A few of weeks ago I wrote about how kids believe they are entitled to good grades for trying as opposed to achieving.

That post was sparked by Andrew’s comment and he also sent me an article about grade inflation in colleges showing that the trend is progressing unabated.

An article today in the NYTimes describes a new approach to grades,

“In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization…standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.”

“I was never the A student, and it would constantly frustrate me,” Dr. Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent said. “Nobody ever bothered to tell me how to get that A, to get to that next level.”

I think that the approach is good since it focuses back on learning and not just on testing and it’s being adopted in various districts across the country.

The down side is that most districts don’t have the money or parental ability, not just involvement, of an upscale Westchester, NY suburb.

Currently grading in most schools, K-12 through college, is on a curve where the best gets an A. But as Dr. Thomas R. Guskey, a professor at Georgetown College in Kentucky, says “The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything. They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.”

I agree. When people do average work they shouldn’t get an A because everyone else is below average or flunked.

If it can be made to work I think the idea of the kids working with parents and teachers to set goals to work towards and the sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving them is excellent; it’s motivating and prepares them for the real world of performance reviews—at least when they’re done correctly.

This could be a step forward, but it involves change.

“The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald Tirozzi — who supports standards-based report cards — said that many educators and parents were far from ready to scrap letter grades, especially for older students, in part because they worry about the ripple effects on things like the honor roll and class rank.”

“I think the present grading system — A, B, C, D, F — is ingrained in us,” Mr. Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”

And we certainly can’t expect adults to change or learn anything new just to improve kids’ education—can we?

This reminds me of something that happened decades ago. Women would taste baby food and if it didn’t taste good to them they wouldn’t buy it, so Gerber added salt in order to appeal to the adults. When the public finally woke up and screamed Gerber quickly changed the formulas.

Right now the public is whining, any suggestions on how to get them screaming?

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In December I wrote a short post on Siemens culture of corruption where bribes were a line item in the budget.

I was ticked off that CEO Klaus Kleinfeld denied doing anything wrong and then had a very soft landing as CEO of Alcoa Aluminum.

I got angrier after reading that “KPMG exposed to top management staff of Siemens in the fall of 2003, how £4.12m in cash was brought into Nigeria by the communication division… investigators stated in their court papers that the employees identified in the report, including a Communications Division manager, which was the division that conducted business with Nigeria, “continued to pay bribes through a series of slush funds until at least November 2006,” when they were arrested at a raid on the German offices of Siemens in Munich.”

Siemens paid a $1.6 billion fine—big deal.

I have no idea what the current Justice Department would do, but at that time “the Justice Department allowed Siemens to plead to accounting violations because it cooperated with the investigation and because pleading to bribery violations would have barred Siemens from bidding on government contracts in the United States. Siemens doesn’t dispute the government’s account of its actions.”

Siemens admits the bribery, but our government doesn’t want to prevent a corporation that cheated dozens of American companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars of possible business from being able to bid on US government contracts.

Why am I bringing this up again? Because now I am raging.

It’s all of 90 days later and I’ll give you three guesses as to who’s bidding on stimulus money contracts and the first two don’t count.

“George Nolen, CEO of Siemens Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of the German giant, aims to win $75 billion of Washington’s $787 billion stimulus package.”If you’re not prepared,” says Nolen, “you will not be able to take advantage.””

Now, I know that Siemens does many things well, but I seriously doubt that they are the ‘only company in the world’ on anything.

I don’t have an MBA and I’m not a lawyer or a big time business person, so I would greatly appreciate it if one of you would explain why, at the very least, there couldn’t have been  a 12 month moratorium on their bidding for US business.

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The best dressed Wall Street leaders

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Now checkout their favorite drink.

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Last week I promised to provide you with a simple, amazing tool that would help identify goals for each of your people and a whole lot more.

It’s the GSA (Great Skills Assessment) that uses a spreadsheet to monitors both hard and soft skills. If you already do something similar this post may open your eyes to additional uses.

The best reviews help people grow, not by beating them over the head but by laying out an achievable plan for improving areas in which they are weak.

An accurate GSA that’s frequently updated makes it easy to identify what will enhance a person’s value to the company in meeting its corporate goals as well as progressing on a desired career path.

Its value increases by merging individual assessments into one for the whole organization that you can use when planning projects.

And it’s invaluable when it’s time to fill an opening; a complete GSA is the best guarantee that you won’t end up with all your group’s skills in one area and gaping holes in others.

There are many ways to approach assessment creation and usage depending on your MAP and attitude towards inclusiveness and openness, but here is how my clients do it.

1. Looking at the template you’ll notice that the first three sections are public while the fourth is marked private. Start by sending the public part of the assessment template to each of your people and ask them to list their skills and rate them on a scale of one to five. Ask them to include not just the skills that they use at work, but all their skills, such as those they use at home or in volunteer work. You may be pleasantly surprised at the unknown depth and variety of abilities you find in your organization.

2. Post the results on your department intranet and ask everybody to add to each other’s profile—this includes you. Many times people have skills and abilities they ignore because previous bosses didn’t value them, but peers are apt to notice and comment and you may value stuff of which they aren’t aware.

3. Once everyone is finished (for the moment, you should encourage people to keep their profiles updated) you want to discuss specific results separately with each person, especially those that diverge from your own knowledge or opinions. Be patient; by the end of the conversation the two of you should be in agreement on both skills and ratings.

4. The private section of the soft skills is completed by you and should remain private. Use it as a guide when you’re coaching, assigning roles, helping the person prepare for their next career move, etc.—and to evaluate your own managerial success. If the public skills improve and goals are met, but you don’t see improvement in the private areas then look in the mirror since those skills are typically a direct reflection of management.

Combining the goal-setting procedure described last week with the GSA makes it easy to identify, define and agree on each person’s goals, both short and long-term.

Success today means constantly reinventing yourself and your organization—I call it continual course correction and the GSA makes it much easier.

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The medium is the message. –Marshall McLuhan, 1964

The network is the computer. –John Gage, VP, Sun Microcomputer, circa 1982

The data is the business. –Richard Barrett, 2009

Previously I reviewed some aspects of new business models that are emerging to accommodate new employee-employer relationships.

Business models are also changing in response to many factors. In this post we will explore business models where “the data is the business.”

In these models, the underlying data has become as valuable, or often even more valuable, than the product or service itself. While it sounds a little odd, these examples amply demonstrate the considerable value of the data itself. In some cases the data is the product, but in other cases, the data is ancillary to the service and only over time did the supplier begin to understand the value of the data, and then to package, promote, externalize and even sell the data itself. A few examples:

Package Shipping and Supply Chain Logistics

FedEx pioneered overnight delivery, but quickly discovered that customers really wanted proof of delivery even more than overnight delivery. Proof of delivery (POD) has perennially troubled the shipping industry; the receiver claims the packages have not arrived and the shipper says “Yup, we delivered it”—leaving the sender in the middle with neither the product nor the payment. After being swamped by POD requests, FedEx went online with its package tracking service. Now you can watch your package move through the FedEx system—its location recorded by scanners at each stop in the delivery chain.

Soon after, UPS and the entire shipping industry followed suit. Shipment tracking has become a cornerstone of the supply chain (logistics) management industry, leaving suppliers no place to hide except in their all-to-visible performance.

The Power Grid

Companies producing and delivering electric power have long since mastered the ability to track and measure the performance of their production and distribution systems with SCADA (system control and data acquisition). Now they are installing smart meters which can not only track power consumption minute-by-minute, but can report it back to the company SCADA system through an internet system on the electric power lines. Soon they expect to impose “time-of-day” pricing to capture the value of power demand during peak times.

Solar City, a regional installer of solar power systems in the southwest, offers a performance monitoring service to each of its customers for a small fee. The monitoring service not only tracks system performance, but eventually will have the capability to reconcile power production with credits from the electric company purchasing the power. Solar City charges its customers for this data collection and monitoring service as part of a comprehensive maintenance package. Within a few years Solar City expects the database of solar power production to have significant value to power companies themselves and other agencies interested in tracking aspects of green power.

Tracking Consumer Preferences

Many companies make a business from tracking and measuring consumer preferences. AC Nielsen, now Nielsen Media Research, started tracking the habits of radio listeners back in 1942.

Today Alexa Web Information Service and others track website traffic for millions of websites.

A Tale of Two Databases

Jigsaw Data Corp has harnessed a social network to create its database of business contacts, which Jigsaw then sells to business contact consumers such as marketing departments. With a database of over 12 million contact records (really complete business cards) Jigsaw cannot even begin to keep each contact record up to date much less to continue expanding the database. Instead, Jigsaw has developed a network of over 300,000 contributors, who earn points by adding to the database and updating individual records when a person changes a job, or telephone, or title, or email.

Of course, the mother of all data businesses is Google. Its AdWords business, tiny paid ads displayed in the right-hand column in response to a user’s search words generates well over 90% of Google’s revenue. The AdWords process is amazingly simple. The power comes from harnessing the search-word data and tracking the click-thru performance of each AdWord.

Incorporate Data In Your Business

Does your company collect data in the normal course of business? Of course it does. That data has significant value to the right audience. Consider these questions to make a business out of your business data:

• What data do you collect from customers, suppliers, partners?
• How can you develop the data collection into a fee-based service?
• How would another business use that data?
• How can you package your data for consumption by others?

As you contemplate selling data you will encounter a host of questions regarding original ownership, distribution rights, payment models, privacy, and protection. But when you have created valuable data, building the data business will provide years of fun, challenge and profit.

Let me know how your team is making a business out of data. Ask your questions here or you can email me directly at rbarrett@one-one.net.

Here’s to your new (data) business,

The media and most people are all enraged because many of the bailed-out companies owe taxes, but I don’t see the big deal.

“Nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies and 68% of foreign corporations do not pay federal income taxes…The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined samples of corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005…an annual average of 1.3 million U.S. companies and 39,000 foreign companies doing business in the United States paid no income taxes – despite having a combined $2.5 trillion in revenue. The study showed that 28% of foreign companies and 25% of U.S. corporations with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in sales paid no federal income taxes in 2005. Those companies totaled a combined $372 billion in sales for the largest foreign companies and $1.1 trillion in revenue for the biggest U.S. companies.”

This isn’t new; I remember hearing about it decades ago, so why freak out now?

The thing that really gets me is that AIG is suing the US government, which essentially owns it.

“A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.”

And even in this day and age $306 million is (or should be) more than small change.

Does this qualify as irony, stupidity or just good, old-fashioned insanity?

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Do you get the feeling that corporate management has gone to hell? That those in positions of power, the folks whose visions we’re supposed to follow, are all crooks?

I have a friend who feels this way, but I don’t.

There are thousands of companies in the US and the majority are led by solid, caring managers who really do their best to do it right. Sure, some do it better than others and some are downright inept, but they aren’t crooks or scam artists.

So where did all the guys in the headlines come from? We know many of them have been around for years or even decades, but few noticed and most didn’t care.

What happened?

I think that the tiny percentage in the news these days are the guys who are 98% bad, but who’ve been previously covered by the other 2% that is comprised of luck, brilliance, or blindness in the peanut gallery.

And of those three saving graces, two are cosmic jokes, but responsibility for the third rests squarely on us—because we went along with it.

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See all mY generation posts here.

Considering the business news for the last decade the title of this week’s quotes is more of an oxymoron.

And, IMCO (in my cynical opinion), it’s not over yet. I think more schemes, more unethical if not downright illegal actions and a whole lot more stupidity are going to surface globally before we get out of this tunnel.

With that in mind I offer up these insights to the human psyche.

There are two levers to set a man in motion, fear and self-interest. –Napoleon Bonaparte (He should know.)

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. –John Maynard Keynes (That was then, now the wicked men do wicked things sans greatest good for anyone but them.)

Corporation, n., An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility. –Ambrose Bierce (But it doesn’t have to be that way.)

Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.–Warren Buffett (Can you say derivatives, Madoff and hedge funds?)

If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. –Robert Noyce (We really didn’t need anyone to prove Noyce’s wisdom.)

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