Awhile back Wally Bock wrote what I think is a very important post about leadership that I want to share with you.

It’s something that you should keep in the forefront of your mind, especially during election season this year and every year.

Think about today’s leaders.

Be it Congress, the White House, governors, or politicians at any level.

How many of them would meet the Hickory leadership test?

How many corporate leaders? How many educational leaders? How many religious leaders?

Sadly, I doubt that even 1% would qualify, no matter how you grouped them.

I sincerely wish I was wrong.

At the very least, we deserve leaders who consider us of equal priority to themselves and not a (very) distant second — or lower.

Andrew Jackson and Leadership in Adversity

In January 1813, Andrew Jackson marched south from Tennessee with a force of 2000 to bolster the defense of New Orleans. When he got to Natchez, some 500 miles from home, he received orders to dismiss his troops.

The order was for him simply to dismiss the troops and turn over his supplies to General James Wilkinson. Apparently, Jackson’s men were expected to make their own way home and find ways to feed themselves. They were in hostile territory and, by then, over a hundred of Jackson’s men were ill. Fifty-six couldn’t even sit upright. Jackson turned over his supplies, as ordered, but he vowed to take all his men home.

The problem was that the expedition had only eleven wagons. When Dr. Samuel Hogg asked Jackson what he should do, Jackson replied simply, “You are not to leave a man on the ground.”

Hogg reminded Jackson that the wagons were already filled with the sick. There was no more room. Jackson’s solution was straightforward.

“Let some of the troops dismount. The officers must give up their horses. Not a man must be left behind.”

I can imagine Hogg screwing up his courage then. Jackson was known for a volatile temper. But he also had a horse. Hogg asked for Jackson’s horse for the sick. Jackson turned over the reins.

Jackson led the troops home, paying out of his own pocket for their provisions, and walking all of the five hundred miles. He laid out his thinking in a letter to Felix Grundy.

“I shall march them to Nashville or bury them with the honors of war. Should I die, I know they would bury me.”

Leadership is about accomplishing your mission and caring for your people. And how you do both speaks volumes about the kind of leader and person you are. Jackson’s actions are a stark contrast to “leaders” who put their welfare first.

This incident was the making of Jackson’s reputation as a general. During the march, his men started calling him “Hickory” because he was so tough. That became “Old Hickory,” the nickname he would carry for life.

Boss’s Bottom Line

What I love about this story is that Jackson did what he thought was the right thing, without much thought about the consequences or how things might look. At the time he chose to get all his men home, walking himself and paying for their food, he could not have known how things would play out later in his life. When you lead, we expect you to do the right thing, all the time, not just when it’s convenient or when it looks good.

Resources

Jon Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, is a great biography, but it concentrates on Jackson the President and skips over most of his early life. If you want an overview of Jackson’s life, I recommend Robert Rimini’s one volume Life of Andrew Jackson.

Image credit: Three Star Leadership

Fake news. People everywhere in the US and in all walks of life are talking about it.

There’s no question that fake news is subversive, whether created by humans or driven by AI.

But what about unfake fake news as served up by mainstream and new media alike?

Think you’ve never seen it?

Sure you have.

Frequently in financial reporting.

From CNBC: Twitter rockets more than 20 percent after the company reports first-ever net profit.

From BI: Snap crushed Wall Street’s revenue targets in its fourth quarter, as it filled its Snapchat app with more ads than ever and tapped into a broader group of consumers.

From US News: Tesla Finally Gives Investors Good Earnings News.

Wow! Based on the above headlines they look like great bets to contribute to your retirement.

Maybe.

But before investing your hard-earned dollars you might want to see what the same information looks like sans spin, hype and OMG.

Consider the information, often buried in euphoric media hyperbole, kind of like the fine print in a warranty or lease.

From Recode: Achieving profitability was one of the company’s [Twitter] main goals in 2017, and one of the big reasons it laid off 9 percent of its workforce in late 2016, and then sold off its developer business and shut down its video app Vine. Investors like profitable companies, and so do potential acquirers.

