It is in Germany

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day, be sure to come back to learn about the down side of solar.

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I read a great description of politics in You Run, a short story by Sarah Shankman, “politics is one long power plan; an exercise in ego”. That seems to be a good description of what leadership is to many people.

It certainly describes the MAP so prevalent in the business scandals of the last two decades, as well as that of the titans of Wall Street who contributed so heavily to the current economic mess.

It’s also a major characteristic of the more mundane populace in general, as witnessed on social media platforms.

• The foremost cyber-goal is to be on the first page of Google search results based on designated criteria.
• The more friends you have on Facebook the more desirable you appear.
• Garner enough followers on Twitter and you are suddenly a leader.
• Technorati assigns authority levels to bloggers.

Every social media rates its members and people work mightily to improve their ratings.

For those who aren’t celebrities of one kind or another or are verifiable in the real world, this is done based on the ancient principle of “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” (As you might guess, this isn’t my forte.)

That means the ratings can be manipulated—and they are.

There are dozens of classes, webinars, coaches and businesses, along with hundreds of books, all focused on ‘managing your online persona’. They teach all the tricks to raising your authority level, acquiring more friends and followers, and the achieving first page status on Google.

But there are no classes, webinars, coaches or books that explain how to tell the wheat from the chaff, i.e., sort through these impressive exercises in ego to find real value.

What do you do? Please share your approach to finding and validating the authenticity and value of your cyber-connections.

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Remember to share your favorite business OMG moments for the chance to win a copy of Jason Jenning’s Hit The Ground Running.

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Boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, have been in the forefront of everything that’s happened in the country from the time they were born and that’s not changing any time soon.

So what’s up with the generation that changed the world, marched to end a war, protested for equal rights, overturned sexual mores, ushered in consumerism and turned on to drugs and rock and roll?

Harvard believes they are still the future and to that end has set up the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative “to lead significant systemic change in education, health care, community development, and the environment.”

Ads may be targeted to 18-34 year old males, but marketers have always counted on Boomer buying power; since the meltdown they may have to rethink that market.

As they age, Boomers are getting more introspective, evaluating their impact—and apologizing for some of their actions and questioning their legacy.

The Millennials love to count the Boomers as Luddites, incapable of embracing social networking in it’s many varied forms, but is that true or just wishful thinking so they can keep their edge.

Having watched them all my life there is only one thing about which I’m sure and that’s that the Boomers won’t go quietly into the night any more than they passed quietly through the day.

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Did you know that six out of ten of the boys who could help build our future drop out of school and end up in jail?

That’s a full 60% and that is one scary number.

These boys are just like your sons—only without the same opportunities.

These boys are black.

The M3 Foundation is changing that one small step at a time.

M3 was started three years ago by KG Charles-Harris, CEO of Emanio, who I met first as a client and now count as a good friend.

The following is from this year’s M3 year-end report.

“M3 has had tremendous success during the past 3 years. We started with 10 underperforming boys at King Middle School in Berkeley in 2006 and expanded to all three middle schools in Berkeley with more than 30 students in the program during the past school year.

The boys achieved an average GPA of 3.0 during the past school year, some starting as low as 0.6 GPA. The average GPA was raised from 2.7 to 3.0 during the last semester.

All our boys are from low-income families, many with single parent or guardian backgrounds. Since 54 percent of black boys drop out of school on a national level, and 73 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area, these results are a tremendous boost. We expect to improve these further during the coming year.”

Take a good look at the numbers. That’s the kind of improvement that No Child Left Behind was supposed to achieve—but didn’t.

M3 accomplished it by working directly with the boys, not by teaching them to take tests or drumming rote memorization into their heads, but by showing them the value of education and providing the attention needed to appeal to their pride.

Instead of being told they could not they were told that they could.

Not just told, but supported and encouraged.

And they succeeded.

Finally, M3 packs a lot more bang for the buck than most programs do—check it out.

Come back next week for an interview with KG Charles-Harris.

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I have four great lessons for you today.

1. arrogance doesn’t burnish your image;
2. don’t hesitate to tell a client they’re wrong when you know they are;
3. don’t just focus on what you’re doing for customers now, but what you’ll do for them in the future; and
4. culture sells.

They’re all wrapped up in a story about Intel’s new advertising plan and Venables Bell & Partners, the agency that’s doing it.

Lesson 1: In a nutshell, Intel’s concept of the branding effort was “we’re so important to your everyday life. Imagine a world without Intel. Your lights would go out. The world would stop revolving.” That’s arrogance.

Lesson 2: In a second nutshell, “Venables Bell said, ‘You got that wrong.’” Telling an account the size of Intel they’re on the wrong track takes guts.

In Silicon Valley Intel is a cultural icon renowned for its technical brilliance, innovative R&D and decidedly quirky culture.

Lesson 3 & 4: VB did an in-depth study of the company and hung out with its engineers; you’ll be seeing the results starting next week.  The campaign’s tagline is “Sponsors of Tomorrow,” and the ads highlight achievements of Intel engineers in a humorous way.”

Share the ideas with your team; then work together and tweak them to sell your company, department or team to those for whom you perform, whether your customers are external or internal.

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That’s right, guys, you are obsolescent whether you realize it or not.

At least, that’s the conclusion that seems to be offered on a post at Bizzy Women, based in part on job loss stats from Peter Coy’s 2008 Business Week article and also quotes heavily from Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon’s Alpha Girls. (Klindon also wrote Raising Cain and Too Much of a Good Thing.)

