The most recent act of executive ultra-stupidity brought down not only Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s CEO, but also Richard Schulze, its founder who was CEO for 40 years and Chairman for ten.
All over what was, according to Dunn and the 29-year-old woman subordinate, a platonic friendship, albeit one with some very tasty perks for the gal.
Schulze is out because he learned about it last December, but didn’t mention it to his board, HR or ethics officer. (Hell of a way to cap 50-plus years of amazing success.)
The report cited the effects of the relationship, including disruption in the workplace, damaged employee morale and perceived favoritism that undermined the employee’s supervisor’s attempts to manage her.
“Further, the C.E.O.’s relationship with this employee led some employees to question senior management’s commitment to company policy and the ethical principles the company champions,” the report said. “During interviews, some employees said that they felt that the rules appeared to apply to every employee except the C.E.O.,” it said.
When will they learn?
When will ‘but me’ be exorcised from executive/management thinking?
When will management learn the importance of walking their talk and that the higher the position the more important that becomes?
Three questions, but just one five-letter answer—never.
We all know that things are not always as they seem and people certainly aren’t.
Brilliant ideas can come from any individual and are not dependent on their level or even their expertise.
By the same token, investors that sound great may not be, while those who are off-putting could be your salvation.
There are no hard and fast rules for evaluating whether what you see is what you’ll get, because each case is different—but that doesn’t matter.
The important thing to remember is that most stuff and people come with multiple layers and they may not be what they seem.
So while I can’t offer a multipurpose evaluation tool I can provide you with an unforgettable visual to remind you to look past the obvious.
SUBMIT YOUR STORY
Be the Thursday feature – Entrepreneurs: [your company name]
Share the story of your startup today.
Send it along with your contact information and I’ll be in touch.
Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific time.
Surprisingly, in spite of scandals and lawsuits people still seem to have trouble understanding that they are different—not joined at the hip.
I could write a lot on this subject to go along with all the articles and advice already out there, but I’m a believer that stories, especially true stories, carry more power.
Such is the story of MetLife that, along with Prudential and John Hancock, will pay out more than a billion dollars for their completely legal but totally dishonorable actions.
The difference between an annuity and life insurance is that the former is paid to a live beneficiary, while the latter is paid to the dead beneficiary’s heirs.
A live beneficiary makes a fuss if the check doesn’t arrive on time.
Heirs only make a fuss if they know abut the insurance policy.
MetLife and the others were very careful to check to see if annuity beneficiaries were among the living, since they could stop paying if they weren’t.
But they saw no reason to cross reference deaths with their life insurance holders, because then they would have to pay.
An absolutely legal decision—but…
“There is simply no reason why insurance companies shouldn’t be scrubbing their policy lists,” looking for matches with the Social Security Administration’s master death index. (…)They stressed that insurers had generally checked the Social Security death index regularly to see whether other customers, who bought annuities, had died. In that case, the insurers stopped sending payments.
Stories are powerful teaching mechanisms.
The difference between legal and honorable should be crystal clear.
[Oops! My apologies. this weekend was the first warm days where I live and I spent them in my garden:) (What a mess!) In so doing, I lost track and didn't write Sunday's Quotable Quotes and although I had this post ready I forgot to schedule it for this morning. --Miki]
It’s the traditional compact in corporate America: what C.E.O.’s do on their own time is their business, as long as they are not breaking any laws. And it’s a compact that is rapidly going by the wayside, as boards concerned with the corporate reputation are increasingly making clear.
However, it does make one wonder when actions that have almost always resulted in termination at lower levels make headlines when they happen in the executive suite.
With few exceptions, most companies have rules against managers dating subordinates; affairs between peers are considered dicey and intra-office adultery is a definite no-no.
When companies are demanding entre to the personal/private areas of candidates’ social media prior to hiring why is it so surprising that corporate boards are focusing on personal/private executive behavior?
In a world where street reps are forever and the bedrock of good corporate culture is trust and authenticity there is no room for do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do executives.
