just published a survey confirming this. And although it was done strictly in Massachusetts, it’s representative—more so because these are hardheaded Yankees, not touchy-feely Californians. Nor was it a survey of Millennials or moms, just a cross section of people.

“The Workforce Survey polled over 1,000 people throughout the Commonwealth, both employed and unemployed. When asked to rank which factors contribute most to their job satisfaction, the majority of people polled ranked Company Culture first followed by Opportunities for Growth, Employee Appreciation, Work/Life Balance, and a good Benefits Package. Listed last was Competitive Salary/Pay.”

As I’ve always said, “The person who joins for money will leave for more money.”

Amusingly, opportunities for growth, employee appreciation and work/life balance are either part of, or the results from, a good culture—even a good benefits package reflects a company’s culture.

Click the link, download the survey and then give some thought to your culture and how it performs in these areas.

What’s in your culture?

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Yesterday, Dave Zinger reviewed a book called The Myth of Multitasking.

Also yesterday, Brenda left a comment on an old (before my time) post on my other blog that led me to a 2001 APA article explaining “executive control.” “[It] involves two distinct, complementary stages: goal shifting (”I want to do this now instead of that”) and rule activation (”I’m turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this”). Both stages help people unconsciously switch between tasks.”

The time spent shifting is yet another reason why multitasking is a myth.

All this reminded me of a post I wrote in 2006 that is overdue for republishing right now.

Smart or stupid? Your choice!

Back in early 2003 I read an article in the Wall Street Journal called Multitasking Makes You Stupid and I cheered. Why? Because it’s always nice to have one’s opinion confirmed through scientific study by experts with lots of credentials—especially when most of the people around you are bragging about how well they multitask.

I got to thinking about that and did a bit more searching to see if anything’s changed. There’s one study that looked at gender differences and came to the conclusion that whereas productivity is about equal, women have a slight advantage in accuracy. I’m certainly not claiming I read all 250,000 pages returned on a search using the terms, multitasking study Dr university, but scanning through the first hundred I didn’t notice anything that contradicted what I’ve always thought—multitasking is not productive!

So what’s happened since the original article appeared? More ways to multitask; more managers demanding that their people do it; and more people bragging about their skill at it—more errors, accidents and loss of productivity.

Don’t believe me? Think about

• what it’s like talking to someone who is reading email or doing other computer tasks during the conversation;
• how close you’ve come to creaming someone, or being creamed, while talking on a cell;
• the last time you didn’t notice the sirens ’cause you were listening to an iPod or talking on a cell.

And before you write all this off with the famous “but me” argument ask yourself: are you really that different from the rest of the human race?

For more insights read HBS working Knowledge columnist Stever Robbins (among many others), then read my Think, dream, innovate, and then really think about how you want to run your life!

What percentage of the day do you spend multitasking?

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Click to see my other WW: another corporate decision-making tool

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Do you consider an offer of help charity?

Here’s the background for my question.

Yes, I earn my living as a coach. But on both of the blogs I write I have a standing offer to my readers for free coaching assistance. Not only has no one taken advantage of me, no one has taken advantage of the offer.

I often help to friends and associates when they hit a snag and my expertise can ease the problem. Again, none have taken advantage of me.

I can afford to do this because what’s often a challenge to one person is easy to another with that particular expertise, so it’s not like I’m offering up the next X years of my life.

That’s the background, here’s what happened.

A guy, call him Jim, and I are volunteers for the same professional organization and have gotten to know each other over the last few years. Jim is CEO of a small, privately-owned company.

To make this short, we were talking on the phone and Jim mentioned that he had to replace a person on his staff and it was critical to make the right choice.

So I offered him some coaching, he said “great,” and I said that I’d send some written material that I used in my practice and then we cold talk.

When I didn’t hear back in a couple of days, I resent the files thinking that they hadn’t gone through (happens all the time).

Jim replied as follows, “I will not waste / take your time without compensation. Perhaps calling it charity is a poor choice, but if I am not paying I will not waste / take your expertise.”