Granted that women gained 300,000 jobs between November, 2007 and April, 2008 while men lost nearly 700,000, but the stats aren’t straight across.

“Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst: manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care. … Manufacturing is over 70% male and construction is about 88% male. Meanwhile the growing education and health services sector is 77% female. The government sector, which has remained strong, is 57% female. The securities business, which is filled with high-paying jobs, is likely to be the next sector to get whacked—and more than 60% of its workers are men.”

Securities was more than whacked, it was decimated.

The problem I have with the idea that “The new economy is largely dominated by young women who have unique skills, not by men who have been taught to follow the rules.”

Unfortunately, the jobs being created are mostly in health and education areas—not the most lucrative positions. And as Coy points out, “the “female” economy can’t stay strong for long if the “male” economy weakens too much.”

The great majority of families need both incomes to thrive and, in many cases, it takes both to just survive.

Yes, more women than men are attending college, but perhaps that’s because more resources have been poured into developing women; that isn’t bad, but it does screw the numbers. (This is especially obvious when you look at the differences between black girls and boys.)

These predictions also assume that men can’t/won’t change, current and future generations of males will be the same and experience will play no role over the next 20 or so years, which I find ridiculous.

But the biggest problem I have with the idea that women will rule is the same problem I’ve had for decades as minority groups, whether designated by gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever, have improved their situation.

Not the improvement, I’m all for that, but the desire to dominate.

When I was living in San Francisco I knew from personal experience that the most disenfranchised group in terms of political power, social services, educational help or general assistance were middle age, white, single, straight females.

Sadly, I find that equality isn’t the driving force—”do unto others as they did unto us” is.

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I’ve never been a lover of the MBA, its almost holy status, depending on the school, and especially its dominance on Wall Street,

In a recent post Justine Larbalestier said, “I was fascinated by Background Briefing’s recent documentary about the emergence of business schools and their effect on corporate culture and its relationship to the current crisis: MBA: Mostly Bloody Awful.”

I agree with Justine regarding the illogic of assuming that people can walk in and manage or advise a business of which they know little to nothing, especially with little to no experience.

It’s said that MBA can also stand for ‘Mediocre but Arrogant’ or ‘Management by Accident’; I would add Muddled by Ascendancy and Master Bull Artist.

The podcast by ABC Radio’s Stephen Crittenden is excellent. I hope you’ll take the time to listen and, hopefully, rethink some of your hiring assumptions.

MBA: Mostly bloody awful

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Podcast credit: ABCRadio

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“The real character of the person can be known by what he does when nobody is watching. … Feudal culture is one where there is one set of rules for the king and another set of rules for the rest of the people. … What we are seeing is not the failure of entrepreneurship. It is the greed, ego and vanity of some super managers of some large corporations. That is not the essence of capitalism. Capitalism is all about creating an environment where individuals can leverage their innovation and their entrepreneurial abilities to create better and better opportunities.” –N.R. Narayana Murthy, Founder, Chairman and chief mentor, Infosys Technologies (Hindustan Times 4/19/09).

Satyam has shown that greed is a human condition, not just the province of the decadent West, reserved for various ‘leaders’ in developing countries or politicians in general.

Murthy’s thought that the real person surfaces when no one is watching are akin to the age old wisdom of Plato when he said, “In vino veritas” (In wine is truth).

And I think that in these two comments you find the real truth about anyone who aspires to positional or as-it-happens leadership.

Leadership isn’t about influence or vision; it’s not about how many follow you or heap kudos on your efforts. It isn’t even about honesty and authenticity—the leaders on Wall Street were both in their pursuit of profits.

It’s about what happens between you, yourself and your MAP at three o’clock in the morning when you’ve had too much to drink (real or metaphorical) and no one is looking.

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There are many lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis, but one of the most important is that we the people should stop following and start leading ourselves.

In other words, we each need to take responsibility for our own actions and think critically about the words and actions of those in positional leadership roles.

In business, we need to rid ourselves of the idea that positional leaders don’t need management skills or that managers don’t lead.

Jim Stroup points out in numerous posts that “No one has proven that leadership is different from management, much less that it is a characteristic inherent in individuals independently of the context in which those individuals operate, one that they carry with them from one organization to another and which they then instill into groups otherwise bereft of it.”

We need to stop defining leaders based on their vision and skill at influencing people to follow them.

A comment left on a Washington Post column by Steve Pearlstein regarding the leadership failure that led to the current economic crisis neatly sums up the problem with that definition.

“What a great summary of the economic problem. However this was not a lack of leadership. Defining leadership as influencing people to move in a specific direction, the financial and economic elite successfully led the country into the economic disaster. The problem was a lack of management that failed to identify the signs of the pending disaster.”

Mike Chitty’s team approach is an unlikely solution since you can’t mandate that whichever [leader or manager] is superior will listen to or act on the ideas of the subordinate, while making them equals is rarely successful.

We need to lead ourselves and stop waiting for someone else to show us how, tell us why or lead our actions. 99% of us know what’s good—not just for ourselves, but for the world.

We especially need to stop

• putting ideology ahead of success;
• avoiding accountability by citing all those whose lead we followed;
• excusing our own unethical behavior on the basis that others do the same thing; or
• believing that [whatever] is OK, because our religion forgives our actions.

Everyone cleaning up their own back yard will alleviate a large part of the problem, and then we can work together for the good of everyone, not just “people like us.”

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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.

So what do we do now?

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