From TechCrunch: Snapchat’s big redesign will reach all users during Q1 2018, up from 40 million users currently. It was due to be fully rolled out by now but that has been delayed following poor reception in countries like the U.K., Australia and Canada. Amongst some of the first users to review the update, 83 percent of App Store reviews were negative, citing a confusing interface, ads mixed into the message inbox via Stories and people who don’t follow you back getting pushed into the Discover section.

From the New York times: The company [Tesla] lost $1.96 billion for the full year of 2017, nearly three times its loss of $675 million in 2016. The company has never made a full-year profit since it went public in 2010.

So what would unfake/unspun headlines look like?

KG sent along some hilariously accurate examples.

Caveat emptor, indeed.

Image credit: Kate Mereand-Sinha

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Words have enormous power. In the past, dozens of companies stuck their foot in their corporate mouth by translating slogans, with no consideration of their meaning in the new language.

Today they face a much more serious challenge. AI’s ability to mimic voices and manipulate images means executives, as well as politicians, celebrities, religious leaders, and ordinary people, can be made to say anything, with images to match.

Caveat emptor has taken on a whole new meaning, not to mention urgency.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Do words really make a difference? Can just one word change people’s perception of a person or event?

I’ve read several items lately on the importance of influence in leadership. Several even make the point that it’s the ability to influence that marks a person as a leader.

Personally, other than socially acceptable definitions, I don’t see a lot of difference between influence and manipulation.

Both influence and manipulation seek to produce an effect without any apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command.

But if you say someone has a lot of influence it’s a compliment; call the same person a master manipulator and you’d better duck.

It’s a good example of the real power that words have to inspire or crush even if their meaning is the same.

And it’s important to remember that words come with baggage that goes well beyond their actual definition.

That baggage was one of the main reasons corporate marketing departments made so many mistakes when moving from one culture to another.

Braniff translated its slogan relating to seat upholstery, “Fly in leather” to Spanish; only it came out as “Fly naked.”

Coors slogan, “Turn it loose,” means “Suffer from diarrhea” in Spanish.

Clairol, introduced a curling iron called the “Mist Stick” in Germany and learned the hard way that mist is slang for manure.

Gerber started selling baby food in Africa using US packaging with the baby on the label until they found out that in Africa the picture on the label indicates what’s inside since most people can’t read.

There are hundreds of similar mishaps. They made marketing departments a laughing stock, forced companies to hire locally, helped change the headquarters mindset and encourage global companies to be truly global.

The point of all this is to encourage you to take a few extra minutes to think through not only what you want to say, but also what your audience will hear when you say it.

That effort can make the difference between going up like a rocket or down like a falling star.

Image credit: flickr

Read all Role Model posts here.

These days, people are fixated on success and finding ways to live longer. The latter doesn’t particularly interest me, but I’ve been conscious of the former from early on.

The first thing I did was figure out what “success” meant to me and I’m happy to say I’ve accomplished exactly what I set out to do. I suppose I could still screw it up, but I’d have to work very hard and have no reason or incentive to do so.

Interestingly, I defined it the same way that billionaire Jon huntsman did and for the same reasons.

“I have attended many funerals in my life,” Huntsman said, adding that he had conducted almost 200. “I have never heard in a funeral that this person made a lot of money or is politically very strong. They never discuss that. In a funeral, people discuss how this person was kind or gracious or had character and integrity. … For some people who are not kind, thoughtful or gracious, their funerals are very short. Nobody has anything to say. I learned from the funerals that we must plan our funerals when we are young. Plan your funeral, start early, by being kind.”

One has to wonder what will be said at the funerals of those who choose to do business and act like Travis Kalanick.

Huntsman wrote several books, among them his 2014 memoir Barefoot to Billionaire: Reflections on a Life’s Work and a Promise to Cure Cancer,

“I desire to leave this world as I entered it — barefoot and broke. To many, that may seem like an odd, unrealistic, even foolish thing. Not to me. Too many wealthy people hoard their riches, believing that dying with a large bank account is a virtue. I read about one woman who died and left her dog $10 million. What’s a dog going to do with that kind of money? Help other dogs? I see it another way: If I die with nothing because I have given it away, humanity is the beneficiary.”

Through both word and deed we all can learn from Jon Huntsman — most especially those who move in the world of tech where kindness is in such short supply.

