“Joe” called me today. He said he was thinking of leaving his company not because he wanted to, but because everyone thought he should.

He explained that everyone who knew him kept showing him articles and telling him that he was a born entrepreneur and should start his own company.

Joe said he had worked for everything from large companies to startups and as long as he had a good manager and liked the culture he was happy. He worked hard and felt he was fairly compensated.

Joe said he had discussed it with his family and they said he should do what made him happy and they would support that decision.

However, he didn’t want to end up looking like a loser because he didn’t do it.

Boiled down, here is my response.

• Contrary to current media coverage people who work for companies are not losers and entrepreneurs are not the be all and end all of success.
• Few, if any, knowledge workers at any level work 8-hour days, disconnect and go home.
• In the current recession, entrepreneurs are to the 21^st Century what consultants were to the recessions of the 20^th Century.
• Having entrepreneurial MAP does not mean you want or have to be an entrepreneur.

The last point is especially important.

I saw yet another list of 10 traits entrepreneurs and I had to chuckle. Here it is

1. They Are Not Stopped by Fear
2. They Know When to Ask for Help
3. They Are Persistent
4. They Are Passionate About Their Businesses
5. They Are Willing to Market and Sell
6. They Know Their Numbers
7. They’re Disciplined
8. They Have Integrity
9. They’re Great Communicators
10. They Think Long-Term

I chuckled because these are the same traits that all good people have when adjusted for their position and experience.

They are also the traits that the best managers look for when they are hiring. There are, however, many mangers too insecure to appreciate them.

Many years ago I read an article about the guy who invented the tiles used on the Challenger spacecraft to protect it when it reentered the atmosphere. He wasn’t an entrepreneur, he was a Lockheed engineer. He didn’t get a bonus for his work, it was his job. He didn’t care; he was happy at his company, was proud of what he did and liked being part of something larger. He was a winner.

The lesson here is that great people work for existing companies and great people start companies and both win.

Joe is a winner.

The losers are those who disparage other people’s choice.

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How do you get culture-blind managers to wake up to its importance?

How do you get them to understand that just as there is no “I” in team there is no “I” in leader and that if they insist on capitalizing the “I” in leadership it will change to leadershIt?

In other words is there a way to motivate managers to change their MAP if the “I” is a function of inexperience or ignorance as opposed to entitlement and willfulness?

A useful 2×4 to accomplish this is vested self-interest (VSI) as manifested in the MyCFF mantra so popular today—my compensation, my career path, my future.

It is amazing how much a person is willing to change when those changes further their own goals—even as far as changing “I” to “i.”

Click vested self-interest for how-to details.

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In an NYT interview Michael Lebowitz, founder and C.E.O. of design firm Big Spaceship, passes on some excellent information on hiring, building a team and culture.

Here are two of the points with the greatest impact,

One of my longest-standing clients, a very smart guy, says: “There’s two ways to manage. You can hire to be the smartest person in the room or you can hire to be the dumbest person in the room.”

He says he works at being the dumbest.

And

“Don’t hire jerks, no matter how talented.”

Lebowitz says that there is no place for rock stars and I agree totally, unless you are naïve enough to believe they can function alone, without the cooperation, support and backing of the team.

Hiring rock stars means turnover—not productivity.

I’ve seen many team members leave because their manager’s focus was so completely on taking care of his few stars that he had nothing left over for the rest.

One of the finest managers I know has had a team packed with stars everywhere he’s worked. Partly because his reputation is well known and talent flocks to work for him, but mainly because he passionately believes that most people have the ability to become stars, some brighter than others, and he manages them accordingly.

True, he works harder at managing than many and has been kidded by his peers about the lengths to which he goes, but he tells me he wouldn’t have it any other way.

I once asked him how he got to be that way and he said that he’d never done anything that he didn’t want from his own manager, so it wasn’t a big deal.

I couldn’t resist asking if he was managed the way he did manage.

His response was a smile and laugh and that just because he didn’t get it didn’t mean that he didn’t want it.

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“Entrepreneur” is the new black.

