I’d never heard of Gerald W. Johnson when I came across this excellent quote, “The closed mind, if closed long enough, can be opened by nothing short of dynamite.”
It was so perfectly aimed, so true and so applicable that I went looking for what else he said.
There’s not a lot, but you’ll love what I did find. Johnson’s comments seem especially pithy and apropos for our world today.
Consider this, “No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.” These days, the higher you go the harder it is to find anyone who has been saddled.
Of course, give it a few years—the economy will recover, the jail sentences will be over, and all those leaders who wouldn’t know a responsibility if it jumped up and bit them will be back taking risks and influencing right and left. This will happen because, as Johnson said, “Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.” Or what they choose to remember.
Heroes aren’t really in style these days, so I thought I’d bring the final quote up to date.
“Heroes Leaders are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.”
And from a small business owner who grew his business from himself to three companies with combined employment of 104 people, a concise description of how he did it and his four keys to motivating his people. I like his attitude when he says, “There’s an old saying: “A fish rots from the head down.” Corollary: It also rocks from the top.”
Finally, the movie. The NY Times review of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! is very intriguing, but the reader comments will give you a more diverse view with which to make your final decision.
Grab a cup of coffee (or a beer it the sun is over the yardarm) because I have 4 superb items for you today.
First up is McKinsey’s Economic Survey one year after the official meltdown. You may have to register (it’s free), but it’s worth it.
Next is a must read article from Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University in which he explains, as Bruce Nussbaum says, “how economists, especially the math-based, market-manic Chicago-school economists, have hurt the US and much of the rest of the world.” The title is How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? and it’s a must read.
Third is an interview with Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Blankfein talks abut management and how Goldman survived the financial crisis—this is not your typical imperial Wall Street CEO. You have a choice between a video of the interview or the transcript.
Will the energy grid replace existing sources of power—oil, coal, gas, and nuclear—with renewable energy? Currently, our energy is finite and polluting yet highly efficient. And all of the players in the market, producers and consumers, recognize the need to overcome these limitations.
Solar energy accounts for only 0.003% of energy consumption in the US today and that is projected to increase to 2% by 2025. That kind of miniscule percent of the overall energy consumed is not specific to solar energy. Wind, bio-mass and geothermal heat all give a negligible contribution to the US’s power supply.
The players in the market have one requirement of energy: it must be reliable at all times. Oil and coal are reliable. And from what I could see at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference, oil and coal companies are not going to allow their market shares to erode without putting up a fight and having their case heard. Chris Poirier, CEO of CoalTek, emphasized to the audience: coal in particular exists here in the US in abundance; coal companies are developing cleaner versions of this resource.
Much is made of “clean coal” but at the end of the day, clean coal is an oxymoron. Coal is a disaster at every stage of its production.
To mine coal, currently the companies raze our mountains to procure the coal. What they absolutely never want to discuss is that they are a highly subsidized industry: all of the energy used to transport the coal over vast distances is subsidized.
But probably the gravest problem of using coal as an energy source is that it emits more carbon dioxide than any other fuel and those carbons are much more polluting because the carbon molecule in coal is larger.
According to John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource Energy, the only way that we can overcome the limitations of going completely green and clean is if we take a localized approach to integrating the grid. That requires the grid to receive energy locally: solar power from Southern California and the Western states, wind from the Mid-West states, tidal power from the coastal states, etc.
That is a smart way of consuming energy. However, what do cleaner oil and coal have in common? The infrastructure already exists for these products. The grid already runs on oil and coal.
How will consumers and the US government react to the fact that this resource resides in abundance in this country and that we wouldn’t have to pay to overhaul our infrastructure to continue to use it?
For argument’s sake, let’s suppose that all renewable energies will have the same level of projected involvement as solar will in 2025, renewable energies would capture about 15% of the market.
Hopefully this is an ineffective way of looking at the situation as nothing is static and clean and green tech companies could possibly improve the amount of energy they generate exponentially in the future.
This all begs the question: can green and clean tech survive and even thrive without national policies to encourage their adoption?
I fear that due to the propaganda of coal being cleaner from the coal companies and the lack of capital investment and political incentives from the government to upgrade our infrastructure we will not replace coal and oil in our grid with renewable energies.
