Fertilizer is produced in a lab with scientists controlling which chemicals in what amount are used and then mass produce that particular formula in a factory.
Anyone who gardens knows that there are a multitude of brands that produce different fertilizers, some considered “general purpose,” but most with specific formulas to accomplish specific goals, including forcing growth.
Experts say compost is a better choice.
Compost is natural, produced when multiple kinds of organic matter are brought together and left to decompose with the aid of a variety of organisms. The result is an incredibly rich material that produces sustainable results without damaging the environment.
Leadership is similar.
You have the kind that is produced in colleges and MBA programs, learned in a sterile environment, with ingredients that parallel the thinking of selected experts’ mindsets and attitudes. Thus, the student is indoctrinated in a set of specifics and is often prejudiced against anything that falls outside those boundaries.
Leadership learned through doing—taking the initiative and accepting the risk of failure—is different. It combines a variety of experiences, good, bad and indifferent and adds a variety of organisms in the form of the varied humans that populate the organization. The effect of those organisms on the experiences of individual initiative produces a deeper, richer, more flexible form of leadership.
Chemical fertilizer needs to be applied again and again as it wears out.
Compost mixes with and enriches the soil itself, so that the more you add the better the growth medium.
Normally Saturday is all about multiple links to useful information, but today I have something even more useful.
Every year KG Charles-Harris, EMANIO CEO and founder of M3, attends the Stanford Summit; this is the second year I’ve asked him to share what he learned with you.
I specifically asked that he provide a look at how this premier Silicon Valley gathering saw their role in the coming economic recovery.
As usual, the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit was a breath of fresh air with industry luminaries, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists interacting intensely. The topic on everyone’s minds was, of course, the Grand Recession that the financial industry had brought upon all of us and what would bring us out of it.
One issue was clear in everyone’s minds and that was that the information and computer industries were some of the leading forces that would turn the negative situation into more positive territories. From my point of view as CEO of a software company and leader of a foundation that works with disadvantaged kids, it is clear that innovation and problem solving will be a core factor to bring the US, and the rest of the world, out of recession.
Technology is a two-edged sword and information technology helped create some of the problems.
The efficiency with which trades are executed in the financial markets;
the ability to seamlessly package, re-package and syndicate debt; and
the borderless nature of global finance is all based on computer technology.
As such, tech was a facilitator, not only in the creation of the bubble, but also the in the speed with which it spread from mortgage backed securities to the rest of the economy.
One way or another most people are experiencing the fallout on a global level.
In the same way, it will be due to the possibilities and flexibility of technology that the world will ascend out of “darkness”.
But facilitators are neutral and play both sides, so just as the downturn and bubble were helped along by technology, so the turnaround will happen with the help of technology.
This is what many of us discussed at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit and I would like to share with you the varied thoughts of three entrepreneurs, Lorenzo Carver, CEO of Liquid Scenarios, Jason Seed, CEO of CVSdude and Renee Blodgett, CEO of Blodgett Communications, on how technology will aid the recovery.
In essence, these three have different takes on the value that technology brings and why tech will facilitate the turnaround.
The first CEO I interviewed was Lorenzo Carver, who has extensive experience in the technology, finance and accounting industries, among others. He has founded several companies, as well as having participated in raising billions of dollars in funding for other companies. He is often sought for his strategic advice by both company leaders and venture capitalists.
At present, his major endeavor is Liquid Scenarios, which minimizes uncertainty for investors in different ventures. They provide the various hardcore financial scenarios that an investor needs to calculate—investment amounts, rounds of financing, time to exit, etc.; the different aspects of modeling the future of an investment beyond what spreadsheets can take you. They have major venture capitalists and other investors as clients.
Lorenzo’s comments on how technology would play a part in the economic recovery were quite insightful. “Tech has already had an effect on the recovery, just like it had in the downturn at the end of the dotcom era. In fact, tech has led us out of the doom and gloom mentality with earnings from Google, Adobe and others being significantly better than expected. This has provided people with hope that organizations are continuing to invest. These are important signals, considering the leadership position that the technology industry has in this country.”
I agree with what he is saying, however, I remain a bit skeptical of the significant optimism that exists in the market today. Considering the significant job losses and the continuing trend of more jobs lost, in addition to the continued credit freeze for both consumers and corporations, it is difficult to imagine that we are as close to a recovery as people believe. A slowing downward trend is not the same as an upward trend.