I’ve often cited Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers regarding right time/right place luck—often an accident of birth. For example Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy were all born between 1953 and 1955
Another example of right time/right place is found in Harvard’s MBA class of 1974 as chronicled by Laurence Shames in The Big Time: The Harvard Business School’s Most Successful Class & How It Shaped America, originally published in 1986 and being republished now.
1974 was probably the most successful single group of MBAs ever graduated from any school; further, this class actually did stuff and built things, as opposed to shuffling money around.
But they also worked their tails off. They didn’t expect anything to be handed to them. They always asked for more work, not less. They were a very competitive, driven group. But, again, not only for their own monetary gains. They wanted to excel. They wanted to be leaders.
When the ’49ers graduated, I think there were 653 graduates. Only six guys went to Wall Street –less than one percent of the class. It just wasn’t considered where the action was or considered a place where you could make a meaningful difference.
Learning about that class makes you wonder what happened. Where did the drive for more than money go?
What happened between 1974 and 2008 that so changed the attitude of our best and brightest? Why did money gain primacy as the only thing that matters?
The funny thing is that if you ask the folks who actually are changing our world, such as Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Kevin Systrom, they’ll all say the same thing—they didn’t do it for the money.
Yesterday I said I would offer some ideas for helping people on your team disconnect, since not all companies are willing to shut down email at night in order to force the issue.
Even the ones that do might not accomplish what they intend given that there are plenty of ways to continue working without corporate email.
So what can one manager do to change attitudes within her own group?
For your team, one of the most important is recognizing that digital addiction is more about its effect on ego than a love of gadgets.
“Being a successful member of middle class society is showing our dedication to professional work and being available at all hours of the day.” –Carolyn Marvin, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication
Changing that perception requires more than a statement or directive from you.
I’ve said over and over “to change what they do change how you think.”
You need to change your beliefs and your actions.
There is no way you can tell your team to take a digital break if you don’t take one.
Why would anyone do what you say when they see you doing the opposite?
If they can always reach you nights, weekends and vacation by email or phone do you really believe that they will disconnect?
Worse, if you actively contact them during those times they wouldn’t dare not to be available.
To make disconnecting truly productive from both your/company’s point of view and the individuals’ requires an open conversation.
Use the article Wharton article as the basis for a “say anything” discussion and together create a holistic digital framework that provides the downtime needed to have a life and recharge without cost to organizational accomplishment, personal perceptions or ego.
I guarantee that if you make the time and commit to doing the work your group’s productivity and creativity will skyrocket while turnover drops like a stone.
Join me tomorrow for a look at how disconnecting plays in a startup.
This post is for all the entrepreneurs and small biz owners who constantly tell me that the best (only) way to reach a large audience and move product is via Facebook.
It hasn’t been for many companies, such as Gamestop, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, 1-800-FLOWERS, Delta Air Lines, Diane Von Furstenberg Studio and Seven for all Mankind.
Even Gap, which, together with its Banana Republic and Old Navy divisions, has 5.6 million Facebook fans, stopped selling on Facebook.
These are companies with abundant talent and dollars to invest in selling online, but they are opting not to do it on Facebook.
For young companies and small biz there is a major lesson here.
“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites. I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’” –Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of social media developer 8thBridge
If there is one lesson that should have come down from the dot com era it is that visitors don’t necessarily translate to buyers.
This isn’t surprising if you look at people’s actions in the real world.
People of all ages spend time at the mall whether to eat, hang out with friends or for indoor recreation in bad weather, but that doesn’t mean they shop and even if they shop it doesn’t mean they buy.
This isn’t to say that you can’t build a store on Facebook and make it a success, but you need to think about whether that is the best use of your resources.
Before committing a large portion, let alone all, of your resources to build on the Facebook platform you should consider two inescapable facts.
People do hang out with friends on Facebook, but it is to socialize, rather than shop; and
you have no control on policies, such as privacy and information sharing, that garnering more and more attention from even casual users.
