Now check out a life warning

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: flickr

This is the story of one of the most brilliant and talented guys I knew during my 20+ years as a headhunter in Silicon Valley. I’ll call him Jim and he was a client for over a decade starting in late 1970s.

The time frame is important, because the world and MAP changed significantly during that time.

When I met Jim he was engineering manager for in a startup, with a grand total of five people. It was a hot startup and his department grew rapidly. I did a lot of his staffing and he was a joy to work with.

Jim didn’t look for exact experience—he wanted people who could learn on their feet; he wasn’t worried about multiple jobs as long as the reason for changing wasn’t just money. Schools and grades didn’t impress him; they were just part of the package. The only things Jim really cared about were attitude, passion, smarts and commitment.

The company was successful, the department grew to more than 100 and Jim grew with it, continually promoted until he was engineering VP. He became one of the most respected managers around, known for the diversity of his people in an area where diversity was the norm.

We became good friends and over dinner eight years later Jim asked me if I could help him find a job. He said that now that his kids had grown he and his wife had made the decision to move back to the Midwest.

I was surprised and said so. I also asked him what else was behind the decision.

Jim’s response caught me way off guard.

He said that he was exhausted from managing such a diverse group. He said that the strain from having to think in the terms of multiple cultures, different genders, US regional differences and widely divergent ages had just worn him down. The mental agility it took to keep everyone happy and motivated had been challenging and fun when the group was small, but as they grew he found himself having to find ways to instill that flexibility into other managers.

Jim said he was shocked the first time that a manager baulked at making an offer to a top candidate with seven years of varied experience and a degree from a state college saying that he would prefer to hold out for someone from a “good” school. But he stopped being shocked as he heard similar ‘buts’ from other managers—but female, <ethnicity>, gay, tall, short, fat, southern accent—the list went on and on.

He said that although it had changed for the better over those eight years it hadn’t changed enough. Many of the attitudes were buried deeper and harder to find during interviews, while many managers didn’t look, assuming, as he had, that those attitudes didn’t exist any more.

I asked Jim where he wanted to move and he said they wanted an urban area, but where the workforce diversity wasn’t as great. He eventually found what he wanted in Minneapolis as it was back then.

However, when Jim retired they chose another area known for its enormous diversity. As he said when he told me where they were moving, “diversity is great when I don’t have to manage it.”

Image credit: sxc.hu

By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.

Are leaders and managers getting dumber or is it just who is assessing them?

Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership blog led me to a very interesting post by Ken Nowack concerning the discrepancies between self-perception of performance and external assessment for corporate executives. The point of the article was that, as managers move up the corporate ladder, they seem to gain more and more blindness to their real performance.

The “no-clue gene,” as Nowack put it, crosses gender boundaries, but “does seem to be more pronounced as leaders move up the corporate hierarchy.”

Any of us who have worked in the corporate world know what he’s talking about.   And the worst part is that most corporate employees look at the top-most levels of their company and fear that the person at the very top may be one of the clueless ones.

I have seen this at work across all size companies from the largest in their category down to mid-sized regional companies.  Smaller companies are not immune, but there the faults of a leader are far more apparent to everyone involved, including the leader himself.

Ignoring the obvious and all too typical problem of employees naively believing that they could certainly do better at their manager’s simple job, even though they really don’t see what he or she actually does, I have seen three factors that drive such disconnects for managers between self-perception and the perceptions of those around them:

1. Corporate pressures on managers/leaders and internal competitiveness are immense these days, and they create a self-defensiveness that increases significantly as one moves up the corporate ladder.  This pressure creates stress that actually does reduce performance aptitude, while it also creates a greater self-protective need to justify oneself.  Honestly, who would want a top-executive job in most large corporations these days, no matter what the payout looked to be?
2. The demands upon top leaders are so great that they themselves don’t believe they are up to the challenge, so they compensate with apparently extreme conceit.  This is a most natural reaction among most personality types to any self-perception of weakness.  Among driver personalities it can be a positive self-motivator – they have learned that, if you think of yourself as something better, you can become it, so they use this tool to drive themselves to greater performance.  Among other personality types, this compensation usually backfires.
3. Most leaders have bought into the belief that they must be able to walk on water in order to lead an organization or team.  It’s the old military code that a leader never admits ignorance; he just states his opinion with greater confidence.  That is a formula for failure in the corporate world, if I’ve ever seen one.  No one can stand up for long to that kind of expectation.  Yet, when faced with the reality of personal weakness, many positional leaders just can’t or won’t face that truth.