When I asked Lorenzo about this, he said “Of course, as a business leader I am planning for continued hard times and am finding ways of doing more with less; I believe that this will continue for some time.”
In short, technology has played and will continue to play a significant role, but we are still experiencing a downward trend.
Everyone I spoke with at the Stanford Summit recognizes this and manages accordingly. In this environment it is all about cash management and to the extent technology can aid in this it will continue to be a winner.
Last year I met Guy Marion, Executive Vice President of CVSDude, an enterprising and innovative version control platform, who had traveled all the way from Australia to attend the Summit. CVSDude is the leading worldwide provider of Subversion hosting and developer solutions to distributed teams.
This year I had the pleasure of sitting down with their CEO Jason Seed, who, over this past year, has driven significant progress, including opening offices in Silicon Valley. When asked about how the tech industry is/would contributing to the economic recovery, he was very clear on the major factor technology brings.
“The major benefit of the technology industry is the efficiency it delivers to all organizations. Clearly both efficiency and effectiveness will be the major drivers of an eventual recovery.” Clearly Jason is correct in mentioning this. Since the inception of technology, efficiency and effectiveness have been the drivers of innovation. Clearly, what we are now seeing in the economy is a retrenchment started by finance, but continued by the search for efficiencies and doing things more effectively using technology.
Many of the people laid off in this recession will have their jobs replaced by technology. They and many more will find that to regain employment some level of retraining will be necessary. This is certainly true for many in Detroit, the epicenter of employment losses.
Jason’s company focuses on delivering these efficiencies to global teams of developers, whether they are distributed across large geographic areas or who work in the same office. Regardless, being able to have scalable, reliable, secure systems to manage version control and other software issues is a core enabler of effective development.
Finally, I discuss the role that technology will play in the economic recovery with Rene Blodgett, CEO of Blodgett Communications. I kidded Rene that maybe she was the sister or wife of Henry Blodget, the infamous dotcom stock market analyst from Merrill Lynch. In fact, she’s not related in any way to “Hype” Blodget, despite her involvement in promoting technology companies.
Blodgett Communications partners with clients, getting to know their business in an intimate fashion, in order to differentiate and create thought leadership. Their core expertise focuses on the absolute fact that revenue and sales are always at the forefront of each management team’s objectives, so they develop media strategies that minimize cash outlay while enhancing cash generation.
Rene believes the way technology will lead us out of the recession is through enabling better decision-making. She says, “It is clear that technology enables analysis of data and acquisition of information in a way that gives companies the tools to understand options and reach conclusions in ways that were previously impossible. This is especially true about business intelligence and predictive analytics; companies, like EMANIO, will be at the forefront.”
Thank you, Rene. It is absolutely true that EMANIO is at the forefront of the information and analysis revolution and I am in complete agreement when you say, “It is only through improved decision-making that we will be able to get the economy on an even keel again.”
To summarize,
Lorenzo believes that tech is already leading us out of the recession and that the “green shoots” that we are seeing are due to the performance of technology in companies or technology stocks’ effect on general sentiment.
Jason believes that effectiveness and efficiencies driven by technology will lie at the base of a robust recovery.
Rene’s conviction is that it is better decisions enabled by technology that will differentiate winners from losers and lead us out of the doldrums.
All our sentiments are valid and interesting, but we’ll have to see how it develops going forward before we can judge how accurate we are.
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder KG Charles-Harris.
Why did you start M3? I started the M3 Foundation when I became aware of the plight of black boys in school. In the San Francisco Bay Area, 73 percent of black boys drop out of school (nationally the average is 54%). These statistics places one of the wealthiest areas of the world on par with war torn areas like the Congo or very impoverished nations like Laos. The statistics, along with meeting some of these kids, shocked me into action.
Another issue was that I wanted my own children to receive a good public school education.
To ensure that this happened, it was necessary to put a structure in place that enabled teachers to do what they were supposed to, i.e. teach students who were performing at or above grade level.
Sadly, most teachers and schools are unable to do this because of the significant portion of students lagging several years behind grade level; that results in remedial teaching and a lower level of education for all.
How did you come up with the approach? The approach was based on common sense. We cannot expect people who are lagging behind to work less and still achieve the same results as those who have worked more in preceding years. Also, we have to make a fundamental decision. Are these boys unintelligent, or is it their environments that are affecting them negatively?