Southwest Airlines, like Zappos, has a corporate culture that is head and shoulders above most and is the envy of their competitors.
Southwest’s culture is so important that the company walked away from a deal to buy Frontier Air Lines.
It is that culture has helped Southwest weather the current financial storm and it zealously guards that culture because it knows it is the true foundation of its strength..
As Gary C. Kelly, Chairman, President and CEO, said in the during the Q2 Earnings Call,
“Excluding special items, we reported a second quarter profit of $59 million and that was $0.08 a share. And I would say given the deep recession that that is a very solid performance and, of course, I’m very proud of our people on every front. We continue to manage through the economic crisis with a lot of change and all the while our folks are delivering a very high-quality operation and outstanding customer service, so I’m very, very proud of them.”
The call was primarily with analysts, although many investors probably joined it, and the introduction included the following statement,
“This call will also include references to non-GAAP results; therefore, please see our earnings press release in the Investor Relations section of our website at Southwest.com for further information regarding our forward-looking statements and for a reconciliation of our non-GAAP results to our GAAP results.”
So if you’re Southwest and known for a fun culture, how do you incorporate that into something as eye-glazing as explaining GAAP, AKA Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, at your annual meeting?
Easily. You just ask David Holmes, known as the Rapping Flight Attendant, to explain it.
Restaurants have much in common with other businesses, especially when it comes to innovation. Like lemmings they copy each other, trying to keep both customers and the Center For Science In The Public Interest happy. Not an easy task.
However, anyone who ever watched Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on the Food Channel knows that not all toe the line; there are plenty that focus on pleasing the former and say to hell with the latter.
It’s called thinking way outside the box and the Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, AZ is the leader of the ‘to hell with’ pack.
Heart Attack Grill is a great example of how an innovative combination of delicious, socially unacceptable food and a culture of exceptional customer care turned a restaurant into a destination and a major hit with people who aren’t intimidated by the food police.
Anybody who is exposed to any media knows that US automakers are on life-support, while Japanese companies are only hurting.
There are many reasons for this, but the lethal combination of low-to-no innovation, stifling bureaucracy and atrocious management/leadership is a primary factor.
“The GM employees share less than one suggestion per year each. The company uses a quarter of them. By contrast, Toyota workers make 17.9 suggestions per person per year. Eighty percent are implemented.”
The bottom line is pretty obvious.
“Toyota thinks people are valuable and have brains. GM thinks that the people with brains are the ones somewhere further up the org chart.”
There are many companies who assume that brains start at a certain level and I’ve always found that mindset hilariously stupid.
Hilarious because all of the people with brains worked most of their careers at the levels without brains; stupid because of the talent, skill and creativity completely wasted.
Remember the old line “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”
It’s not true. Most people who go into teaching do it because they have a true passion—at least when they start.
But passion is hard to sustain when all you hear is that
you are too easy/hard;
you give too much/not enough homework;
you too often receive little-to-no respect from parents, kids, administrators and even your colleagues;
more time is spent on politics than lesson plans;
you spend more time teaching basic manners than educating; and
your de facto hourly pay rate is around minimum wage in spite of a 9 month work year.
Some manage it and they are the ones who truly leave their mark.
Most of us remember the teacher(s) who really touched us, who opened our eyes and helped us see the world differently.
And we remember the worst we had, but the majority fall in-between and become a blur.
some of the best come to teaching from other successful careers.
One of the highest profile of these is Tom Bloch, who left H&R Block (the family business founded by his father) after 18 years, five as President, and a salary of nearly a million a year to teach math at an inner-city middle school in Kansas City, because he wanted to make a difference—and he has.
Listen to this interview and then read his story in Stand for the Best. Share it; maybe it will inspire others to apply their passion to teaching, but if nothing else, perhaps it will encourage them reconsider their own attitude towards teachers.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
I’d never heard of 
First off we have the yin and yang of employee motivation and retention as brought to you by CIO and HR.BLR.COM.
First up is 
There are many reasons for this, but the lethal combination of low-to-no innovation, stifling bureaucracy and atrocious management/leadership is a primary factor.