I wrote a post a few months ago supporting Jeffery Immelt of GE, who had just been whipped public ally by his ex-boss, Jack Welch, for not being a clairvoyant about profit in their tumultuous financial services group.  I’m not a big fan of Immelt, but the pressure he was under to perform with perfection in an imperfect environment demonstrates what many top leaders are up against.

This problem only decreases in scope and intensity, as you go down the corporate ladder.

• There far too many persons ready and willing to throw someone else under the bus when they spot any weakness that can be exploited.
• I can’t even guess how many times I’ve heard corporate employees say that they can’t trust anyone.
• The loneliness of business that used to only exist at the top tiers has sifted downstairs throughout the corporate ranks.
•  The fad of 360-degree assessments has only fueled such isolation, because everyone around you suddenly becomes a potential critic who will be heard.

There is certainly incompetence evident in most organizations.  I would suggest, however, that the perceptions of incompetence are often anything but objective, and the causes for the real managerial and leadership weaknesses seen could be addressed through a better model for expectations for leadership and how to assess performance.

When was the last time you trusted a co-worker who could assess your performance?

When was the last time you saw someone in your organization admit weakness?

I had a unique view of this through the 15 years of research I did into dominant companies for my book The Alpha Factor.  I saw it at an even closer level as we conducted the tests with more than 75 companies to see if our findings could create dramatic, sustainable growth.

One of the interesting things I discovered was that there was little direct correlation between ability of a company to create such sustainable growth and the actual competence of top leadership.

Rather, it was the willingness of top leadership to allow the smart, very competent people below them to do smart things that had a far greater correlation than the leader’s personal aptitude.

I recall being more than a bit skeptical about the conclusions of Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, where his team had decided that leadership approach was the critical factor in defining great companies vs. simply good ones.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: flickr

By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every other Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

College is expensive. Students have to pay for tuition, fees, books, school supplies, and all sorts of other expenses.  Many years ago, college was still expensive, but at least the average college student could afford to go to college.  But tuition, fees and textbooks have increased in price at far more than the inflation rate.  Students and parents are understandably upset over this.  At many institutions, the tuition goes up every year, sometimes at several times the inflation rate.  Many people think that the universities are just raising tuition to be greedy.  It isn’t that simple, though.

The average student’s tuition does not adequately cover the cost of education. College is not like high school.  College professors need to maintain expertise and remain current in their fields of study.  That means more than just reading about the subject on the internet.  Also, college professors need to be paid.  Libraries need to be current, and professional journals are not cheap.  Books are not cheap for libraries, either.

State colleges and universities are supposed to be supported by tax dollars.  However, state legislatures have cut funding to higher education, reasoning that colleges and universities can make up the difference through tuition.  That means that tuition goes up to cover inflation, and then goes up even more to cover the reduction in state funding.

Private institutions rely not only on tuition, but on investments from their endowments to generate operating funds.  In today’s economic climate, those endowments are not bringing in much money, so tuition has to rise to compensate.

Then, textbook companies keep coming up with new editions of textbooks.  They are pretty proactive killing the used book market, too.  I have on occasion tried to adopt an old edition of textbooks when the new editions come out, only to find that the bookstore could not get copies of the old edition.  We wound up using the new editions.  So much for trying to save my students some money.

As you can imagine, costs quickly spiral upwards too high for most students to be able to afford college.  There are some grants and scholarships, but most are for those who have very low incomes.

The wealthy can afford college.

The poor have it paid for them.

The middle class, the bulk of our students, don’t qualify for grants and can’t afford college themselves.