Image credit: Wikipedia

I have been traveling this week visiting clients to advance a few opportunities I am working on. One thing that came up throughout the meetings was the need for authenticity.

It seems to be the result of too many salespeople doing a quick transaction and leaving the customer high and dry after. I was struck by their need. Not so much because I haven’t heard it, but that it is coming up in almost all of my conversations.

As a salesperson, I am always looking for ways to provide value to a client and become their trusted advisor. I’ll be honest, it doesn’t happen overnight, but with some effort and true insight it can be achieved.

We as humans have a responsibility to others to put forth our best, be trustworthy and learn to work together as a team. It was my client, however, who showed me that partnership is what matters most.

It made me think about how does one achieve that partnership?

A lot of it is listening and having the business acumen that can fully understand and address complex issues. Some of it is time spent with someone. Some of it is personality.

Being an authentic human being goes a long way in my book and always putting others needs ahead of your own. Being humble and appreciative will pay off huge dividends.

Beyond sales, how else can we be authentic?

Perhaps it’s taking ownership over a project. Asking for mentorship. Seeking out new people to learn from. Etc.

What do you do to build partnerships and become authentic?

Image credit: Barbara

I’ve been ranting for years about the negative effects of social media and how it lends itself to insecurity, FOMA, jealously, etc., how it enables trolls, kills empathy and, worse, its unmitigated, conscious focus on addicting its users in exactly the same way heroin addicts.

Of course, I’m not the only one; psychiatrists and psychologists, educators, parents, and a host of pundits have weighed in.

Everyone knows that actions speak louder than words, so it is telling that the biggest names in tech kept tech away from their kids and far away from the schools they attend.

This in spite of giving millions in cash and product to enable schools to embrace tech.

Since it’s proven that screens kill empathy, not to mention engagement, their actions will give their own kids a major advantage in adulthood, since empathy and critical thinking will be at a premium.

If the hypocrisy doesn’t encourage you to seriously limit screen time, no matter the howls of outrage, perhaps the new voices condemning the addiction and warning of the dangers will carry far more weight.

Why?

Because they are the people who helped create the problems, starting with Tristan Harris, a former in-house ethicist at Google.

“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.”

The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Read the article and then decide whose side you are on — the hypocrites or the social angels.

Image credit: NotionsCapital.com

Way back in the early 1980s, when companies were far more sensitive, not to mention controlling about appearance, “Roy” asked me if it was a good idea to shave the beard he’d had for 15 years for an interview.

I said sure, as long as he didn’t intend to grow it back. He responded that his wife loved the beard would probably divorce him if he didn’t re-grow it. I told that Roy shouldn’t shave.

Back then, hair was cut, grooming polished up and tattoos covered when interviewing.

If you think things have changed, think again.

People are still jumping, just though different hoops.

These days they’re rushing to clean up their social media history.

Brand Yourself’s reputation tool, introduced last month, is a logical outgrowth of its business, said CEO Patrick Ambron. While the company launched in 2009 to help business and users massage their search results, Ambron says it now focuses on helping job seekers find and repair embarrassing blunders in their online past. Employers are increasingly screening  job candidates’ social media history for red flags, and it’s incumbent upon job seekers to scrub their posts of any blemishes, he said. Simply tightening the privacy restrictions may not help when some companies are demanding social media passwords from applicants.

For the heck of it I registered to see how it works. It gave me a list of places I was identified, short, since I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, etc. At each one I had to say it was positive, negative or “not me.”

There were three “questionable” items and when I checked them I was left guessing why they were potentially damaging.

One wasn’t me, one an article from 1999 that appeared in the SF Chronicle, and one post from the Leadership Turn blog that I used to write and is archived here. There was nothing any algorithm could have taken exception to unless you could the work “sex” in a comment on the post, so I marked both “positive.”

If the word “sex” was what got flagged you have to wonder if it rates the same as the f-bomb and if WTF counts the same. If you’re interested my score was 700 (whatever that means).

I digress. The point of all this is that no matter how well you scrub the profile and social media under your control it won’t remove all the places to which it has migrated.

More importantly, no matter how you scrub your past you are still you.