We put together a program which used sports and hip-hop as a carrot and focused on providing homework assistance, extensive mathematics tutoring and surrounded the boys with role models (UC Berkeley male students) as tutors and team leaders.
The program is intense; we work with the boys three times per week for 4 hours in the afternoon and 4-6 hours on Saturdays. One of the keys to the program is our excursions; it is difficult to have vision and dreams when one never has been exposed to something beyond the few blocks of inner-city where one resides.
What have been the most difficult roadblocks? We are encountering road blocks all the time. We are still a startup, though we have proven that black low-income boys can perform well. We now have an average GPA of above 3.0 across all the school sites where we are active.
The most difficult roadblock we encountered was being shut down by the school district because of a perception that we discriminate. We have created a model for the most difficult student population, African American boys from low-income backgrounds, and have proven it works. Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, it is difficult to serve this population since we are unable to select students based on race, gender or other characteristics.
Luckily, thanks to the assistance of one of our Board members, we were able to move beyond this with the school district and are now experiencing them as good partners.
Of course, we are always experiencing challenges of hiring strong team members, retaining and motivating students, working with parents, and many other issues.
Is M3’s approach scaleable? When I started M3, one of the goals was to create a scalable and cost-efficient model. Because these were some of the founding thoughts, we constructed the program around these objectives and are managing to have a cost per student that is significantly lower than other programs working with these types of students. In fact, we have lower costs and better results (in most cases).
We have managed to accomplish this by leveraging the resources we have through partnerships with other organizations and also measuring everything we are doing to ensure we get the results we desire. If we fail to achieve the results, we are able to evaluate our performance from an objective perspective.
This has been difficult to engender since most non-profit organizations are more “touchy-feely”; we want to ensure that we are both empathetic and results oriented.
A personal note from KG. I cannot have this opportunity to speak to all of you without appealing to your generosity.
Since more than 50% of US African American males fail to graduate high school, and 64% of those who drop out end up in the penal system, one of the strongest ways to lower crime is to ensure that these boys receive a good basic education.
The absolute proof is that less than 1% of college educated black males end up in prison while 64% of drop-outs end up there.
Please feel free, whether to fight crime, enhance education or because of racial pride, to donate to M3. Please visit our website; click to donate or send a check to M3 Foundation, 832 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94710
Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a venture capitalist, considers himself a pragmentalist (pragmatic environmentalist) and his investments reflect that attitude.
“And I’m a firm believer, technology is the real solution. The world will not go backwards. Human beings aren’t made that way. And so you have to come up with different solutions.”
All well and good, but he goes on to say that leaders need to hold opinions based on their own belief system and that if you believe strongly enough you can lead confidently.
The examples he mentions are Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison and therein lies the problem.
It’s a common attitude, cite one of the “good guys” to illustrate so-called leadership qualities and ignore all the bad examples of the same action.
Ellison and Jobs are known for forging ahead based on their own opinion and convictions and damn the torpedoes and analysts. Fortunately, they’ve both been right far more often (not always) than wrong and so are held up as examples of the need to hold to passionately to one’s beliefs.
But what about all the leaders who follow their own belief system and blow up their companies when they damn the torpedoes?
Robert Nardelli at Home Depot; Richard Fuld at Lehman and the rest of the Wall Street CEOs who passionately believed in derivatives and minimized the risk; John Thain at Merrill Lynch; Al Dunlap at Sunbeam; the list is endless and timeless.
Khosla is interesting and obviously successful following his own advice, but I suggest that you look for more than confidence based on a personal belief system when choosing someone to follow.
David Zinger’s post Friday (marvelous wordplay and puns) was all about freedom—freedom from clothes.
It seems that a Dave Taylor, a business shrink in the UK, recommends “Naked Friday” to boost team spirit—taking casual Friday to a whole new level.
“Inviting an organisation to go naked is the most extreme technique I’ve used. It may seem weird but it works. It’s the ultimate expression of trust in yourself and each other.”
Seems like naked is the rage among folks with those great accents.
Air New Zealand has made both an ad and a safety video using its own employees, including CEO Rob Fyfe, fully dressed—in body paint. (It’s probably the first time anyone paid attention to a safety video.)
“Each clip took one day to shoot and cost about 10 to 15 per cent of the cost of a major brand commercial.”
But don’t look for anything similar in the US any time soon.
Can you imagine the harassment lawsuits? Even if the staff agreed, someone would accuse someone else of staring and the simplest action would border on inappropriate.
The same with the commercial.