This is where student loans come in. All across the nation, college financial aid offices are advising students to secure student loads.  But most of these students are young and have not had any experience with loans.  They quickly get in over their heads.  Nearly 2/3 of students wind up graduating college in debt.  Most owe over $20,000 in loans.  Many owe over $50,000 and some students owe nearly $100,000 (if they go from undergraduate to graduate, law or medical school).

This is a serious problem.  Students are graduating deep in debt.

Worse, shortly after graduation they have to start paying back their loans, but this is when they are least able to do so. After all, your first job after college normally is not a high paying job (even for highly paid fields).  So students graduate with debt, just as they are trying to buy cars, buy houses, start families and do many other things that incur additional debt and expenses.

To add insult to injury, students often have to take more classes than they used to.  High schools are turning out students who are not at all prepared for college level work.  Close to half of our students require some remedial work in mathematics, reading, and writing.  Those remedial classes have tuition, but they do not count towards degrees.  This adds a year or more to an undergraduate program and it incurs more tuition, fees and textbook expenses.  That is a problem, however, that needs to be fixed at the high school level.

So, what are we to do at the college level?  The solution is not to simply force colleges to lower tuition.  After all, tuition was raised not out of greed, but as a way to fund the college after state funds and endowments dried up.  If states were to fund higher education at the rate that they used to, then tuition would drop. As for textbooks, I’ll leave that to a later post.

What is clear to me is that something needs to be done.  We are doing our students a disservice if they are graduating deep in debt.  Perhaps our financial aid offices should be working to help students find part-time jobs to fund their education.  Perhaps there needs to be more direct government assistance to students in the form of grants.

It is hard to say just what needs to be done.  But I see the cost of college getting higher and higher.   In fact, it is high enough now that I think that I’d have had trouble affording it and I seriously doubt that I’d have been able to afford graduate school.

There is not an easy fix to this problem.  Any fix would require a cohesive and comprehensive plan.

And I simply don’t see that happening.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit

Now see what to do about it

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit

By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.

Is there really a lending problem?  I know several people who doubt it.

One is a local car dealer.  He was almost dazed as he related a story to me about selling a used car to a woman who had a bankruptcy five years ago.  He sold her a nice car for $27,000.  She did not have the first payment she needed to make the deal.  Three banks (Bank of America, Citizens Bank, and one other I can’t recall) all offered her a loan for $32,000.  That’s on a car that would only give her $22,000 on trade-in, if she sold it back one week after consummating the deal.

I also know another young couple who just purchased a $19,000 van.  They had no problem getting a loan despite the fact that they have very low income.  The rate was 18.5% – about three times what should be available.  When an older and wiser friend challenged them that they could not afford the payments needed, they said, “Well, they must know what they are doing.  They offered the loan to us.”  The friend helped them sell the car, pay off the debt they still owed on the van, and get them into something they could afford.

So what’s wrong with these scenarios?

In the first case, at least one of those banks is in the midst of getting a getting an infusion of taxpayer cash from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, because they lost so much money on poor-quality loans.  In the second case, the justification for making a really bad decision was that the blame was really on someone else.  Worse yet, someone helped them get out from under the burden, but it is obvious from talking to them that they really don’t understand what was wrong with their decision.

We’ve just gone through the scariest financial event in my lifetime, but we aren’t through the consequences of banks, mortgage companies, investment companies, investors, consumers, and the U.S. government all thinking they can get away with making really stupid financial decisions because the blame can be cast upon someone else.  It’s like watching three year olds pointing fingers at each other and expecting mom to “buy” it.

What is it going to take for us to finally understand that it doesn’t work to either expect someone else to make things right for us when things go bad or to do things that enable those persons making bad decisions to go on making bad decisions?

Isn’t it time that we let people take responsibility for their decisions?

If people want to have the freedom to make decisions for themselves, shouldn’t they also be required to take the consequences of those decisions?

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit

I thought you might be up for some fun today and one of the most fun things I do is read is Guy Kawasaki. This weekend I ran into two interesting bits, an interview and a column in Always On.

The interview brought something forward that I think is very important, especially given the current economic times.