I wasn’t looking for compensation—of course, I wouldn’t have turned it down if it was offered, but in companies such as Jim’s I know that it can be a difficult sell to the owners—but it annoyed me no end that Jim made the decision based on his assumptions.

Didn’t ask/discuss/mention, just decided.

Do you agree with Jim’s actions?  Am I annoyed for no reason?

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Nerys Wadham, in commenting on the changes in the corner offices at BP and GlaxoSmithKline, says, “…culture perhaps being less about ‘the people’ collectively than the CEO individually. The tone, look and feel of a firm are to a great extent set from the mindset and world view at the top.”

I can’t stress enough how true this is.

It’s the boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that creates the form and shape of the corporate culture.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a mom and pop operation, startup or global giant; whether the company has two, two thousand or twenty thousand employees; whether the boss is called owner, founder, president or CEO.

Best Buy’s vaunted ROWE could not have taken root, nor would it have spread throughout the company, without a top boss who enabled the bottom-up culture in the first place, as well as providing the fertilizer that allows ideas to bloom.

It’s not enough to announce the cultural attributes in which you believe, such as no politics, and then ignore political actions because you believe that your senior staff are adults and won’t engage in behavior that goes unrewarded.

Even if you want to manage your culture by benign neglect, people need to know that there are repercussions for actions that flaunt the corporate culture just as there are for actions that violate legal issues such as harassment.

All this is just as true for the individual subcultures that establish themselves around every manager in the company.

Creating and caring for the culture around you should be written into every manager’s job description at every level.

If that bothers you, just remember that culture affects productivity, engagement, innovation and retention.

And if that’s not enough motivation for you to pay attention then stay focused on the MY-CCF mantra—my compensation, my career path, my future.

What do you do abut culture?

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College presidents want to take a radical approach to dealing with underage drinking on university campuses—lower the drinking age.

It’s an interesting debate, with more support than you might expect.

“Opinion polls suggest most Americans support enforcing current drinking laws,” but I wonder if that’s a knee-jerk reaction or well thought out reasoning.

The college presidents and their supporters cast it as a choice between “just say no,” which is the only option until age 21, or the ability to teach responsible drinking without breaking the law.

I’m not sure what makes these houses of higher education believe that they’ll have more success teaching responsible drinking between 18 and 21 than the parents, churches, and various other groups had during years 0-18.

Unfortunately, today’s kids tend to listen to their peers for better or worse, so the major benefit may be keeping their record clean for when they finally grow up—assuming they do.

(Hat tip on this to Jean at Small Business Boomers.)

What do you think?

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Another favorite of mine, Robert Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule added his thoughts to BW’s cover story Business@Work.

In a short, hard-hitting piece, Sutton says that “One of the most compelling, and frightening, academic literatures I know is about something called “emotional contagion,” which has the power to turn almost anybody into a jerk.

The research shows “…that most people, regardless of their personality traits, will automatically and mindlessly start feeling and displaying the emotions expressed by the people around them,” and says it has happened more than once to him.

Next up is research that confirms that power does indeed corrupt, and it doesn’t take much to do the job. “A growing body of research—notably by professors Dachner Keltner at University of California, Berkeley, Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford, and their students—documents that three things happen when people are put in positions of power:

1. They focus more on satisfying their own needs;
2. They focus less on the needs of their underlings;
3. They act like “the rules” others are expected to follow don’t apply to them.

Keltner also cites research showing that power leads people to process information in shallower ways and to make decisions that are less carefully reasoned.”

Hilariously, given just a smidgeon of power and people “eat more cookies, chew with their mouths open, and leave more crumbs.”

The way to avoid these traps is by honing a high state of self-awareness, while cultivating a circle who tells you the truth no matter what. This approach is in line Stanford professor Hayagreeva Rao’s recent hypothesis “…that CEOs with teenage children are less likely to suffer from the power poisoning described by Keltner and Gruenfeld. He reasons that no matter how much deference they get at work, at home they face sons and daughters who constantly challenge their power and question their judgment.”

Gee, who knew that teenage angst and rebellion served a higher cause than just making adults miserable.

What do you do to avoid contagion and corruption?

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