KG Charles-Harris sent me an article about WeWork-as-a-cult, which prompted yesterday’s Oldie.

This post isn’t about WeWork, but about two things that struck me.

First, the pure adoration shown to Adam Neumann and the absolute blind following of all he preaches reeks of Jim Jones only with a far larger world vision.

The second were the words uttered by Neumann’s wife Rebekah at the recent Tunbridge Wells Summer Camp.

“A big part of being a woman is to help men [like Adam] manifest their calling in life.”

Shades of Phyllis Schlafly.

And here I thought the fight, from gender equity to #metoo was so women could pursue their own, independent manifest destiny.

Silly me.

All this is even more disturbing, since the great majority of both WeWork employees and devotees are Millennials.

Image credit: Yankech gary

Bezos may be a genius and Amazon may be beloved by it’s customers, but for years it has been reviled for it’s (mis)treatment of fulfillment center (AKA, warehouse) workers.

The newest weapon in it’s fight to correct the facts is a Twitter campaign.

“FC ambassadors are employees who have experience working in our fulfillment centers… The most important thing is that they’ve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience.”

The effort was first outed by Flamboyant Shoes Guy, who also said in a comment,

What amazes me is that a entire board of people on 7 or 8-figure salaries had several meetings regarding this, discussed it thoroughly and then concluded that there was no way anyone could possibly notice.

But if you think warehouse conditions are bad now, when the economy is hot and bodies in short supply, just wait until it turns, as it will. (What goes up always comes down. It’s the nature of the beast.)

Be it Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., you need to remember that companies, just like people, aren’t all good or all bad.

It’s just that their bad has a much larger effect.

Image credit: Twitter

With 68% of employees disengaged, you would think the board’s critical eye would be turned on the executive suite.

You would think wrong.

One of the greatest causes of disengagement is the difference in compensation between the CEO/executives and the workers.

That difference is the direct result pay-for-performance, coupled with the board’s ego-driven competitiveness and desire for bragging rights.

Name the most brilliant, talented, past or present CEO you can think of, then remove them from their position.

The company may hiccup, but it won’t go down in flames.

Now remove all the line managers/team leaders OR all the workers in a specific department or with a specific talent and watch the company stagger and fall on its face.

An unintended consequence of pay-for-performance is we treat companies as if they are in the airline business, except the only person who matters is the pilot—not the grounds crew, nor the quality control tinkerers, nor the guys who wrangled the ore and fuel from the ground, forged the parts, tightened the bolts and soldered the frame.

In their rush to acquire the “best” talent, boards are likely to forget that corporations are not independent entities

It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

To move in the same direction people need to be engaged.

But how engaged would you be when the proceeds of your hard work show up in someone else’s paycheck?

In the 1970s, shareholders took out about 50% of a company’s profits, while the rest was reinvested in the productive capacity of the firm, including R&D to employee training and rewards. Today, the shareholder gets over 90% between dividends and share buybacks. Today, a 60% or greater weight on equity or equivalents is the norm in pay packages.

Dominantly CEO/ senior pay packages.

The funny thing is that rank and file aren’t looking for similar pay.

They are looking for fairness in relative pay.

Image credit: JustyCinMD

Bias, implicit or not, intentional or not, is at the forefront of most companies and bosses’ minds. Companies spend thousands on various kinds of anti-bias training.

But based on decades of data, not much seems to change.

Perhaps that’s because bias isn’t “fixable” or, as Lily Zheng, a diversity and inclusion consultant, says, Bias isn’t like an upset stomach that an individual can take an antacid to fix.

Zheng offers a truly commonsense approach that is far more practical and achievable than trying to make people unbiased.

The outcome of any implicit bias training shouldn’t be to cure people’s bias or make them more objective—it should be to make people bias-aware. (…) When people are bias-aware, they are able to act with less bias without fixating on being unbiased.

It all boils down to knowing yourself, which can be a lost cause for some people.

More than a decade ago I started talking about MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™ is the basis for everything you do—it is the why of life.

Everything you do and say is a mindset, grounded in your attitude towards others, which, in turn, is based on your personal philosophy.

Obviously, implicit bias is part of MAP.