Can you imagine the lawsuits if an airline crew walked through a major airport here clad only in body paint?
The awards for developmental damage to children, the pain and suffering of the adults and the general flouting of public decency could pay off the TARP loans.
Perhaps this is where the US went wrong.
Our Puritanical roots are very close to the surface and we’ve lost our national sense of humor—if we ever had one.
There is nothing like laughter to take the hot air out of the leading windbags who dominate all viewpoints in our national news, whether business, religion or politics.
Are you looking for a good way to make your company or group more innovative? To move it from where it is to where you want it to be?
A good place to start is by encouraging your people to question the fundamentals (QF) of the company.
QF is one of the best ways to overcome the “…but we’ve always done it that way” school of thought and foes a long way to overturning “not invented here” syndrome; both are major stumbling blocks to innovation, productivity, retention and a host of other positives moves.
QF also goes a long way to attracting Millennials and other creative types, because there are no sacred cows—everything is open to improvement and change.
However, making an announcement isn’t going to do it.
Start by identifying your company’s fundamentals, not so much the official ones (although they can also be problematic) as the unwritten/unspoken ones your employees deal with every day.
It’s easy to find them, just ask—but ask knowing that you may not like the answers. (One client found that, contrary to its stated policy, their people believed that quality wasn’t as important as shoving the product out the door.)
Depending on your current culture the identification process can be anything from a public brainstorming session with a whiteboard to some kind of “suggestion box” that’s truly anonymous.
You may be very surprised at some of the perceptions that turn up.
Once you start on a list of fundamentals you want to open them up to debate—the more passionate the better—using a combination of technology (forum, wiki, etc.) and in person discussions. The object being to decide whether to modify/jettison/keep each one, as well as what to add.
Unless your MAP dictates a company that functions in Dilbertland, this is an ongoing, proactive management task to encourage employees to question, rethink, revamp or even dump the company’s fundamentals.
Even when QF is deeply embedded in your culture you can’t assume your people will keep doing it and new people coming from other cultures will need assurance that QF is indeed part of your company’s DNA.
Two articles caught my eye this week, both on a very positive note.
Education
The first is an overview discussing what Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, did in Chicago and wants to do nationally. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot more than we’ve seen in years. Not only that, but the price tag per school isn’t that outrageous considering what I’ve seen previously and he doesn’t seem to expect states to pull the funding out of thin air as NCLB did.
It won’t be a silver bullet (what is), but maybe we’re finally moving (glacially) in a positive direction.
Parenting
The second article is even more encouraging, since it looks at parents—who are at the heart of this mess.
But I see this new fad as a move in the right direction. It’s about letting kids play, doing less and (maybe) realizing that your kids are not the center of the universe or even your primary purpose in life.
How’s that for revolutionary?
Can you imagine? Instead of having every minute of every week packed with scheduled functions, parents would expend some of that energy making sure that their kids used the free time to run around, play using their imaginations, read, think and dream, as opposed to texting, keyboarding or watching TV.
They could use some of the extra time and energy that went into keeping their offspring on schedule to staying involved with their spouse and some more on feeding their own soul.
They might even have enough energy to learn to say ‘no’ and stop indulging their kids to the point of entitlement.
Sounds like a trip to Fantasy Island, but who knows, it might be part of the recession’s silver lining.
It’s a holiday weekend and I assume (hope) that you have better things to do than sit around reading a bunch of stuff on the Net.
So the links I’ve found for you are made to bookmark; they’re ongoing resources for you to explore as the mood and time moves you.
First is a cool site from Stanford Graduate School of Business with videos, such as the one on Jeff Raikes, head of the Gates Foundation, and a large selection of other topics.
Next is a favorite from Business Week’ Innovation and Design. It comes out weekly with great stories; for example, did you know that McDonald’s Chicago HQ is the greenest building on the planet?
Finally, also from BW is the new Business Exchange, an online community “to access the most
relevant content for you, filtered by like-minded business professionals.”
Have a terrific holiday and stay safe; I don’t know what I’d do without you.
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,
Fertilizer is produced in a lab with scientists controlling which chemicals in what amount are used and then mass produce that particular formula in a factory.
losers and lead us out of the doldrums.
A good place to start is by encouraging your people to question the fundamentals (QF) of the company.
Two articles caught my eye this week, both on a very positive note.
So the links I’ve found for you are made to bookmark; they’re ongoing resources for you to explore as the mood and time moves you.
