I’ve always thought of life as a corridor with dozens of doors opening, each one representing an opportunity.
You may open one or pass them by—it’s your choice.
Each time you do open one and enter that door closes forever and you move down a new corridor full of doors.
The door you entered is sealed because whatever lay behind it changed you, so you can’t go backwards, only forward.
Some people to through life opening as few doors as possible, changing as little as possible and staying as safe as possible.
Others launch themselves through the most interesting doors with gusto, taking advantage of whatever opportunities are concealed and then on to the next door.
In honor of all those who are, or lean to, the latter description I dedicate these two Rules. They are especially apropos today.
Watch for big problems—they disguise big opportunities.
Welcome the unexpected! Opportunities rarely come in neat, predictable packages.
You can’t open every door and you don’t have to stay long if you don’t like what you find, but if you pass straight through never opening any doors you’ll stay in pristine condition and you don’t really want to arrive at the end as untouched as you were when you started—do you?
Today is about the boss, but the reasoning behind the ‘leadership’ advice can be used by anyone.
First is advice from Toddi Gutner in WSJ Online for what to do as an incoming CEO. The advice is well worth reading considering 1,484 CEOs turned over in 2008.
Next a look at CEOs from a different culture and with a different attitude. It’s not that the Japanese do everything right, but American CEOs could certainly use a dose of their humility.
“The greatest challenges were identified as: motivating staff in uncertain times; being able to clearly communicate the rationale for changes; working within a leadership team format rather than alone; and developing staff for redeployment rather than layoffs.”
Finally, two great interviews, one with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the other with Kevin Sharer, chief executive of Amgen. Amazing what you can learn from real pros who produce real value.
Enjoy and I hope that you’ll take a moment to share what you learn from these sources.
According to Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, “95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating. There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it.”
“The professor has been surveying cheating practices among college kids for 18 years and high school students for six years. He says he’s surveyed 24,000 high school students in 70,000 high schools, grades 9 to 12. His findings? Sixty-four percent of students report one or more instances of serious testing-cheating, which include copying from someone else, helping someone else cheat on a test, or using crib notes or cheat notes.
In 2002 17-year-old Alice Newhall was quoted in a CNN article on cheating, “What’s important is getting ahead. The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you’re going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you’re going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that’s what’s going to be going on. The better you do, that’s what shows. It’s not how moral you were in getting there.“”
Colleges are no different, with MBA students leading the pack. “56 percent of MBA students admitted to cheating… In 1997, McCabe did a survey in which 84 percent of undergraduate business students admitted cheating versus 72 percent of engineering students and 66 percent of all students. In a 1964 survey by Columbia University, 66 percent of business students surveyed at 99 campuses said they cheated at least once.”
MBAs lead another pack; see if these names sound familiar: Jeff Skilling (MBA, Harvard). Joe Nacchio, (MBA, NYU), Richard Fuld, (MBA, Stern), John Thain, (MBA, Harvard), the list goes on and on.
Do you see a pattern here?
It’s OK to cheat in high school to get good grades to gain entrance to a good college;
it’s OK to cheat in college to gain entrance to a top grad school; and
it’s OK to cheat in grad school to insure access to a good job, especially on Wall Street; so
it must be OK once you’re working to cheat to improve your company’s bottom line.
Cheating is good business in its own right directly or in the sub-strata of plagiarism.
Google offers 1,620,000 results for “how to cheat in school,” 605,000 for “how to cheat on a test” and another 562,000 for “how to cheat on tests,” not to mention the more than 3,000 “how to cheat” videos on YouTube.
Meanwhile, on the plagiarism front, “school papers” returns a whopping 22,600,000 results.
Take a good look at the numbers and you’ll see that religion, spirituality and cheating seem to happily co-exist.
“The University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute reported that 80 percent of students show high degrees of religious commitment and spirituality. The new data comes from a survey conducted this past year involving 112,232 first year students attending 236 various colleges and universities.”
All the ethics courses, integrity lectures and moral preaching that go on aren’t likely to change decades of successful cheating—mainly because it works getting people where they want to go.
Cheating isn’t new, but the casual acceptance of it as a viable life strategy has radically changed.
One of the hardest things that growing companies face is the need to stop shooting from the hip.
I hear the reasons not to all the time, from startups, small biz, entrepreneurs, et al:
It will ruin our culture.
It stifles creativity. It’s for larger companies.
It’s bureaucratic. It’s too time consuming.
