I’ve come to the conclusion that the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions; it’s paved with ”leaders with intentions”—good, bad or indifferent.

I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?

Media co-opted ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ decades ago and increasingly diluted the meaning until it disappeared.

Along with dilution, the media gave those they termed leaders the same treatment that was previously reserved for extraordinary athletes, celebrities and rock stars.

In doing so they created the monstrous, indestructible, uncontrollable ego found in every leader who bought into their hype; and reflected in compensation packages more fit for royalty than for business people.

And in case you haven’t noticed, you can find many of those massive egos in (surprise, surprise) investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and other sectors of financial services. But you knew that.

In fact, ego-mania has percolated throughout all industries, with little consideration for the size of the organization or its mission.

Further, in throwing the leader term around so loosely the media helped enlarge politicians’ already super-sized egos still more and extended the ego franchise to religious heads.

Not only are those egos super-sized, they also seem to be bulletproof.

How many of these ‘leaders’ have actually taken responsibility for what they’ve caused?

Have you seen them apologizing for their share of bringing down the global economy? Did I miss it? Boy, I hope you Tivoed it for posterity.

But the media’s gone pretty silent on the subject; lauding corporate heads seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. But dodos aren’t the only extinct bird, the phoenix is, too. And like the phoenix, media leadership hype will rise again just as soon as we all forget—which, unfortunately, we will and that’s a historically proven fact.

By the way, I’m not the only one; Jim Stroup noticed the silence, too, only from a different perspective.

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For years I’ve pushed my clients on the importance of communicating bad news along with the good and in the summer of 2006 I wrote a post about it.

Convincing executives that sharing bad news is as necessary as sharing good is similar to discussing global warming. Most agree that something needs to be done, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into action.

What’s forcing them to act is Web 2.0 and a multi-generational group of web-savvy folks with a belief in transparency and a willingness to spend their time promoting it using blogs and Twitter.

“Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company…[since] Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters. “We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.””

That’s it in a nutshell.

Much of the transparency trend started with activists who created websites about companies where people could comment, make suggestions and vent their frustrations; now it’s pushed into the tech startups of Silicon Valley, but laggards in all industries are being dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality.

“Every industry has Web sites that cover its companies and eagerly publish rumors, from the Starbucks Gossip blog to DealBreaker for the financial industry and BlueOvalNews.com for Ford Motor. Web sites like Glassdoor.com and JobSchmob.com also encourage workers to vent about their bosses.

Larger companies need to learn that lesson, too, said Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, which helps big companies use social media. “There are hold-out companies that still wish there was traditional P.R. control of the message, but that day is long over.””

The only thing a company can do that’s worse than silence is to lie or fudge the truth.

Many years ago a rumor started at a Siemens facility in Arizona that the company was going to move to a new location about 70 miles away. The management hotly denied it and many of the engineers who they relocated there trusted them and bought homes. About nine months later the company did indeed move and most of those people lost money when they had to sell their homes to keep their jobs.

Lies aren’t smart, but this one was particularly stupid and unnecessary; the story outlasted the executives who did it and tainted their recruiting efforts for years.

The moral is simple—tell the truth, without spin, and tell if first.

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Yesterday, Dave Zinger reviewed a book called The Myth of Multitasking.

Also yesterday, Brenda left a comment on an old (before my time) post on my other blog that led me to a 2001 APA article explaining “executive control.” “[It] involves two distinct, complementary stages: goal shifting (“I want to do this now instead of that”) and rule activation (“I’m turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this”). Both stages help people unconsciously switch between tasks.”

The time spent shifting is yet another reason why multitasking is a myth.

All this reminded me of a post I wrote in 2006 that is overdue for republishing right now.

Smart or stupid? Your choice!

Back in early 2003 I read an article in the Wall Street Journal called Multitasking Makes You Stupid and I cheered. Why? Because it’s always nice to have one’s opinion confirmed through scientific study by experts with lots of credentials—especially when most of the people around you are bragging about how well they multitask.

I got to thinking about that and did a bit more searching to see if anything’s changed. There’s one study that looked at gender differences and came to the conclusion that whereas productivity is about equal, women have a slight advantage in accuracy. I’m certainly not claiming I read all 250,000 pages returned on a search using the terms, multitasking study Dr university, but scanning through the first hundred I didn’t notice anything that contradicted what I’ve always thought—multitasking is not productive!