Zheng provides a good roadmap for handling implicit bias, focusing on the need for self-honesty and a non-judgmental attitude, including that awareness doesn’t always mean change.

While the decision may not end up changing, the process of being honest and nonjudgmental about one’s own bias adds both accountability and intentionality.

I provided a simple step-by-step for changing your MAP if you so desire.

Both require honest self-awareness, but doing them is, as always, your choice.

Image credit: Ron Mader

Yesterday I commented that too often the last place bosses, and people in general, look for the cause of a problem is in the mirror.

Along with that proclivity of externalizing the source of difficulties, both great and small, is their belief that reasons excuse most anything.

Not excuses, oh, no, but reasons.

There’s a difference, you see.

Reasons make it OK.

As long as there’s a reason it doesn’t seem to matter much what “it” is.

Excuses, you see, seek to lesson blame/responsibility, while a reason explains/justifies “it.”

They may sound similar, but excuses admit something was wrong, whereas if there’s a reason then nothing really happened.

But at the end of the day, neither negates “it” or makes “it” acceptable.

Image credit: ♥*.Holly.*♫

Words are tossed around today with little consideration for their actual meaning, let alone accuracy of usage.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter, but misusing others can be the basis for serious errors, while treating words as interchangeable, as if they are synonyms, can have dire consequences.

This is especially true when the subject is emotionally charged or carries a lot of baggage — such as diversity, the great catch-all.

I can also say that I, too, have used the following incorrectly: privileged, underrepresented, marginalized, diversity, and inclusion.

Let’s take a look at what the words actually mean.

• Privilege is about access.
• Being underrepresented is about numbers.
• Being marginalized is about treatment.
• Diversity is about variety.
• Inclusion, which is about experience—the experience of a person, a group, or a community.

None of these words are interchangeable; each has a complete, stand-alone meaning in and of itself.

Companies are famous for signage promoting their values, mission, etc.

Perhaps the time has come for a new one based on the true definition of these five words.

The poster covers talk.

However, the talk is worthless unless it is partnered with the walk.

Exactly like diversity and inclusion — the first means nothing without the second.

Image credit: TEDx NJLibraries

In 2013 I wrote,

Actually, a corporation isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

In other words, they relate.

Relationships are formed when two or more people interact.

According to Todd Davis, chief people officer for FranklinCovey, with more than 30 years of experience,

It’s the nature of the relationships between those people [think culture – Ed] that really creates a team’s or an organization’s or a company’s competitive advantage. I think it’s critical, and it’s really what makes or breaks the success and effectiveness of an organization.

Up until recently, ‘relationship’ was typically used more in our personal world; using it in conjunction with work is relatively new.

For decades I’ve said that people have two sides to their head, personal and professional, and rarely do they use the skills from one side in dealing with the challenges on the other.

People spend time (and often money) learning to improve their romantic relationships, but don’t necessarily think of tweaking what they learned and using it to improve relationships with their colleagues/subordinates/boss, but they should.

Should, because taking time to really understand where others are coming reduces personal stress.

Should, because relationships are the keys to success — yours, the team’s, the bosses’, and the company’s.

In short, should, because it works.

Image credit: Katy Ereira

Last week I cited research the showed a culture of respect was far more productive than a nice one and the next day went on to say that ‘respect’ and ‘like’ aren’t inseparable.

Now I have to add that being respectful doesn’t indicate any form of agreement.

This may be especially shocking to the tech world where a war is raging in the open source world.

They are arguing about whether they should have to agree to a community code of conduct (CCoC) that requires them to behave respectfully. (…) That code of conduct basically says that the group is open to people of all walks of life and expects its members to be courteous.

In this context courteous probably means you don’t act like a troll — screaming, cursing, intimidating, harassing, etc — online or real world.

There is nothing that says you have to agree.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to disagree without being a troll.

It’s also possible to have passionate arguments over a subject that include yelling and profanity directed at the subject/opinion, as opposed to the person.

It’s the difference between

• That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard

and

• You are really stupid to say that.

Further, online trolls don’t necessarily act the same in the real world — it’s easier to be a bully on a keyboard than face-to-face — although more and more do.

It’s actually amusing in a way, since every community of which one is a member has its own CCoC, whether written or inherent.

People abide by them, because, by and large, they agree with them.