When talking about his new book, Reality Check, and who makes the best venture capitalist, Guy downgrades MBAs and those who haven’t had operating roles, saying

“Consulting, investment banking and accounting do not provide you with “on the firing line” experience. You’re always the “outside expert” who zooms in, interviews a few people, creates a PowerPoint presentation and then tells people what they should do.

Unfortunately, analysis and ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. A consultant can tell you to reduce your work force by 10 percent, but figuring out who to lay off and looking people in the eyes when you do it is much harder.”

No kidding. A lot harder.

This is important advice for regular business folks in companies of all sizes, not just entrepreneurs, to keep in mind when looking for help in solving difficult situations. In fact, pretty much everything Guy says can be applied with minimum tweaking to any size company, so read the interview and reap the value.

Guy also says that entrepreneurs, like ‘leaders’, aren’t recognizable up front and that the real proof is in the results.

Now for the fun.

Guy considers it “irrational to base one’s mood on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). After all, (a) what does that have to do with the real world? And (b) it reflects the buying (and selling) decisions of the same investment bankers who got us into this mess.”

So he created a more rational way to measure the health of the economy. Here are three of the 11 measures that make up the GIA (Guy’s Index of Absurdity).

• Venture capitalists attend board meetings via WebEx rather than Gulfstream.
• Pierre Omidyar [eBay founder] starts selling stuff on eBay.
• Men can speak at Blogher as long as they pay for the time slot.

Enjoy; reading Guy is a great way to start the week.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit

What a difference a year makes. Last year Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray wrote Revolt in the Boardroom: The New Rules of Power in Corporate America. (Excerpt) detailing the war between Boards, shareholders and CEOs.

He remembers the time when CEOs were all-powerful autocrats running top-down organizations under the auspices of Boards comprised friends and colleagues. The came the revolt and CEOs started being dumped right and left.

How large was the turnover tally last year and was it really that different from what it used to be?

Generally speaking, prior to the 1990s CEOs weren’t fired. During the Nineties Boards ousted a few high profile cases, such as GM, IBM, American Express, but by mid-2000 things really started changing and have continued apace—663 in 2004, 1322 in 2005, 1478 in 2006, but ‘only’ 1,356 2007.

Of course, not all were fired, some retired, some took outside offers, but a great number left by, or just before, Board request and some left in a very public perp walk.

By the time the book came out, six years after Enron, most of us thought we’d seen the worst; we believed that governance had changed and that Boards and investor activists had tamed CEO ego.

Many thought that it was a permanent shift in power away from CEOs, but it took only a year to show how inaccurate that analysis was.

It might be true when dealing with felonious intention, but when it comes to “maximizing shareholder returns” it seems like anything legal still goes.

But even slightly out of date, Revolt in the Boardroom is a good read—educational, entertaining and offering some unique insights into the corner office.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit

Leadership From The Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life is a second edition, published on the 10th anniversary of the original.

What Kevin Cashman writes resonates whether you’re running a Fortune 100 corporation, raising a kid, or struggling to live a decent life.

As Cashman reminds us immediately, “we are the CEO’s of our own lives,” so if you read the book forgetting what you do or what you earn and focus on increasing your value to YOURSELF and those around you the book has great value.

However, if you read it as another part of a to-do list on getting ahead its value substantially declines.

Leadership From The Inside Out addresses understanding, growth and change in your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) as opposed to a set of steps and check-off points in how to be a ‘leader’.

Unhappily for some, Leadership From The Inside Out requires you to not only think, but think deeply. To gain real benefits from it you’ll need to mull, cogitate and then enable change in many levels of your MAP. Doing so is neither easy nor comfortable, but it is personally rewarding and extraordinarily valuable.

The book is still more valuable if you recast some of the thoughts to broaden its scope, e.g., where Cashman asks how authentic you are as a ‘leader’, ask yourself instead how authentic you are as a human being? How authentic in your other roles—parent, friend, spouse, teacher, landlord, plumber, etc.

