The first step in innovation

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Reputations are fragile things and company reputations are no different, but in the brave new world of YouTube, Twitter and blogs their fragility has skyrocketed.

Pity Domino’s Pizza whose Conover NC franchise employed two of the stupidest thirty-somethings available. They posted a prank video on YouTube (it’s been removed) that burned through the social media world faster than any recorded wildfire and was just as damaging.

In a 2007 post I quoted Chris Gidez, head of U.S. crisis management for the public-relations firm Hill & Knowlton, “Once it’s on the Web, it’s like taking the rods out of a reactor. Companies have to work harder to determine, ‘Do we need to worry about this?’ “Overreacting can call more attention to a rumor than it gets on its own, I’ve had clients who wanted to respond to a problem with guns blazing, and I say, ‘Hold on a second. You might be telling a larger universe of people about a problem they didn’t know existed.”

I think that Gidez may be giving different advice these days, since it’s doubtful that any rumor, prank or sin will die a natural death.

“If you think it’s not going to spread [in social media], that’s when it gets bigger,” said Scott Hoffman, the chief marketing officer of the social-media marketing firm Lotame. “We realized that when many of the comments and questions in Twitter were, ‘What is Domino’s doing about it’ ” Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre said. “Well, we were doing and saying things, but they weren’t being covered in Twitter.”

By Wednesday afternoon, Domino’s had created a Twitter account, @dpzinfo, to address the comments, and it had presented its chief executive in a video on YouTube by evening.”

The real problem today isn’t the speed and transparency with which information moves, but rather it’s that the stupidity factor is just as bad, if not worse, than it ever was.

Dr. Jay Geidd, NIH: “The part of the brain that fills in last is the part involved in decision-making and controlling our impulses.”

The articles on teen brain research all indicate that the brain matures around age 25 or later, but it seems the availability of instant fame, no matter how fleeting, has pushed brain maturity way past that mark increasing the level of stupidity that people find so amusing—think YouTube and AFHV.

This weekend talk to your kids. Show them the article; tell them about the legal charges filed and the civil suite in the works. And ask them what business in it’s right mind would ever hire people whose judgment is this bad?

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Or is this more accurate?

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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 CEO reputation isn’t exactly in the ascendancy these days, in fact, as a group it’s pretty well tanked. So it’s sad to see them, again as a group with exceptions, strolling down another truly stupid path—no time for talent worries. “It’s no surprise that global leaders raked financial pressures to cut costs (82.95%) and rapid market decline (54.36%) as their toughest business challenges. Unfortunately, “Loss of leaders in key areas or insufficient talent to quickly adapt to change” (5.30%) fell to the bottom of the list.” Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership spells out the details, including a link to the survey. Whoo hoo, short term thinking at it’s best.

Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership eloquently discusses the stupidity (my word) of inspiring emotional connections in ‘followers’.

“That’s what the modern individual leader wants: uncritical commitment, steadfast devotion, unquestioning obedience. There is little room in contemporary leadership theory for qualified, deliberative followership; extended, modified, or rescinded at the initiative of the follower.” Scary attitude!

Finally, to add a little levity to a day dedicated to stupidity, past and future, here’s a quick explanation of the banking crisis for those of you who still don’t understand the MAP that got us into this mess.  It’s a little story that’s making the rounds on the Net. Hat tip to KG Charles-Harris who sent it to me.

Young Stern moved to Texas and bought a donkey from a farmer for $100.00. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

The next day he drove up and said, ‘Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died.’
Stern replied, ‘Well, then just give me my money back.’  The farmer said, ‘Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.’

Stern said, ‘OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.’

The farmer asked, ‘What a ya gonna do with him? Stern said, ‘I’m going to raffle him off.’

The farmer said ‘You can’t raffle off a dead donkey!’   Stern said, ‘Sure I can. Watch me. I just won’t tell anybody he’s dead.’

A month later, the farmer met up with Stern and asked, ‘What happened with that dead
donkey?’

Stern said, ‘I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and made a profit of $898.00.’

The farmer said, ‘Didn’t anyone complain?’  Stern said, ‘Just the guy who won. So I gave him back his two dollars.’

Stern now works for Goldman Sachs.

Or did until he was laid off.

There, do you feel better now that you know the truth?

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See all mY generation posts here.

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Year’s end is drawing closer, southeast Washington State is facing its first Artic storm in several years, it’s late and I’m feeling silly.

So I dug into my digital clippings and found some fun stuff that made me smile and thought it would be good to share it with you.

• OK, OK, I’ll include one that has corporate culture relevance—at least to those bosses who can see past their short-term nose and embrace productivity-raisers that aren’t mainstream—such as napping.

• Hmm, I suppose I can actually justify including this one in the name of innovation. Anyone who has watched Unwrapped on the Food Channel knows how fascinating it is to see how different foods are made. But did you ever stop to wonder how many of the foods you love were invented accidentally as opposed to on purpose?

But the next two are strictly in the name of whimsy, silliness, and off the wall weirdness.

• From my old stamping grounds comes weird news at SFGate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle. It offers up links to all kinds of strange, often funny, news items. The original post I read was dated February 16, 2007, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to access, so enjoy the current ones.

• Finally, a link to The Darwin Awards, one of my all time favorite sites, along with information on it from About.com. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the awards, here’s a brief overview (paraphrased).

“A chronicle dedicated to individuals who have given their all in an effort to improve our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of killing themselves by the most extraordinarily stupid means.”