I’m not suggesting that you ignore Facebook and other social media sites, rather that you recognize them as great places to build your brand as opposed to selling your products.
The topic isn’t new, but there is more and more proof that creativity flourishes more in a single mind than in a group, but it doesn’t have to be an either-or function—a better approach probably lies in a combination of the two.
I do a lot of brainstorming with my clients in the course of naming products, creating investor presentations and developing marketing material.
Much of my work is done alone, but my own creativity is substantially enhanced by the feedback I get and the new directions that happen when we discuss what I’ve done or they respond to my questions.
Often the most valuable questions I ask are based on my ignorance.
Why?
Because I have no knowledge base from which to make assumptions clients are forced to drill through their own in order to respond. Doing so often results in an entirely new thought process or direction, which, in turn, sparks yet more creative ideas.
It is an exciting and satisfying process.
It’s important to be aware of how your organization approaches innovation. Here are seven questions to ask yourself when you want to juice creativity.
Does your company/team use brainstorming as part of its innovation process?
If so, do you do it together or individually?
If individually, do you come together to review/discuss/question the new ideas?
Do people feel safe sharing what are usually still-fragile thoughts?
Do the questions/discussion lead in yet more creative directions that no one thought of previously?
Do you investigate the new directions with an open mind?
And probably the most important aspect,
Is the process about the best possible idea or who gets credit for it?
I dream; you dream; everybody dreams—without dreams there would be no reason to get out of bed in the morning, let alone do anything else.
Robert Kennedy summed up the human attitude towards dreams when he said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
Why not, indeed?
Walt Disney tells us, “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
And Jesse Owens elaborated on that when he said, “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”
But if you find yourself dreaming more than doing Baltasar Gracian’s advice should help, “Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way.”
Entrepreneurs are dreamers big-time and entrepreneurism is truly a global force; Jack Kerouac understood not only the universal appeal of dreams, but also its universal effect, “All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”
Entrepreneurs looking to hire would do well to remember the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and make them their mantra, Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
When times are darkest and your dream seems unlikely to reach fruition you will find the words of Christopher Reeve inspiring, “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”
Are you ever too old to dream? John Barrymore has a great answer to that, “A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”
Finally, you can do a lot worse than let the words of Malcolm Forbes be the driving force in your world, “When you cease to dream you cease to live.”
An engineer friend sent the following story because he knows I’m an evangelist for KISS** and this is such a great example of it.
A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line; otherwise you will have disgruntled customers at all points.
Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.
The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution – on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop; someone would walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.
A few weeks later the CEO checked the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” he thought, but before closely checking other statistics.
To his consternation, the number of defects picked up by the scales after the first three weeks of production use was zero, where as it should have been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report.
He filed a bug report and after investigating the engineers came back saying the report was correct; the scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were filled.
Puzzled, the CEO traveled down to the factory to see for himself the part of the line where the precision scales were installed.
A few feet before the scale there was a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
When the CEO asked a production worker about it he got this response, “One of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang.”
While I agree that this is a great example of KISS it also highlights another piece of management idiocy.
How many times have you seen a similar story play out not only in manufacturing, but also in development, marketing, finance, sales and especially administrative areas?
How much money is spent every year on expensive consultants and external specialists while the actual workers are never asked for solutions?
Why haven’t more bosses learned that solutions can come from anywhere and listen to all their people?
Of course, workers’ solutions wouldn’t be described in multisyllabic words in bound in custom folders on heavy bond and presented in a darkened room using impressive power point slides by ego-stroking consultants.
The most recent act of executive ultra-stupidity brought down not only Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s CEO, but also Richard Schulze, its founder who was CEO for 40 years and Chairman for ten.
Such is the story of 
I’ve often cited 
Yesterday I said I would offer some ideas for 
I dream; you dream; everybody dreams—without dreams there would be no reason to get out of bed in the morning, let alone do anything else.
How many times have you seen a similar story play out not only in manufacturing, but also in development, marketing, finance, sales and especially administrative areas?
Subscribe to MAPping Company Success 