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.

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Yesterday I said I would share ways to find employees who would be invested in your company and not just in themselves.

The best place to start is to take a look at the stupidest hiring practice I know and why it is so stupid, i.e., only hiring people who are currently working or not off more than six months.

I’ve seen this attitude before during other recessions, but to see it this rampant now, when the economy is still shaky and the job market hasn’t turned around is beyond belief.

As I told the managers who contacted me and I’m telling all of you, I have no empathy for managers who say they can’t find good people.

Pundit managers (those who share their views through articles and blogs) are constantly saying that attitude is more important than skills; add willingness and ability to learn and the value skyrockets and if the candidate is a good cultural fit the value jumps by an order of magnitude.

Manage them well and you will get additional benefits that money can’t buy—gratitude, appreciation and loyalty—all because you gave them a chance.

The wisest engineering vp I ever met once told me that he would rather have a programmer who knew multiple languages than an expert in the one he needed at the moment. He said that technology would keep changing faster and faster and he needed people who could learn on the fly and change with it. He said that a proven ability to change was more valuable than expert status.

When hiring stay focused on the fact that your next top performer won’t necessarily

• have the best grades;
• attend a prestigious school;
• work for your competitor,
• in your industry or
• even be working at all;
• be younger than X;
• have a full head of hair, with no gray; or
• fit easily into your comfort zone.

The bottom line is your success is the result of your ability to recognize jewels where others see only lumps of coal.

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Many of the news reports and stories I read leave me with the same unanswered question, ‘why’?

Why do people with everything do such incredibly stupid things?

Why do they risk losing it all—and often do?

To paraphrase a question, what’s in it for them?

And more importantly, what can be done about it?

Bill George, Professor of Management Practice and Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics at Harvard Business School wrote an article on the subject. Focused on positional leaders in a variety of circumstances it considers “Why Leaders Lose Their Way,” but his solution, while correct, is old and tired. Not to mention that he’s preaching to the choir—those who listen are on the right path already and those who should won’t.

While George’s approach offers nothing new, Dave Balter, founder of BzzAgent, provides a much more compelling story that should provide a wake-up call to anyone who’s ego is on the way to, or has already gotten, out of hand.

Interestingly, there is a ‘why’ on the other side of the coin, too, but it’s one that goes unnoticed, buried in positive actions and the (well earned) praise sung by the media.

I’m referring to the actions of people such as Angelina Jolie, Bono and now, Matt Damon. If you aren’t aware of the role he’s created for himself, read about it. It surpasses by far anything else he’s taken on before.

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On March 25^th I read an article on the newest perk, teaching employees how to start their own company, being used to lure talent; I choked and saved the URL for today’s post.

A few days later I read Bill Taylor’s reaction to the same article at HBR. To say that Taylor, who is a co-founder of Fast Company, is a big booster of entrepreneurial efforts is like saying Google is a modest success, but his reaction was the same as mine.

Rather than rehashing what he said (click and read it) I want to point out why jumping through hoops to hire from a certain tiny percentage of available talent is insanely stupid and tomorrow I’ll offer alternatives.

• Insane because, as Einstein so aptly put it, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
• Stupid because there is a wide range of talent available that would work its butt off for the right reasons.

Why it’s insanely stupid

1. The candidate who joins a company primarily for money, stock or whatever is hot du jour will quickly leave for more money, stock or hotter du jour. In other words, when joining a company is “all about me” there is nothing invested in the company, its values/culture, products or even its success, so when (not if) the going gets rough there’s no vested reason to stay.
2. Many companies and managers hire as much for bragging rights as for need. In other words, do you really need to hire god or will an angel or even a mortal do the job just as well?
3. One manager’s star is another manager’s failure. In other words, past achievement is an indicator, not a guarantee, of future performance.
4. Candidates have definite cultural ideas and needs. In other words, people perform based on how synergistic their cultural and managerial needs are with the same elements in their employer.

(Note: although the focus here is on software development, I’ve seen the same insanely stupid hiring in most fields and industries at one time or another.)

Companion posts,

• Insanely Smart Hiring
• Insanely Smart Retention and Stars

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I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of the amount of pure stupid going around.

Now it’s Mark Hurd, but he is just the latest in an epidemic of stupid.

I expect stupid from teens, after all, brain science has proved that teen brains are in a process of change and during that time the frontal cortex isn’t functioning.

Dr. Paul Thompson, UCLA School of Medicine: “As you get older, you don’t necessarily get more brain. The outer layer of the brain is actually thinning.”

Dr. Judy Rapaport, NIH: “You end up with a sort of leaner, meaner thinking machine by the time you’re an adult.”

But it seems that many aren’t thinking.

Call it Extreme Makeover: Career Edition and Ty Pennington just screamed, “Let’s do some demo!”

I think the brain research needs to be redone to account for regression after 40.

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Few things are constant, but management stupidity when it comes to retention is one of them.

Before Wall Street pulled the rug out of under the economy global demographics made the need to cherish workers at all levels obvious.

Estimates of the national shortage run as high as 14 million skilled workers by 2020, according to widely cited projections by the labor economists Anthony P. Carnevale and Donna M. Desrochers.

Then came the downturn and executive retention stupidity is once again running rampant.

Two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers. nearly two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers.

The assumption is often that Gen Yers are the least loyal and most mobile, says Robin Erickson, a manager with Deloitte’s human capital division.

However, a companion survey of employees found that only about 37 percent of Gen Xers said they planned to stay in their current jobs after the recession ends, compared with 44 percent of Gen Yers, 50 percent of baby boomers and 52 percent of senior citizen workers who said the same.

Everyone surveyed worried about job security. Gen X and Gen Y were most likely to complain about pay. But a ”lack of career progress,” was by far the biggest gripe from Gen Xers, with 40 percent giving that as a reason for their restlessness, compared with 30 percent of Gen Yers, 20 percent of baby boomers and 14 percent of senior workers.

Gen Yers, meanwhile, were more likely than the other generations to cite ”lack of challenges in the job” as a reason they would leave, while baby boomers more often chose ”poor employee treatment during the downturn” and a ”lack of trust in leadership.”

Let me spell this out.

The economy will turn around.

The Boomers may stay in the workforce for now, but they will retire.

Gen Y is being held back because of the economy and may never catch up, certainly not fast enough to run American enterprise when the Boomers retire.

That leaves Gen X, which is being ignored.

Stupid attitudes towards employees is nothing new for the folks running companies, but this one is really going to come back and bite not just them, but our country’s competitiveness.

One can only hope that the stupidity is global, so we’re not the only ones dealing with it.

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Social media; stories about it are everywhere, but I find the most interesting are about what companies are doing and how its being used.

Let’s start with Twitter. Everybody has heard of Twitter, even people who have no idea what it is talk about it—like my friend’s great-granny. But it’s their smarts in innovation that is most impressive—they outsource it.

Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them.’ –Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

If you run a business these days you’re probably using Facebook or thinking about it—I know I am. So I found this article in the NY Times of great interest, especially since it’s written for folks, not pros.

You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are, and with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services. –Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009).

Do you know the key ingredient that helps police nab the bad guys? Stupidity—theirs. It used to be that they flashed their loot around and bragged to their friends, not they flash their loot and brag on Facebook.

Maxi Sopo thought he had made an excellent decision when he ran away to Cancun to escape a Seattle fraud prosecution. He also thought it would be a great idea to add a former Justice Department official as a friend and gush about his exploits on Facebook.

I love it when stupid gets stupider.

Last is an item that falls in the smart or stupid category—you decide. It asks the question; at what point does a CEO’s Facebook sharing cross the boundary to TMI (too much information)?

Recently Chip Conley, CEO of Joie de Vivre, a $230 million company with more than 3,000 employees, got enmeshed in a bit of a 2009 corporate culture snafu. Conley’s not your average Harvard MBA pinstriped buttoned-down corporate chieftan. He’s an entrepreneur. He writes his own rules. So to him, it wasn’t so strange to post some pictures of himself at the Burning Man whatever-it-is in the dessert on his Facebook fan page. Or to tweet on Twitter about the demise of his 8 year long relationship.

When his employees got upset he wrote about it on BNET. Read both articles and share your thoughts in comments.

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Now find out what stupid has to do with shame and duty

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