“It” refers to the underpinnings of all successful companies. “It” includes the following in order of importance:
Financial controls that include
monthly statements of revenues by product;
discounts;
costs by department;
cost of goods sold;
inventory;
receivables aging;
stock issuance;
cash flow;
manufacturing yields;
hiring by department
Annual operating plan covering the above financial measures
Organization charts and definitions of responsibilities
Hiring process
Long-term planning
Centralized information technology implementation and planning
Whether it’s just you, or one, ten, fifty, or more employees, whether full time, part time or virtual, you need viable processes to keep you focused—think of it as coloring inside the lines.
Everything on this list can, and should, be scaled for applicability, but all are important to every business endeavor.
Those that don’t directly apply may be tweaked, e.g., manufacturing yields can change to productivity measures; a very few, such as “stock issuance” may be completely discarded if the action is truly warranted.
Sure, they can’t all be implemented at once, but none of them will happen as long as your MAP rejects or begrudges them—after all, you’re the boss (CEO/president/managing partner/owner) and people will follow your lead.
Finally, don’t confuse process with bureaucracy. Process is like MAP, it gets you where you want to go, whereas bureaucracy stifles whatever it touches; process, like MAP, is ever-growing, while bureaucracy is carved in stone.
The markets are in turmoil, the economy sucks, borrowing has gone the way of the dodo bird and businesses large, small and micro are looking to cut costs while still motivating their people.
For many companies this means a change in corporate culture, but which changes will have the most impact?
Short answer: creating/enhancing a culture of fiscal intelligence.
Long answer: a transparent culture that spends its money wisely, sharing the reasoning with its people, eliminating low ROI frills and cuts without selling the company’s future down the drain.
This doesn’t mean substituting crappy coffee for the good stuff and eliminating free soda or M&Ms as so many companies do.
It does mean listing all the frills—executive and worker alike—and polling your people to find which are really paying off and which can be scrapped—not a decision made by management, but one that your people hash out and agree to before it’s a done deal.
Sometimes good coffee and soda have a higher ROI morale-wise than you would think.
All this should be doubly true for startups, but it often isn’t. Yes, your money is banked and if you’re VC funded, as opposed to angel, chances are you’re pretty flush—but having it doesn’t mean you should spend it.
Any company that thinks cushy perks are attractive in this economy think again.
Think just how naïve/ignorant/arrogant a candidate must be to expect a large sign-on bonus or fancy perks given current economic conditions.
Not to mention how financially stupid any company still offering them appears to a candidate.
The smartest companies build fiscally intelligent corporate cultures from the beginning, so that when they have to tighten down they know exactly where to cut and their people aren’t surprised.
Throwing money around is always stupid, whether in business or personally.
I’ve heard from companies of all sizes and managers at all levels why this one candidate was worth X more than anyone else walking and how not getting her could deal a crippling, or even lethal, blow to the company.
If you ever feel that way, remember two inimitable truths.
If not having that one specific person could bring down the company it’s probably going to crash and burn anyway.
The candidate who joins you for money will always leave for more money.
Remember, the goal is a lean, mean, innovative, motivated machine—not a lean, mean, depressed one.
Today is all about innovation, so grab your coffee and settle in. Only one to read and the rest you can listen to or watch. Enjoy!
First, check out how Mark King, CEO of TaylorMade drives “relentless innovation” that has doubled revenue since 2003.
Now listen to Always On CEO Tony Perkins, Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of venture capital company Draper Fisher Jurvetson and founding partner of ThinkEquity and author of Finding the Next Starbucks talk about What is the Next Big Thing?
Then click over and explore the bonanza of innovation inspiration in the form of podcasts and videos at the Stanford University Entrepreneurial Corner. I think you’ll find it worth bookmarking.
A few days ago an executive I’ll call Dan called me to bemoan the lack of creativity in his organization and I told him to stop hiring dogs. He informed me that he had great people and when I agreed he demanded to know why I called them dogs.
The problem is that Dan hires people he likes who fall inside his comfort zone, so his organization gets along well. And while it’s well diversified from an HR point of view it has little mental diversity.
It’s a happy place, kind of like a dog park with a large variety of breeds and mutts all well socialized to play together and those that don’t play nice are asked to leave.
That kind of peace may be good for a dog park, but it can mean death for a company’s innovation efforts.
Unfortunately, people have been moving away from thought diversity for quite awhile now. The attitude has a name, homophily, it’s been around forever and it’s an attitude I run into frequently when it comes to hiring, although it’s rarely intentional. It’s a word you should learn just so you can avoid it.
It’s what makes it difficult for Dan’s people to be creative; when something is suggested it’s often accepted with little discussion and even when a counter idea is presented it has similar DNA.
It’s not that Dan needs to toss a bunch of cats in the middle, but he does need to start hiring people that come from a variety of companies and industries, with different experiences and with whom he may not be as comfortable as he is now.
It also means that Dan will have to work harder.