So what’s happened since the original article appeared? More ways to multitask; more managers demanding that their people do it; and more people bragging about their skill at it—more errors, accidents and loss of productivity.

Don’t believe me? Think about

• what it’s like talking to someone who is reading email or doing other computer tasks during the conversation;
• how close you’ve come to creaming someone, or being creamed, while talking on a cell;
• the last time you didn’t notice the sirens ’cause you were listening to an iPod or talking on a cell.

And before you write all this off with the famous “but me” argument ask yourself: are you really that different from the rest of the human race?

For more insights read HBS working Knowledge columnist Stever Robbins (among many others), then read my Think, dream, innovate, and then really think about how you want to run your life!

Then ask yourself, what percentage of the day do you spend multitasking?

Image credit: shdt

Image credit: jon argos

All this talk about knowing yourself/your MAP reminds me of something I’d like to share with you.

Twice recently people have commented on how direct I am and both times it caught me up short. Not because I’m unaware of the trait, but because I’d forgotten about it.

For the last 10 years, direct is why my clients hired and paid me.

The fact that my directness was problematical previous to my starting RampUp Solutions had totally slipped my mind, so when it came up my reaction was ‘huh’.

That’s the way it is with MAP features. There’s no way we can stay conscious of every one of them all the time and in all their guises—and that’s OK 98% of the time, but that 2% can bite when (not if) it pops up.

What to do?

Start by leveling with your people about yourself. In my case, I not only admitted to being direct, i.e., blunt—I joked about it. Along with that I approved and encouraged them to be blunt with me—full reciprocation. It wasn’t always comfortable, but it worked.

Since you know that it can happen, focus your awareness on your effect on those around you. Stay conscious of their facial expressions—or lack thereof—body language, speech patterns, even silences. When a flag goes up address it immediately.

MAP features don’t function as excuses for poor behavior. Continuing with my example, being blunt isn’t an excuse for tearing people down; it doesn’t excuse rudeness, embarrassing, humiliating, disparaging, or publicly criticizing someone.

What MAP features have you forgotten? What impact do they have?

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Corporate culture is the darling of today’s pundits, toasted and blamed for enhancing, allowing, enabling or contributing to every success and failure when it hits the media—and for good reason.

But is corporate culture also at the bottom of the amazing number of ethical lapses that have come to light over the last decade or so?

In a talk on ethics Bradley Preber, Grant Thornton’s partner-in-charge of its Forensic Accounting and Investigative Services practice commented that “Any company that continues having pervasive and systematic behavior problems with its employees must look at its culture to see if it could be partly what drives that unethical behavior. And if the recurring problem stems from upper management then this will have repercussions for the rest of the company. He added that culture is a factor that can be used to predict fraud and evaluate a company’s ethics.”

Moreover, the ethical breaches that surface shouldn’t come as a surprise.

According to Marianne Jennings, author of The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse and professor of legal and ethical studies in business at W. P. Carey School of Business, “All unethical organizations are alike; their cultures are identical and their collapses become predictable.” Moreover, there are seven warning signs for which you can watch,

1. “pressure to maintain numbers;
   
2. fear and silence in the ranks and leadership;
   
3. young and inexperienced executives and a bigger-than-life CEO;
   
4. a weak board;
   
5. conflict;
   
6. pressure to produce constant innovation; and
   
7. a penchant for philanthropy that assuages guilt for questionable decisions.”

Just don’t expect this checklist to be posted in neon in your office or offered up on the company wiki.

Plus, there’s an entire gray area that although the actions may not be illegal they are unethical. It’s your responsibility to keep your head out of the sand, your eyes open and to recognize when you’re in that gray zone.

Just as you know that when something is too good to be true it probably is, know that if you’re wondering if something is unethical it probably is.

Do you see any of the seven signs in your company’s culture?

Good post over at lifehack.org about productivity and why it’s about more than time management.

Rather than rewrite it I’m going to link you up with some stuff I’ve written previously that dovetails perfectly with the idea of Luftmenschen (people who deal in the non-tangible: ideas, thoughts, dreams).

I’ve written about this before, starting with proof that multitasking is a figment of your overactive imagination or wish list; then on to the time to think to facilitate the dreaming that fosters innovation and happiness; why vacations are important, and, best of all, here’s a link to the only real, honest-to-goodness silver bullet that not only exists, but is already yours!

Are you a Luftmenschen?