The book is divided into seven ‘masteries’, they are

1. personal mastery;
2. purpose mastery;
3. change mastery;
4. interpersonal mastery;
5. being mastery;
6. balance mastery; and
7. action mastery.

Cashman focuses on the fact that it’s not enough for you to master each of these, but that you must share them—passing them on to others within your world.

Although the book talks about executives, it’s not difficult to extend the intelligence to any level along with every-day life.

You always have to lead yourself, and you never know when you’ll have the opportunity to lead others, which makes the effort involved in truly utilizing what Cashman offers well worthwhile.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CandidProf’s schedule requires reducing posts to every other week. Read all of CandidProf here.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit

By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. Wes can be reached at The Ball Group. See all his posts here.

How can we create successful leaders when we lie about what creates success?

A few days ago Miki, for whom I guest post here, sent me an email letting me know that Nina Simosko, Global Chief Operating Officer for the worldwide SAP Education organization, had referred to one of my Leadership Turn blog posts on her blog about leadership.  Her post discussed the issue of failure and its role in developing leaders.   She was referring to a post I had written that stated that future leaders need to be mentored and nurtured through failure, because through failure comes the learning for creating success.

Her article sparked a thought chain that reminded me about a significant problem we have in developing strong future leaders organically in our organizations:  the current mythology about leadership.  Our current leadership mythology (and mythology about business in general) is self-destructive and, as with most mythologies, is not even based upon broad truth.

Everything in life has a mythology – i.e. a set of stories and examples that define what we believe about that subject.  And, like all mythologies, they change to reflect current cultural thinking.

For instance, the mythology of “dating” was once that a young woman desired to get married.  She watched for the “right” man, made herself visible to him, waited for him to “ask her out,” resisted his passions until marriage was consummated, and lived happily ever after.  This was played out in a mythology that pervaded books, movies, conversations, examples of friends, etc.  That doesn’t mean that there were not plenty of real-life examples of very different scenarios, but the mythology defined the ideal, the thing to which we were to aspire.  It was the thing that young girls held onto when confronted with tough decisions.

That mythology has changed quite a bit even in my lifetime.  There is no need to define the current mythology about dating, because you probably either laughed or cried as you read the contrast between the old mythology and what you hear shared every day about the “ideal” of dating now.

Those changes in mythology drive how we think about dating even before puberty.  Obviously, if sociologists were to do an unbiased long-term research study of what creates the most productive, least destructive dating and the best, most sustainable long-term results, they could help us turn those facts into a mythology that we could embrace.  That new mythology could then offer a much happier alternative for people to follow.

Now, we all know that mythologies are created by people.  They are the propaganda that is issued to create a desired result.  When I was a child, for the most part, those mythologies were created and spread by well-intentioned persons to help protect and guide us to happiness and success.  We also know that there are many factions who have their own agendas for how people should think that are based upon completely irrational, less than well-intentioned purposes.  Their purposes may be to make themselves feel better about pain they experienced, a desire for others to be no happier than they are, a desire to justify bad decisions they have made, etc.  That’s why there has to be some rational basis for mythology to have a good outcome.

In the business of leadership development, we have a similar problem.  There is more than enough empirical data to demonstrate that creating sustainable, beneficial success is hard work.  It takes risk. It takes time. It takes pain.  It takes making a long series of wise decisions.  It takes great investment and some losses.  It takes gaining the help of many other persons who will aid in creating your success.  It takes courage.  And, most of all, it takes failure from which learning and improvement comes.

But what is the mythology of success under which we operate?

We choose to believe that…

• Success comes relatively easy.
• It comes through minimizing risk or at least spreading it to others – mostly that happens through putting others at risk more than yourself.
• It happens quickly.
• It happens with minimal or no pain, like winning the lottery.
• It involves little in the way of acquired wisdom; there is more luck and “who you know” than wisdom involved.
• It takes minimal personal investment in money, time, or effort.
• It is done virtually on your own with little outside help.
• It requires no courage, because there is so little effort, pain, or risk required.
• Failure is a thing to be despised and ridiculed, not embraced or used as a platform for learning.  And, when failure comes, you blame it on others.

