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Today’s investment bankers are known mostly for their greed and excess (with a few exceptions), but has the profession always been that way?

Meet James Truslow Adams, whose take on life is vastly different.

“There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.”

“The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

What unexpected source do you like?

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A week ago I brought IBM’s The Enterprise of the Future  to your attention and said I’d be discussing it in the future, but there’s so much material in the three studies that I decided to make it a Saturday staple for awhile.

Additionally, if you or someone you know, would like to provide a guest post based on or related to any of the three IBM studies (CEO, CFO and HR) I would love to have them.

In the Global CEO Study five critical traits needed for success were identified through conversations with more than 1000 CEOs around the world.

The first is that to be a powerhouse, no matter your size, you must be “hungry for change,” not scared, tolerant or even willing, but hungry for it.

You must see “change within the organization as a permanent state” and build your culture accordingly.

According to Masao Yamazaki, President and CEO, West Japan Railway Company, “The key to successful transformation is changing our mind-set…it is easy to be complacent…company culture must have a built-in change mechanism.”

While corporate culture is the reason that “employees are comfortable with unpredictability. In an environment in which products, markets, operations and business models are always in flux, values and goals provide alignment and cohesion,” it’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that provides the underpinnings for it all.

And it’s not just organizational change that’s moving so quickly, but positions, including CXOs, are, too.

In an insightful article in MIS Asia, Chris Potts says, “In less than five years’ time, the CIO role, according to CIOs themselves, is destined to become either an executive leader of business change or absorbed into another role,” and walks you through the reasoning and the changes that need to happen.

“There is a pressing need for integrated leadership of business and technology change. With enterprise architecture and investment portfolio management, CIOs have the two strategic tools onto which that leadership depends. The CIO’s cultural challenge is to explain that these tools are primarily about people and collaboration, not technology.”

Change requires talent and a paucity of talent was rated as the greatest barrier to growth, more so than even regulatory and budgetary considerations.

Moreover, the kind of talent needed has changed radically from the descriptions so often heard as has the ways to remunerate them. Now, it’s “people who question assumptions and suggest radical, and what some might initially consider impractical, alternatives” with the potential for “differentiated rewards, such as a stake in the business they helped create.”

Managing this kind of talent takes more than good people skills or charisma, it requires MAP that’s secure and willing to hire people smarter than itself, share a vision of the needed results, turn them loose and trust them to accomplish it.

Do you know many managers with this kind of MAP?

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The other day I said to a friend that I’ve turned into a real wimp. He thought I was kidding and said that I was the last person he associated with wimping out on anything.

I was surprised, but as we discussed it I realized that what I saw as wimpiness he saw as strength.

That got me to thinking how often what one person calls wimping out may be another person’s greatest act of courage. Likewise, what moves one person can leave another cold.

It’s all relative depending on your MAP, the circumstances and even the mood you’re in.

Sounds obvious, but it’s important knowledge, not information, but knowledge—maybe even wisdom—for any person responsible for motivating others, whether at work or in everyday life.

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Leadership is an industry. In the name of leadership over the last 4000 years at least a million trees have gone to make the leadership library’s books and magazines; more recently thousands of computers serve up terabytes of digital commentary, discussion and rants about leadership; and the thousands of people in the leadership industry pay mortgages, raise families and send their kids to college.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. Industries have coalesced around stranger, more ephemeral, more esoteric topics and people have benefited—or not.

But I often wonder if there is truly anything new under the leadership sun or if it’s all been said already, and with more beauty, by the earliest pundits, such as my own favorite Lao Tzu.

That’s not to say we can’t learn from more recent writings.

To learn, we each must find that which resonates best within us—not in someone else, but in our own most vulnerable self. That’s the most fertile soil—where seeds planted can truly flourish.

Richard Stengel has written another thoughtful and moving article about Mandela and leadership, “I’ve always thought of what you are about to read as Madiba’s Rules (Madiba, his clan name, is what everyone close to him calls him), and they are cobbled together from our conversations old and new and from observing him up close and from afar. They are mostly practical. Many of them stem directly from his personal experience. All of them are calibrated to cause the best kind of trouble: the trouble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a better place.”

1. Courage is not the absence of fear—it’s inspiring others to move beyond it
2. Lead from the front—but don’t leave your base behind
3. Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front
4. Know your enemy—and learn about his favorite sport
5. Keep your friends close—and your rivals even closer
6. Appearances matter—and remember to smile
7. Nothing is black or white
8. Quitting is leading too

I’ve listed just the headings and although you may think that it’s the same stuff you’ve seen before if you don’t take time to click and read the entire text you’ll be doing yourself and those around you a major disservice.

This may be the one—the one that resonates, takes root and changes your life.

What resonates most for you?

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CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.