The term/title is being applied to a multitude of people, from the consultant/coach making ends meet until businesses start hiring to the bleary-eyed kid in his dorm room hoping to be the next Facebook or Google; from the preteen mowing lawns to the Boomers using severance pay to follow their passions; from the person using the proceeds from the sale of one startup to launch the next to the woman using a micro loan to lift her family up from poverty.

Some are entrepreneurs by choice, some by chance; some run and leap into new opportunities with a battle cry on their lips, while others drag themselves kicking and screaming into the fray, but all are fascinating.

All face one particular challenge and the need to overcome it is great, because these days there are fewer choices, fewer options to pay the bills, fewer paths from here to there.

It’s motivation and it’s the biggest challenge faced by every working living person on the planet.

Whether you are a solopreneur, a founder/member of a startup or one in a cast of thousands you need to keep yourself and your people motivated.

While clear visions and strong passions help, motivation is in the doing—not the talking or the planning.

This is especially true for entrepreneurs, because the fewer the people the fewer the places to hide.

There’s no way around it, being an entrepreneur means full responsibility and full accountability, but it also means undiluted pride in the results.

Please join me Saturday for a look at a few of the more unusual entrepreneurs.

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Is the picture true? Do people need bosses?

A study about the value of middle management and what happens when it is significantly improved focused on manufacturing in India, but the bottom line, and what is universal, is that good managers and management practices can raise productivity in any situation.

But do highly educated knowledge workers need bosses as much as unskilled factory workers or could they produce the same results on their own?

Let’s make this very personal.

Think about the differences you found when working for a good boss and for a bad one—even if the relativity was more like good/great, bad/worse, or the most common, OK/so-so.

Think about how you felt when the alarm went off; did you look forward to your destination or shrink from it?

During the day did you feel part of a productive team; one that was making a difference and helping the company accomplish its goals or did it feel dysfunctional, untrustworthy, with everyone faking it?

Did you end the work day with a feeling of accomplishment and good mental attitude that you could share with family and friends or did you go home, slam the door and yell at the humans or animals that greeted you?

Trace those feelings back to the management actions and attitudes that fostered them.

Now you know what to do and not do yourself and which to do more of or eliminate.

No question that people need bosses, but what they really need are good to great bosses—and with a little effort you can be one.

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Too many managers (of all ages and at all levels) tell me they are using texting, Twitter and email to manage their people. They’re even using them for performance reviews, layoffs and terminations.

When I ask why they use them I’m told some variation of ‘saves time’, ‘more immediate’, ‘modern way to manage’, ‘cool’ or the worst one, ‘lets me focus on what’s important.’

I may be a digital dinosaur, but I’m here to tell them (and you if you are on the receiving end) that that isn’t managing; it’s avoidance pure and simple.

It’s having the title while avoiding every single action required to lead a high-performing organization. It trashes careers and shows enormous disrespect for people.

In short, it’s a total copout; unfair to the team, the company and the investors.

What’s important are the people, because without the people there is no company and if there is no company you have no job.

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Companies struggle not only to create great corporate cultures, but to describe them. Perhaps they should read more ads, because off and on I see ads that do a great job of describing various parts of corporate culture.

For instance, in 1998 Sun Microsystems ran an ad that said, “Information shall circulate as freely as office gossip.” A great attitude for any company or manager.

Today I saw another that embodies another great corporate culture action; it was run by IDA Ireland in Business Week.

“New thinking is not about the dollars you invest. It’s about the people you invest in.”

That attitude is even more important today, in a world of shrinking budgets, than it was before tough times hit.

It’s simple; if you want to keep your valuable assets, AKA, the people who keep your company/department/team running smoothly then they need to feel that staying is smarter than leaving.

They need to feel valued even when there’s no money for raises and bonuses.

You do that by investing in them and helping them grow.

And you can do it even when your training budget has been slashed to the bone.

Funnily, I wrote about exactly that way back in 2006.

Worked then, works now.

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Do you work at fostering a culture of innovation? Encourage your people to think creatively? Do you want them to come up with ideas, large and small, to improve products and processes?

Most managers do.

Do you unintentionally stomp on their creative efforts?

That happens more often than you might think.

How many times has a member of your team (at any level) had an idea or made a suggestion and your initial response was along the lines of, “I know…,” “we tried that already…,” or “Jill already…”

Such reactions dump ice water on the creative process and if it happens several times most people won’t bother mentioning their next idea. Employees understand ideas may not be used, but that’s different from feeling you don’t want to hear about them unless they are perfect.

This happens most frequently with new employees, because they have no history to guide them, but new or not, the result is to kill creativity, instead of nurturing it.

I frequently hear from clients and others about their exciting breakthroughs/ideas for motivating their people, for their culture, or whatever, and it’s often simply their rephrasing of ideas we’ve been discussing or that I, or others, have written about, sometimes for years.

It doesn’t matter; and I make sure not to say anything that detracts from their breakthrough—causing them to feel that it’s not a big deal and that they merely reinvented an old wheel.

You see, the big deal is that they thought of it independently and that’s what I want to encourage—ideas, creative thinking, thinking beyond their knowledge, not necessarily historical knowledge.

To nurture the thinking that leads to creativity you need to acknowledge it, you don’t need to convince them that no one ever thought of it before, they’ll figure that out for themselves or a peer will tell them, what you focus on is the accomplishment.

The critical point is that they came to it on their own, and, because it came from inside, they own it.

And that makes the idea far more potent than anything you or I or anybody can say from the outside.

So when that old idea comes up yet again acknowledge the creativity of the thought first, then gently explain its history, being sure the person understands that the value is in the creativity it took to think of it and that you are looking forward to more creativity in the future.

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Pizzled is a cross between puzzled and pissed and it’s what people get when forced to work in a Triple A Culture.

RAT culture, on the other hand, leaves employees engaged, motivated and productive.

RAT means rational, authentic and transparent.

• Rational actions that make sense to your people and rational communication that doesn’t employ emotion to manipulate them.

• Authentic eliminates BS, yours and all those who report to you, and stays consistent, stabilizing everybody

• Transparent is saying clearly what you mean, doing what you say and holding everyone to the same standard—no exceptions.

RAT culture is always a top-down function imposed by any manager at any level on those who report directly or indirectly. Sadly, it is almost impossible to enable or enforce RAT culture up through the organization.

Assuming you have RAT MAP, RAT culture is satisfying to build, because it means

• doing what comes naturally;
• not having to remember what you said or did to stay consistent, because it was the truth;
• creating a working environment that’s full of sunshine instead of sh*t where people can grow and excel; and
• where fun, happy, productivity and success are the norm.

Finally, propagating RAT culture is profitable—not just for the company, because of high productivity, and your people, because of goals reached and dreams fulfilled, but for you as you’ll see from your reviews, the ease with which you hire and the pleasure you take in what you’ve accomplished.

So forget pizzled and go RAT, you won’t be disappointed.

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I think Harvard’s Jim Heskett poses some of the most thought provoking questions in his “What Do You Think” forum of anyone on the web and his readers generate some of the best commentary.

In the current forum he asks, Is Profit as a “Direct Goal” Overrated?

In his experience, the most profitable companies are run by people who don’t focus on profit.

Almost to a person, they treat profit as a by-product of other things to which they devote most of their attention, things such as a focused strategy that delivers results to carefully-selected customers while pursuing policies and practices that leverage results over costs, hiring people with the right attitude (one that fits with the organization’s culture), and proper training and organization (often in teams).

Heskett cites Obliquity, a new book by British economist John Kay, who argues that business problems cannot be solved by drawing a straight line between cause and long-term effect because they are so complex, a manager’s information so incomplete, the competitive environment so complicated, analytic techniques so inadequate, and the number of things over which a manager has control so limited, that it is impossible to make the connection with any assurance.

Tony Hsieh is adamant about not focusing on profit, but that didn’t stop him from building a billion dollar company.

Take a few minutes and read both Heskett’s thoughts and his readers’ commentary. (The forum is open for comments until July 28.)

Not surprisingly, many of them disagreed and felt that profit is the right focus.

I think that it may have been true in the 20^th Century, but it certainly isn’t in the 21^st.

What do you think?

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