This is the mythology that has created our current age of entitlement.  “I did not ask to be born, so you owe it to me to make things go well for me without a lot of work on my part.”  To greater or lesser extent, this attitude pervades both the educated and the uneducated.  It is nourished by the stories about instant successes and greedy top executives who did not earn what they got.  It is fueled by stories about companies that are harming us with their “outrageous” profits while ignoring the investment and work that made it possible to gain those profits and even ignoring where most of those profits go to create more job opportunities and wealth for a great many persons.

I did some extensive research for the U.S. Department of the Treasury about 10 years ago.  We were looking at attitudes about investment and savings among a broad cross-section of the population.  I was stunned to discover what I called, “the lottery mentality.”  This thinking said that it wasn’t worth saving money.  If you couldn’t get 30+% return on your investment (the then current mythology about investing), then it was better to either spend it on self-entertainment or buy a lottery ticket.  It just wasn’t worth the aggravation of trying to slowly, steadily save for the future. This attitude stretched from the very poor to persons making seven-digit incomes.  Surprisingly, the only demographic that consistently resisted this and embraced the idea of “slow and steady saving is better than wasting it” were low-income ethnic women, especially black and Hispanic.  Men generally were the most predisposed to the “lottery mentality,” but white women of all incomes were almost as enthusiastic about it.

The modern mythology about how businesses run and how leaders lead was one of the greatest hurdles I had to overcome in researching my book, The Alpha Factor.  As I tried to understand what really created sustainable success and dramatic growth, I continually stumbled over mythology-based conclusions from both the corporate executives involved and the media that were covering it.  It took a great deal of deeper digging to uncover the real factors that were behind those successes.

Most of what I would hear from corporate executives involved in successes was their own brilliance at responding to market fluctuations, being able to generate short-term results no matter what the competitive environment, spotting new trends and creating the right products and business model to address them, and other self-aggrandizing perceptions of what created their success.  What I generally found was that the great products that were so “right” were discovered more by accident than by purpose.  And the short-term responses they thought so highly of actually had made things harder for them to keep moving forward profitably.

Most often, it was things they discounted as minor that were the real driving force behind customer perceptions that created the demand for their products.  Most often, these “minor” things were ones that they felt unable to control directly, so they discounted them as being irrelevant.

That has created an incorrect business mythology that says that money managers are the lifeblood of the business.  That cost-side management is the secret to long-term success.  That price is “everything.”  And, if not price, then quality is.  It focuses business watchers upon stock price as the indicator of success (and we all know how accurate that was from the “dot com” bubble).  It has created a perception of entitlement among top executives that says they deserve multi-million dollar bonuses, while ignoring the real drivers of corporate success that will continue to create jobs and wealth for generations to come.

There have been a number of articles in recent years about the failure of top business schools to turn out potential future leaders.  Much of that failure can be attributed to the reality that our mythology about what creates success taints how we think about what defines a leader.  So we generate self-serving, short-term focused MBAs who have little ability to drive long-term success.

Compounding that, in the ranks of corporations all over America, future leaders receive no real leadership training.  They simply do their jobs under the constant threat resulting from short-term management thinking that the company could sell itself at almost any time or that budgets will be cut making it impossible to accomplish the tasks assigned to them.  Managers do their best to look effective while hiding from the fact that they can’t, given the little support they receive.

Our mythology has made us into a nation expecting miracles without a willingness to make the investments required for real, sustainable success.  Instead, we fail through lack of willingness to really succeed and cover our failure under a veil of blame pointed at others around us.

If we really wish to create future leaders, we need to create a new mythology based upon what truly creates success.  That mythology should be based upon truth and not self-aggrandizing lies.  It should be based upon a rational, empirical understanding of what creates sustainable success.  That’s why I wrote The Alpha Factor.

Creating such a mythology within every organization and generally throughout the business community is a task that every person involved with leadership should pursue.  It should be based upon empirically-based reality in order to be truly valuable.  To do that, we need to understand the real factors behind success, before we can ever expect to recreate it or to develop tomorrow’s successful leaders.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit