It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Echo Chambers. They’ve been with us since humans first stood erect. We hear what we want to hear; listen only to those who agree with us. Seek out the likeminded with whom to spend our time. And, when all else fails, people have been known to go beyond the acceptable to prove they are right. But when this happens at work, what’s a manager to do?

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Last week I had a call from a “Rick,” marketing manager, with what he thought was a unique problem—sadly it’s not as uncommon as you might think.

Short version. “Chris” is one of his top producing marketing people and extremely valuable to the team and the company. Recently, the team had a vehement disagreement on a marketing plan, but finally decided to go with an approach different from the one that Chris had championed.

Since then, Chris has made a number of comments and suggestions that undermine the current effort and has privately said that she hopes it fails because the other approach was better.

The team was starting to notice and some were losing confidence—a sure way to guarantee failure.

Rick said he had talked a bit with Chris; she denied that she was sabotaging the campaign and if it failed it would be because the wrong choice was made.

When I asked if Chris was always such an ideologue Rick was startled. He hadn’t thought of her actions in those terms, but after thinking it over he decided that she was a bit, although normally not to this extent.

Rick went on to say that it was ironic, because during the election Chris had been adamant that the “hide-bound ideology on both sides was creating problems for the country” and that she thought Obama was less locked into a specific, narrow ideology than most politicians.

More recently, she had been furious with Rush Limbaugh’s comment “I hope Obama fails,” seeing it as destructive and unpatriotic.

And therein, as I told Rick, lay his solution. Here is what I suggested.

• Arrange a conversation without interruptions, such as an off-site lunch.
• Make a production of turning off your cell phone (if Rick isn’t answering his, Chris is unlikely to interrupt to answer hers).
• Keep the tone conversational; avoid anything that sounds like an accusation or makes the lunch feel like a confrontation.
• Remind Chris’ about her previous thoughts regarding ideologues.
• Once she confirms her thoughts gently draw the parallel between her attitudes and an ideologue.
• Use her own words and feelings to refute whatever defense she raises (again, without attacking her).
• Keep it conversational and take your time leading her to the recognition that her actions are the same as those she dislikes, just in a different arena.

Rick called today to say they’d had lunch that day and the conversation went exactly as predicted. It wasn’t perfectly smooth and there were some dicey moments, but when that happened he backed away and tried another route. He said that it would have been impossible to do in the office with interruptions and turning off their cells created a whole different mood.

He said that when Chris realized that she was doing a highly watered down version of Limbaugh she was openly shocked and very apologetic.

Instead of leaving it there, Rick took extra time to walk through the competing plans and why the team had chosen the one and not the other. He explained that it wasn’t that Chris was wrong, she just held a different opinion and that was OK, but it wasn’t OK do anything to undermine the program—even unconsciously.

With a more open mind Chris grudgingly agreed to the reasoning. She said that in spite of still feeling the other plan was better she would do everything in her power to make the project work. She said that the success of the project was more important than being “right.”

Rick was lucky because a critical member of his team was also a rational thinking person who could see a parallel when it was pointed out and not enough of a hypocrite to claim “that’s different…”

Chris was lucky because she worked for a manager who valued her and was willing to take the time to help her change and grow.

How do you control your inner ideologue?

Or do you?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last week I wrote Time To Get Off Your Ass And Lead (Yourself) and Ravi Tangri added some very intelligent thoughts in his comment. I hope you’ll take a moment to click over, read it and add your own thoughts to the conversation. It’s an important one for all of us.

Image credit: Gurdonark on flickr

This golden Oldie dates back to 2009 and includes a comment worth a click.

What kind of boss/colleague/subordinate are you?

Does William Butler Yeats’s line “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” fit you?

Sounds like a bad thing, but actually it’s a great attitude to cultivate.

Look at the two parts separately.

Let’s take the second part first; I believe “while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” refers to people who espouse a certain approach or methodology so emphatically that nothing sways them that there may be a better way or even that a different method will accomplish the same thing.

“The best lack all conviction” could be taken to mean being totally wish-washy with no firm beliefs, but taken together with the second part I think it means being open to new ideas/approaches.

In other words, the first is open to learning and the second is a ‘my way or the highway’ type.

Who would you rather work with?

If you want the first, be sure not to model the second.

Flickr image credit: Tom Henrich

Elon Musk is everywhere these days; played up by the media as a guru and role model.

But is he?

Malcolm Berko, a financial writer who’s not afraid to say when the emperor has no clothes and with no ties to anyone but himself shares a different take on Musk in response to a reader’s question.

I understand your enthusiasm for SolarCity, founded in 2006 by the Rive brothers in collaboration with Musk. But you’re ascribing extraordinary powers to this Musk chap, who, with Peter Thiel, founded PayPal in 1998. In 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion after Musk was contentiously removed as CEO by its board of directors. Musk is kind of a geeky, spacey guy who, in late 2001, designed the project “Mars Oasis.” He intended to land miniature greenhouses on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith. But Musk put his Mars Oasis on hold when he realized that current rocket technology would not allow humans to become “true spacefaring” people. Hello! He sought to address this problem by founding SpaceX, which so far is flying in the red and running up debts. His Tesla Motors, founded in 2010 and financed with four partners, hasn’t made a dime, either, but the company has a ridiculous market cap of $18 billion. In late 2011, this wacky genius spent millions researching a new form of transportation between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in August 2013, he unveiled his “Hyperloop,” a subsonic air travel machine relying completely on solar energy that would permit commuters to travel the 350 miles between the two cities in 30 minutes. As long as Musk has billions in the bank, he’ll be a genius, but take away his money and people will call him a fool. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue’s marketing has done a splendid job of promoting his name and reputation.

But very few things he touches turn to gold; Musk is a geek without management skills, and investors should realize this.

I have no idea how accurate Berko’s analysis vs. the media in general, but I do know that no matter who says what it’s wise to check out both sides of any story.

Not only to check it out, but to do so with an open mind.

Because even if 99 out of 100 have the same opinion that doesn’t prove that the one dissenting opinion is wrong.

It may just prove that the emperor really doesn’t have any clothes.

Flickr image credit: Huw

There will be numerous stories today about the events of 12 years ago; however, I already shared the only personal story I believed added a different component to the usual conversation.

Instead of looking backwards, I want to show you the present and what one company, Toyota, did to change the course of food philanthropy in New York City—a lesson that other areas would do well to consider.

Many businesses of all sizes write checks to charities and others offer time off for their people to actively pursue projects.

Toyota wrote check, too, but then had a better idea.

Instead of a check, it offered kaizen. … an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance.

Think small improvements that offer large results over time.

What could a bunch of engineers and a dose of kaizen really do for the country’s largest anti-hunger charity?

To get the full impact you need to read the story, but consider this,

At a soup kitchen in Harlem, Toyota’s engineers cut down the wait time for dinner to 18 minutes from as long as 90. At a food pantry on Staten Island, they reduced the time people spent filling their bags to 6 minutes from 11. And at a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where volunteers were packing boxes of supplies for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a dose of kaizen cut the time it took to pack one box to 11 seconds from 3 minutes.

The biggest take-away of this story is the absolute proof that the only thing required to take an approach known to yield positive results and successfully apply it in circumstances with no relationship to the norm is not an open mind, but rather a willingness to be proven wrong.

“They make cars; I run a kitchen,” said Daryl Foriest, director of distribution at the Food Bank’s pantry and soup kitchen in Harlem. “This won’t work.”

Happily, Foriest was proven wrong.

Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank. (…) “I never thought that what we needed were a bunch of engineers. In our world food is king, but we didn’t know that the queen would be kaizen.”

So the next time you are about to reject an outré solution, remember what kaizen did for the NY Food Bank and rethink your decision.

Flickr image credit: Inha Leex Hale

Since I can’t send gifts to each of you, I thought I’d offer up a video of me dancing along with one of my infamous rhymes—what more could anyone want?

Christmas comes just once a year
as does its spirit, too, I fear.
It would be nice to keep peace and goodwill,
but after the First it’s all downhill.
Perhaps this year we could arrange
for each of us to make a change;
revamp our MAP and maybe then
we can leave closed minds in 2010.

Have a wonderful day and enjoy your people.

Now take a look at modern business smarts

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Image credit: *Zephyrance – don’t wake me up. on flickr

The silly blow-up over President Obama’s back-to-school speech drove home once again how I am that won’t be around when the current crop of kids take the reins of political, social and business so-called leadership roles.

I am continually amazed and revolted as I watch so-called conservatives of all stripes work to be sure their children are exposed to nothing that conflicts with whatever ideology they are steeping them in.

I say ‘conservatives’ because so-called liberals seem more flexible within their stands. (Please note that I said ‘flexible, not changeable.)

What exactly was in this speech, that some kids weren’t allowed to hear? Here are some excerpts that I found especially uplifting to hear—and if you think I cherry-picked the contents you can read it in its entirety and decide for yourself.

• But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world — and none of it will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. That’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.

• You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it.

• What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. The future of America depends on you. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

• We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that — if you quit on school — you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

• But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.

• [After describing specific kids’ situations] But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

• I know that sometimes you get that sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star. Chances are you’re not going to be any of those things. The truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject that you study. You won’t click with every teacher that you have. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

• I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and that then allows you to learn something new.

• So today, I want to ask all of you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?

The text of the speech was released early in response to fear-mongering, but some schools still didn’t broadcast it and some parents still prevented their kids from watching.

Why? Because he encouraged them to take responsibility for themselves? Because he said that our country’s future depends on them? Because he was raised by a single mom? Because he told them that success was a function of very hard work?

Or is it the closed-minded attitude of the ideologue represented by 15-year-old Andrew Quick, near Orlando, Fla., who said “he considered the speech to be a potentially disruptive interruption of his school day, so decided not to watch it. “I’m a Republican,” he said, “and I really don’t like Obama all that much.”

I translate that to mean ‘I don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t think as I think and agree with me’, an attitude that doesn’t bode well for our country’s future.

Exactly what in this speech was of such concern to the conservative agenda that their kids should not hear it?

Perhaps the problem is the message that, in the end, they are each responsible for what they become—not their parents or teachers or politicians and certainly not God—just them.

That they will be what they choose to be and whether that choice is active or passive; it’s their choice as thinking individuals—assuming they choose to think and not just blindly follow a given ideology.

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Image credit: edokhan on flickr

How’s your attitude?

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: sjtodey on sxc.hu

Last week I had a call from a “Rick,” marketing manager, with what he thought was a unique problem—sadly it’s not as uncommon as you might think.

Short version. “Chris” is one of his top producing marketing people and extremely valuable to the team and the company. Recently, the team had a vehement disagreement on a marketing plan, but finally decided to go with an approach different from the one that Chris had championed.

Since then, Chris has made a number of comments and suggestions that undermine the current effort and has privately said that she hopes it fails because the other approach was better.

The team was starting to notice and some were losing confidence—a sure way to guarantee failure.

Rick said he had talked a bit with Chris; she denied that she was sabotaging the campaign and if it failed it would be because the wrong choice was made.

When I asked if Chris was always such an ideologue Rick was startled. He hadn’t thought of her actions in those terms, but after thinking it over he decided that she was a bit, although normally not to this extent.

Rick went on to say that it was ironic, because during the election Chris had been adamant that the “hide-bound ideology on both sides was creating problems for the country” and that she thought Obama was less locked into a specific, narrow ideology than most politicians.

More recently, she had been furious with Rush Limbaugh’s comment “I hope Obama fails,” seeing it as destructive and unpatriotic.

And therein, as I told Rick, lay his solution. Here is what I suggested.

• Arrange a conversation without interruptions, such as an off-site lunch.
• Make a production of turning off your cell phone (if Rick isn’t answering his, Chris is unlikely to interrupt to answer hers).
• Keep the tone conversational; avoid anything that sounds like an accusation or makes the lunch feel like a confrontation.
• Remind Chris’ about her previous thoughts regarding ideologues.
• Once she confirms her thoughts gently draw the parallel between her attitudes and an ideologue.
• Use her own words and feelings to refute whatever defense she raises (again, without attacking her).
• Keep it conversational and take your time leading her to the recognition that her actions are the same as those she dislikes, just in a different arena.

Rick called today to say they’d had lunch that day and the conversation went exactly as predicted. It wasn’t perfectly smooth and there were some dicey moments, but when that happened he backed away and tried another route. He said that it would have been impossible to do in the office with interruptions and turning off their cells created a whole different mood.

He said that when Chris realized that she was doing a highly watered down version of Limbaugh she was openly shocked and very apologetic.

Instead of leaving it there, Rick took extra time to walk through the competing plans and why the team had chosen the one and not the other. He explained that it wasn’t that Chris was wrong, she just held a different opinion and that was OK, but it wasn’t OK do anything to undermine the program—even unconsciously.

With a more open mind Chris grudgingly agreed to the reasoning. She said that in spite of still feeling the other plan was better she would do everything in her power to make the project work. She said that the success of the project was more important than being “right.”

Rick was lucky because a critical member of his team was also a rational thinking person who could see a parallel when it was pointed out and not enough of a hypocrite to claim “that’s different…”

Chris was lucky because she worked for a manager who valued her and was willing to take the time to help her change and grow.

How do you control your inner ideologue?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last week I wrote Time To Get Off Your Ass And Lead (Yourself) and Ravi Tangri added some very intelligent thoughts in his comment. I hope you’ll take a moment to click over, read it and add your own thoughts to the conversation. It’s an important one for all of us.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: Gurdonark on flickr