Great for a laugh and especially great for the ego when you think that you’ve done something stupid; read a few of the posted winners and no matter what you’ve done it will shrink to manageable levels.

That’s it for another Saturday. There’s enough here to keep you warm with laughter no matter what your weather is today.

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Oh what fun. I do love a good scandal, preferable in business, because usually the players more interesting to me, but now and then a political one blows that tickles my fancy.

And it just happened.

Here’s the deal. The Interior Department spent two years and $5.3 million to discover that for four years “nearly a third of the Denver office staff — received gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies, including Chevron Corp., Shell, Hess Corp. and Denver-based Gary-Williams Energy Corp.”

That’s the Minerals Management Service office—the folks who collect royalties from the oil companies, in case you didn’t know.

The investigation found a “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” where “employees frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and natural gas company representatives” who referred to some of the government workers as the “MMS Chicks.”

Whoo hoo, hot stuff. Oh, and don’t forget “the director of the royalty program had a consulting job on the side for a company that paid him $30,000 for marketing its services to various oil and gas companies.”

In a gross understatement, Inspector General Earl E. Devaney called it “a culture of ethical failure.” No kidding, makes you wonder what was taught in the ethics class all but one took.

But what really makes this hilariously ironic is the timing.

Because these are also the people who approve offshore drilling permits and some in “Congress are starting debates pressing to expand oil and gas development off America’s beaches while trying to stave off an election-year rush by Democrats to impose new taxes and royalties on the oil industry.”

So besides a juicy scandal we have a giant load of political…hay.

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Make no mistake, this is a rant.

Last year I wrote Being “special” can ruin your children’s lives; yesterday at Small Business Boomers Jean ranted about Millennials’ atrocious writing skills, a subject I’ve bemoaned here multiple times—and not just Millennials!.

Today, at Leadership Turn, CandidProf, a regular on Thursday, talks about education now and what he foresees as a result of additional schools adopting rules similar to those enacted by the Dallas School System.

Previous complaining about the results of today’s education pales to insignificant when considering the long-term results of what Dallas has done.

Consider,

• “…the new rules require teachers to accept late work and prevent them from penalizing students for missed deadlines. Homework grades that would drag down a student’s overall average will be thrown out.
• District records state that the changes are part of a switch to “effort-based” grading and are designed to give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate that they’ve mastered class material.
• Requiring teachers to contact parents instead of awarding zeros is designed to increase home-school communications…
• Retests and deadline extensions are meant to motivate students to do better after initial failure.”

In other words there are no penalties for not doing the work and the tests don’t count since students can take the exact same test over and over until they get a good grade and their previous efforts are deleted from their records.

As to the over-worked/under-paid teachers, do you think that many will take the time to call every parent whose child’s homework isn’t turned in on time. 20+ kids in the class times an average 15 minute call talking to a parent who is more likely to heap abuse on the teacher while defending their perfect child.

It’s not worth it, so the kids will pass.

Pass on to college not only unable, but also unwilling to learn—forcing colleges to dumb down their classes, too.

According to Denise Collier, the district’s chief academic officer “The purpose behind it is to ensure fair and credible evaluation of learning – from grade to grade and school to school.”

Fair to whom?

The students who work hard or the ones who consider teachers lucky that their classroom is graced with their presence.

Fair to the teachers who get those students the following year, and the year after and the year after that…

Even previous graduates think it’s stupid, “Babying the rules so that [students] have almost unlimited chances to pass, that’s unreal,” said Joshua Perry, a 2007 graduate of Skyline High School. “In the real world, you don’t get a whole lot of chances or other ways to make something up.”

But it’s after college that you, my dear readers, come into play.

Because these are the same kids you will be forced to hire and rely on to move your company forward.

And if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you let me know what drugs you’re on and I’ll get some, because it sure scares it out of me.

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Does one really have to be an accountant, lawyer, minister or whatever expert in order to recognize when something is likely illegal or, at the least, unethical?

“That’s not my area of expertise” is the excuse du jour on most of the financial games being played—especially option backdating.

I find it very amusing when I hear high-powered corporate CEOs explaining that they don’t have the financial or legal savvy to understand that backdating is a no-no.

In one high profile case dating back to 2006 involves Dr. William McGuire, former CEO of UnitedHealth Group, who “…relied on others to assess the legality and appropriateness of backdated stock options granted to top executives and new hires. As such, all allegations against him in a shareholder’s lawsuit should be dropped.”

I love this part, “Dr. McGuire has no formal training or degrees in finance, accounting or law,” the brief states. “His only professional training is as a medical doctor with a specialty in pulmonology.”

Maybe no formal training, but please! There’s no way he was hired to run one of the largest health-care companies in the country without good business knowledge and skills.

No formal training, but didn’t he read or listen to the news? The backdating went on for 12 years and there certainly were news stories of other companies that got in trouble doing it during that time. The cost? $1.56 billion downward restatement of earnings.

But it’s the Cablevision case that really cracks me up.

“Cablevision had awarded 400,000 stock options to a deceased vice chairman, while making it appear as though the options had been granted prior to his 1999 death.”

Cablevision just settled, “…terms of the settlement agreement, certain present and former Cablevision directors and execs will pay Cablevision $24.4 million, while Cablevision’s liability insurer will kick in another $10 million. Cablevision has also agreed to adopt a number of corporate governance changes relating to stock-based compensation awards.”

Who said that greed ends with death?

(To learn why I chose this picture just click it and read.)

Heard any good corporate greed stories lately?

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