And vice versa.

Image credit: InterfaceLeader

It’s always gratifying when something I wrote in years past, based on my own experience, is validated by current research. Yesterday’s Oldie about privilege is no exception.

I wrote it in 2015 and last week I read the validating research in the Harvard Business Review (love these little ego trips).

There are lots of people held back by bias. And that means that some of the people at the top have advanced partly through privilege.

Our research finds the idea of being advantaged to be uncomfortable for many senior leaders. We interviewed David, a senior executive who recognizes both having benefited from unfair advantages and the injustice of bias. He’s tall, middle-aged, well-educated, heterosexual, able-bodied, white, and male — and these provide David with unearned advantages that he intellectually knows he has, but that in practice he barely notices. He tells us he feels an underlying sense of guilt. He wants to feel that his successes in life are down to his abilities and hard work, not unfair advantage. “I feel like a child who discovers that people have been letting him win a game all along,” he says. “How can I feel good about myself succeeding if the game was never fair?”

Over the years, I’ve found the idea of ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ deeply embedded in people’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where it has a major impact on all three MAP components.

In speaking with leaders about their built-in advantages, we have seen that David’s experience is widely shared. Acknowledging these advantages can challenge their very identities and sense of worth.

As is often the case, normalcy erases awareness.

Our research on speaking truth to power shows there is often a blind spot among the powerful, preventing them from seeing their impact on the less powerful. We call this advantage blindness. When you have advantage blindness, you don’t feel privileged. You don’t notice a life of special treatment; it’s just normal. You don’t think about your physical safety most of the time; you don’t worry about holding hands with your partner in public; when you get angry, no one asks you if it’s because of your hormones; and people in power generally look like you.

The results of the researchers interviews list three negative reactions

• Denying the playing field is unlevel.
• Focusing on one’s own disadvantages.
• Denying the playing field is unlevel.

And three positive ones

• Owning personal prejudice and bias.
• Empathy from connecting with people who are “other.”
• Putting personal advantage to collective good use

The one problem with the research is it’s focus on executives, which is to be expected from Harvard, but the same advantages, bias, guilt, and negative reactions can be found at all levels.

The good part is that the positive approaches discussed also work at all levels.

What should you do next?

• Read the article.
• Consciously and honestly identify your own advantages.
• Write (not keyboard) them down.
• Reread the list often.
• Heighten your awareness.
• Lower your defensiveness.
• Implement the actions described and add your own.

While you can’t eliminate societal advantages, you can put them to work for the greater good. Doing so will go a long way to validating your advantaged success.

Image credit: Duck Lover

It’s so sad. At least it is if you believe Vinod Khosla, who claims that no one over 45 has new ideas, let alone disruptive ones.

That doesn’t bode well for a new his new healthcare venture.

Amazon is forming a joint venture in healthcare aimed at employees with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, according to a company press release.

Obviously, Khosla and his groupies forgot to tell 54 year-old Jeff Bezos that he is dead in terms of new ideas and that his co-founders, Jamie Dimon, 62 and Warren Buffett, 87, are even deader.

Not only are his co-founders old-to-ancient, one of his first hires was a geriatrician (in case you don’t know, that’s a doctor that specializes in the Medicare crowd)

Must be those dead brain cells at work, since the tech crowd, who are disrupting healthcare with bio hacks and drop-in clinics, know that speed and convenience are what’s needed.

What is it that old guys can see — and the under-40 just don’t get?

If Amazon is looking to disrupt the healthcare industry, why start with geriatrics -— a specialty that hardly seems cutting-edge? But what tech experts don’t know, and what Amazon has figured out, is that to provide high-quality health care for seniors, physicians must be innovative — and disruptive.

Cutting edge IDEO figured that out in 2016.

Just as writers must use their life experience to write with any kind of authenticity, you can’t expect innovations from people who have never experienced or noticed the problem.

When your body, and those in your social circle, work as they should 99% of the time you are unlikely to have a handle on the difficulty of managing multiple, chronic diseases, especially with severely limited resources — financial and human.

So let’s hear it for the old crowd, may they focus their efforts on the problems and challenges of which their younger brethren are barely aware.

Hat tip to Emily White for sending the article.

Image credit: Stuart Richards