Moreover, if a company is dumb enough to pass on candidates for the stupid stuff they did in college or even the more recent past, then perhaps you should see it as having dodged a bullet, as opposed to missing an opportunity.

Notice I said “stupid stuff.” Bragging about knocking your partner or kid around, etc. shouldn’t get a free pass.

Although it was not that long ago when people’s private lives were actually private.

Flickr image credit: Bernard Goldbach

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I hold very specific views when it comes to MAP and how people conduct themselves — some would even call me opinionated and I wouldn’t argue. But opinionated or not, I do my best to evaluate based on what is, as opposed to what I wish.

So it was with major regret that I realized this post is no longer what is — at least in Silicon Valley, other startup ecosystems, too many parts of corporate America and large swaths of the public (dis)service, AKA, politicians — it’s what I wish.

And I’m sure others do, too.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I was reading Oscar de la Renta’s obituary (fascinating guy) and a quote from him caught my eye.

“Being well dressed hasn’t much to do with having good clothes. It’s a question of good balance and good common sense.”

What grabbed me was the second sentence.

Because it doesn’t matter what you set out to do or how much money you spend on accouterments.

It doesn’t matter who you know, where you went to school, how many hours you work or how brilliant your vision.

It doesn’t matter because without balance and common sense you will fail.

Because balance and common sense are the foundation of anything you choose to accomplish.

Flickr image credit: James Jordan

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Over the years I’ve written about the value of reading books, most recently in a Golden Oldie just before Christmas. A few days later I was talking with a group of founders, all under 40, a couple of which follow this blog.

They took me to task for expecting them to have spare time to read. They said it was difficult enough finding the time to keep up with what was happening in their field and tech in general and that if they needed additional information on a subject they could google it.

When I commented that that kind of information didn’t lend itself to enlarging knowledge or encouraging thinking things got a bit heated. It was simpler to let them think I had backed down and change the subject than to subject the others to an argument.

And at that time I didn’t have the right ammunition to make my point, but now I do. Better yet, it’s courtesy of four of the most well-known thought leaders / influencers alive today.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.” — Charlie Munger, Self-made billionaire & Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner

Why did the busiest person in the world, former president Barack Obama, read an hour a day while in office?

Why has the best investor in history, Warren Buffett, invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career?

Why has the world’s richest person, Bill Gates, read a book a week during his career? And why has he taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career?

Why do the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate learning (the 5-hour rule), while others make excuses about how busy they are?

Not only do they read, they read widely.

Successful people focus on both the tactical (daily) part of their business/lives, as well as the strategic (long(er)-term) part.

Blogs, media, conferences, etc., are tactical.

Books are strategic.

Image credit: HikingArtist

The State of the Union address was on last night. I’ll be honest I, typically look forward to the event. There is pomp and circumstance, high drama, and the occasional surprise. To cap it off you get to have a speaker from the opposite party offer a rebuttal. Without fail the night can be informative and completely ridiculous in a single span of time. However it does offer a snapshot of both our ideals and fears.

As I thought after about the address, I thought I should take stock of my own Union. Am I living up to my potential, am I taking ownership over my life?

I’ll be honest, my assessment wasn’t that positive. I tend to take a dim view of my own accomplishments in life and try to downplay them. But the event was cathartic as well. When given a chance how often do we truly evaluate ourselves?

The company we work for can hold a lot of our identity. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but we spend a lot of our day at work and it dominates our time. Is that Union strong? What about your family relationships? Friends?

You may be asking, why the sobering talk? Quite simply it’s important to remove the blinders from time to time and truly look at life unfiltered. Take the time to look at your strengths and weaknesses and look for opportunities for growth. I can assure you everyone will be better for it.

One thing I learned this week is to set the example.

It sounds minor, but I tend to come in a few minutes late to work sometimes. Typically it’s because I’m grabbing a coffee or with my girls for a few minutes.

Today, my manager spoke to me about it and said he doesn’t care that I am late, but he needs me to set an example for some of the junior folks on the team.

It went from what could have been a discussion on a trivial matter to a coaching opportunity. And you know what, he was right!

And the Union is that much stronger for it.

What makes your union strong?

Image credit: ewe neon