What I do is not just a job. I know a few college professors, and several pre-college teachers who see what they do as just a job.  They are not very good at what they do, though.  Sometimes, you have to do more than just stand in front of a class and talk.

Good instruction means taking time to prepare what you are going to say. Yes, I’ve taught for enough years that I can just walk into a classroom, with no notes and no preparation, and start lecturing.  And, my students would learn something.  But they would not learn as much as if I had actually prepared.  Now, I don’t often follow my notes.  I have gone over what I’ve got to say before I say it, and I’ve taught this material for so long that I am quite familiar with it.  Still, I prepare.

That preparation also means that I have to keep current in the field.  What new developments have there been?  What new discoveries supersede what the textbook says?  It is my job to know my field.  That means spending many, many hours reading journals.  It means going to conferences.  It means keeping up with my own research.

And, of course, I need to grade student papers.  I want to give reasonable feedback so that they can learn from their mistakes.  But that takes extra time.  I don’t have to do that.  I know several faculty who don’t give students any feedback.  But for my class practically every thing in the class is a learning experience.  There is a reason that I have certain students go out of their way to take my class.

I am not the easiest professor around. That is clear from the internet sites where students evaluate their professors.  However, I am thorough, fair and my students learn. So, those students that want an easy “A” take someone else’s class and those who want to learn take my class.

How tough are your kids teachers?

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Working with entrepreneurs on writing business plans to finding affordable office space and everything in-between is big business. And, as with most services, they vary in value and effectiveness.

But venture firm Highland Capital Partners (Boston and Silicon Valley) is doing something different. Instead of charging the promising entrepreneurs they pay them.

“The program was designed as a sort of summer camp for entrepreneurs. Open to undergrad and graduate students, it offered aspiring entrepreneurs a $7,500 stipend, free office space, and access to Highland’s staff and outside contacts.”

The greatest value to the entrepreneurs isn’t the cost or the pay, but Highland’s knowledge and network.

Last year, “Michael Sullivan was trying to figure out how to add some mojo to his startup. As a graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard, Sullivan had co-founded Affine Systems in 2006 with classmate Bobby Impollonia. Working out of their homes, the two computer whizzes had whipped up a software program to let media companies know if their copyrighted videos show up on the Internet.”

Anyone who follows the news knows that copyright on the Net is beyond hot.

So what did Sullivan and his partner get out of their ten weeks?

Highland’s partners helped Affine craft a business strategy, land their first test customers, and hire two senior executives. Ultimately, last winter, Highland put venture money into Affine, one of two companies in the program to get funding.

Highland isn’t the only program, Lightspeed Venture Partners (Silicon Valley) also runs a camp as do several other VCs. As with conventional startups, not all attendees’ ideas fly, but that’s OK, the connection is made and the next idea could be the next big thing.

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Check out my other WW: leadership vacuum

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Check out my other WW: changing corporate culture

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By Wes Ball, author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success. Read all of Wes’ posts here.

It is seldom the “big” decisions that kill a company, except in the final stages, when big decisions are needed to “save” it.  It is the day-to-day sacrificing of “Alpha Assets” that drive a company to ruin.  Alpha Assets are the real strategic assets a company has, based upon the Alpha Factor model defined in my book.

What happens is that leaders start to believe the lies they hear from customers, retailers, and salespeople that they have to compete on price.  They make decisions based upon short-term internal needs before addressing strategic needs of customers.  They make budget and other decisions based upon satisfying shareholders and stock analysts, whose interest in the company is extremely short-term.

When I see the kinds of problems that most corporate leaders face on a day-to-day basis, more than 90% of them are ones that either would not exist or would be much less threatening, if the company had not made many small compromises and small “mistakes” over a long time.  They have given away the competitive influence they might have had by “playing by the rules.”

In the research for my book, The Alpha Factor, I was continually surprised to find that many Alpha companies struggle with this.  The difference is that Alpha’s compromise less and stay focused more upon their core Alpha Assets when making decisions.

What kind of pressure have you seen that tempts you to just solve the problem today without regard to how it might harm your long-term potential?

Your comments—priceless

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Robert Nardelli, best know for almost killing Home Depot by trashing its customers and ignoring its culture and poster boy for the platinum parachute, is back in the news.

For those of you vacationing on Mars (the only way you could have missed it) last August, Cerberus hired him to run Chrysler.

A year later, in a marriage between surreal and oxymoron, Nardelli is teaching executives how to create a a quality-based customer-centric culture.

It’s a sweeping change in MAP, but apparently he read a book and was converted.

Wow! As Kevin Meyer said over at Evolving Excellence, “I guess I better get a copy of that ice cream book. It must really be something.”

But before you get too excited, let it be noted that Nardelli hasn’t actually talked to any dealers or showroom customers—probably too mundane and not measurable enough.