Not because his people won’t get along, but because diversity of thought does foster exactly what Dan wants—higher creativity.
Creativity means multiple ideas with no common DNA leading to passionate champions, intense discussions and heated meetings. Dan will have to actively manage the various elements if he wants to harness that energy for the benefit of the organization.
Whether you consider yourself a manager, a leader or a combination thereof, the more mentally diverse your organization the more difficult to manage, but the rewards are high for doing it well.
Perhaps ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ should be rewritten, ‘As you parent, so shall you hire.’
The generations that parented the Millennials are reaping the results of confusing self-esteem with entitlement.
The kids who sang ‘I am special / I am special / Look at me / Look at me… (set to the tune of Frère Jacques) in nursery school are still thinking that way in as they move through college and into the workforce.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, narcissism researcher and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable than Ever Before, thinks that parents should stop “meaningless, baseless praise,” which starts even before nursery school.
Instead of mindless compliments why not take the time to teach them that all actions have consequences (AKA cause and effect)—even doing nothing.
Praise what they accomplish and instill in them an appreciation of the real value found in the words, actions, deeds, and contributions, both large and small, that they make in the world.
If your kids are young start by not only eliminating empty praise from your home, but also teaching them how to recognize it and why they should discount it.
With older kids—teens, twenties, thirties—help them wrap their minds around the idea that life doesn’t offer entitlements to anyone and share with them the real facts of life.
They are special to
you, because you are their parent, and to others who also love them;
themselves because “self” is the only person they will ever truly know or actually have the ability to change.
They are not special to others, except as the result of their words, actions and deeds.
Being special to you and to themselves does not entitle them to special treatment from their teachers, friends, bosses, colleagues, the guy complaining about their loud cell phone conversation at Starbucks or the cop who tickets them for speeding.
Special isn’t related to self-esteem—self-esteem is grounded in and built from their own efforts and accomplishments.
Self-esteem entitles them to nothing, but provides the strength to not only survive, but thrive, now and in the future.
They may not appreciate your efforts now, but they will be forever grateful as they make their way though the world as adults.
As discussed last week accountability stems from the public nature of an action and one of the best ways to inject strong accountability into your organization is with a positive review function that your people might actually like!
Sound impossible? It’s not and over the next few weeks we’ll discuss how to make it happen.
The first thing that you need to understand is that there are two totally separate parts of the review process.
The visible part, the mechanics, is dictated by your company, but that’s all it is—mechanics; usually a timetable and a set of forms.
In other words, positive reviews are a function of how you choose to think about them.
Done correctly reviews are painless and even enjoyable for both parties.
Done incorrectly reviews are painful, embarrassing, discouraging, upsetting, frustrating or all of the above—for both parties.
The bottom line of reviews can be summed up in two words—no surprises.
Any time an employee is surprised by information during a review means that you aren’t doing your job as a manager.
You avoid surprises by understanding the philosophy behind the review process and how it should work and then allocating the time and effort to make it work.
How many times during or after your own annual review have you said out loud, or silently screamed in your head, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
How many times since you were promoted has one of your own people felt the same way?
In a comment Monday Denis asked, “What do the people you hire tell about your leadership style?”
The short answer has been around a long time in one form or another.
Good leaders (managers) hire people smarter than themselves and don’t feel threatened by people who are better at given tasks.
The people you hire tell more about who you are than just your leadership style; they are a reflection of your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and your confidence.
No matter what the reality, the more insecure a leader/manager feels the weaker the people he hires.
At lower levels, you find that those less willing to delegate rarely hire people with skills similar to their own.
Just as your friends reflect your thoughts, attitudes, beliefs and prejudices, so do those you hire. If you want to know who someone is, just look at who they hang with and who they hire, but not who they date and marry.
All bets are off when love/lust enters the picture.
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’ve always thought of life as a corridor with dozens of doors opening, each one representing an opportunity.
Today is about the boss, but the reasoning behind the ‘leadership’ advice can be used by anyone.
One of the hardest things that growing companies face is the need to stop shooting from the hip.
The markets are in turmoil, the economy sucks, borrowing has gone the way of the dodo bird and businesses large, small and micro are looking to cut costs while still motivating their people.
Today is all about innovation, so grab your coffee and settle in. Only one to read and the rest you can listen to or watch. Enjoy!
A few days ago an executive I’ll call Dan called me to bemoan the lack of creativity in his organization and I told him to stop hiring dogs. He informed me that he had great people and when I agreed he demanded to know why I called them dogs.
thinks that parents should stop “meaningless, baseless praise,” which starts even before nursery school.
Instead of mindless compliments why not take the time to teach them that all 
and in the future.
As discussed 
The short answer has been around a long time in one form or another.
