Power is interesting—an almost tangible phenomenon.
People crave power relative to their image of themselves. What seems like a small amount to you may be enormous to another.
According to Margaret Thatcher, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
Alice Walker warns that “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Of course, a lot of people have just quit thinking, so they don’t have to worry about their power.
Francis Bacon tells us that “Knowledge is power,” but doesn’t mention that knowledge requires more than book-leaning and texting.
Napoleon said “Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.” Wow, he would make a great hedge fund manager, don’t you think?
Abraham Lincoln warns that “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
Sadly, most have failed the test.
As usual, the best wisdom about power is old.
In the mid 1600s Blaise Pascal said, “Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just,” but it will be a cold day in hell when that happens.
But It was Lao Tzu who best summed up power 2500 years ago when he said, “He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”
And what the experts recommend for them will work for you.
Forbes has an article how to control CEO rage, but the best part is the accompanying slideshow highlighting the anger of a few of the most famous and infamous—those who lied, cheated and stole their way into history.
The Washington Post calls it the “Silent Language of Leadership,” but ignore the ‘leadership’. What is described is the silent language of influencing people, whether you are a CEO, Bernie Madoff or parents struggling to get through to your teenager.
Sometimes the boss decides it’s time to leave, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it—Sarah Palin did it the wrong way. See how it should be done; this is good information no matter what level you’re on.
Finally, how much disclosure should be required of the CEO of a publicly traded company? It’s a hot topic since Steve Jobs surgery was announced as a done deal.
I had an interesting experience today—actually, I found it amusing, but ridiculous.
I used to live in Silicon Valley, the land of early adopters and the technically obsessed, and am still involved with several groups there.
Here’s the short version of what happened.
Around noon one of the project members sent an email to all of us saying he urgently needed certain information and asked if ‘Joe’ had it;
Joe replied around 1 that he didn’t have it, but maybe a Jean did;
Jean replied around 1:45 that only Mary had access to it.
I saw the thread around 2:15 when I got back to my office, called Mary and told her that she urgently needed to respond to the thread.
She did and the situation was dealt with immediately.
What was so ridiculous is that the entire group knows that
1) Mary is the only person with access to this info;
2) That she is ‘technologically challenged’; and that
3) she doesn’t read email as it arrives; she checks it on and off when she has the time.
That means that email wasn’t the best choice to contact her and everybody knew—if they had stopped to think about it instead of running on autopilot.
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
The problem lies in focus; your choice should depend not on your preference, but on the preference of the person you are trying to reach.
So remember, communicating is like playing golf. The trick isn’t to play the whole course with one club, but to know which club to use for which shot.
Monday Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).
A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.
“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”
I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. Now I can’t find it because I was so darned connected online I didn’t actually pay attention to the title or where I filed it.
This leads into the video below. I was reminded of Emotional Intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman’s TED talk a couple of years ago. If you want to know the connectedness between emotions, business, and “noticing”, this will be time very well spent. Close your door. Now. Tell you’re boss you are doing professional development. You are.” x
I recently wrote that“No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.”
All I can add is that we better start noticing before all the lights are turned off for good.
Now go see your friends and tell them; have a ‘noticing’ contest together with a ‘doing’ contest.
Before you can practice random acts of kindness you need to notice.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
Innovation is crucial to success, especially in today’s economy, and diversity is crucial to innovation.
But diversity refers to much more than race, creed, or gender.
Juicing creativity and innovation requires a strong diversity of both thought and skills within your organization—homogenizing your workforce dilutes the juice.
Thought Diversity
True mental diversity is about MAP and mental function, not just a race and gender. I’ve known managers whose organizations were mini-UNs with equal numbers of males and females, but they might as well have been cloned from the boss, their thinking was so identical.
scorn/belittle/reject anything that doesn’t conform with your own MAP/ideas/approach; or
allow others in your organization to do the first two.
As your organization grows more diverse you want to celebrate controversy, encourage disagreement, and enable discussions—all within a civilized framework that debates the merits of ideas, not individuals.
Skills Diversity
Skills homogeny is just as detrimental to innovation. As with MAP, people tend to gravitate towards people whose skills are within their or their group’s comfort zone; worse, managers may be unaware of the full range of skills available within the group.
The fix for skills homogeny is far simpler, since it requires awareness and mechanical action, rather than changes in MAP.
Use this three-step process to better identify and access your group’s skills
Skills survey: Have each person in your group create a complete list of all their skills, not just the ones they’re using in their current job, but also those from previous positions and companies, as well as skills they’ve developed outside of work. Have them rate each skill 1-5 (five being the strongest) based on their expertise. (I’ve yet to see a manager do this who wasn’t surprised at the results.)
Skills set matrix: Using a spreadsheet, create a matrix of the information.
Repeat and update: go through the entire process and update the matrix twice a year; add every new hire’s info immediately.
Be sure to consult the matrix every time you develop a new position or replace someone, whether through promotion or attrition.
Knowing all this gives you tremendous staffing flexibility. For example, you may have someone in your group who’s developed the needed skills on a new project and would be thrilled to move to the it. Then, using the matrix, you can design the new position to fill other skill gaps, both current and future.
The end result is a well-rounded organization of people inspired to learn new skills, because they know that they won’t be relegated to a rut just because “that’s what they’ve always done.”
Viva La Difference is the rallying cry for the anti-homogenizing movement.
(For more on how to diversify click here, here and here.)
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Forbes has an article how to 
I’m sure you’ll find something interesting to do with the time normally spent here on Saturday.
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
Juicing creativity and innovation requires a strong diversity of both thought and skills within your organization—homogenizing your workforce dilutes the juice.
