“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.
Are there any basic attitudes that you can build into your company’s culture that will encourage, let alone mandate, ethical/moral behavior in the decision making process when ‘moral’ equates to risk?
“…moral dilemmas, the decision to tell the truth or to bury it entails a huge amount of risk and soul-searching. Viewed in that way, what we call “ethics” is really a set of decisions about which risk is easier to sleep with at night: opening up about an uncertain situation or trying to hide the worst of it from yourself and everyone else.”
There are three traits that must be deeply embedded in your culture are
Consciousness. This is also known as ingrained awareness of the ramifications of collective action.
Discipline. Neuroscience research over the last decade has demonstrated that continual, intensive focus changes the pattern of neurons within the human brain.
Empathy. When a company is truly empathetic, the recognition of the value of employees is just a starting point.
The quote above is from an article based on the video below; the speech was given this past January at a Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs seminar entitled “Top Risks and Ethical Decisions.”
For full details read the entire transcript as well as the article, they’re well worth your time.
Shortly after I started writing Leadership Turn I did a post about diversity, ending with this—
“Another way to look at it is that any increased spending on diversity development is an investment and will be more than offset by the increases in innovation, productivity and revenues. If spending $100 results in a bottom line increase of $1000, did you really spend the $100, or did you gain $900? $900 that wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t invested the initial $100.”
How do you define diversity?
True diversity isn’t just diversity of race, gender, creed and country, but what I call the new diversity—all those plus diversity of thought.
Think about it, if a manager really works at it she can create a rainbow-colored group who all think the same way—George W. Bush’s initial Cabinet was ethnically diverse, but their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) was homogeneous.
It’s far more difficult to put together a group of totally diverse thinkers. Managers tend to hire in their comfort zone, but more and more that refers to how people think, rather than how they look.
So what should you do to ensure that you’re building a truly diversified team?
Here are five key points to keep in mind when you’re both hiring people and managing/leading them.
Avoid assumptions. People aren’t better because they graduated from your (or your people’s) alma mater, come from your hometown/state or worked for a hot company.
Know your visual prejudices. Everybody has them (one of mine is dirty-looking, stringy hair), because you can’t hear past them if you’re not aware of them.
Listen. Not to what the words mean to you, but what the words mean to the person speaking.
Be open to the radical. Don’t shut down because an idea is off the wall at even the third look and never dismiss the whole if some part can be used.
Be open to alternative paths. If your people achieve what they should it doesn’t matter that they did it in a way that never would have crossed your mind.
Finally, remember that if you’re totally comfortable, with nary a twinge to ripple your mental lake, your group is probably lacking in diversity.
If you read me often you won’t be surprised to learn that I love culture. I believe in the power of culture. I believe that good culture is the difference between great companies and the rest.
Most importantly, I know that if it’s going to succeed culture must be stain not paint.
Unfortunately, many companies use culture paint, believing they can pass it off as culture stain.
The difference is obvious, just as stain is absorbed by wood, culture stain is absorbed into the very fiber of an organization affecting everybody’s thoughts and actions.
And just as paint covers a surface masking its imperfections, culture paint sits on the surface where it is paid lip-service and its effects are grounded in convenience.
In great cultures the CEO enables ideas and desires to percolate up from many quarters to become part of the culture.
In others companies, CEOs only include them to make people feel good; they don’t really buy into them and the result is culture paint. As with real paint, culture paint hides the imperfections, dry rot and structural weaknesses.
Today’s employees have a deep distrust of paint and an abiding desire for stain.
And employees always vote on culture with their feet.
Sometimes it seems as if the economic crisis is acting like an earthquake that’s turning over rock after rock and all kinds of icky things are crawling out much to our dismay. A few months ago I wrote about the mindset that seems to be so prevalent these days.
“These days” aren’t all that recent whereas the executive bonuses causing so much rage are just a blip.
Enron was eight years ago as was the phen-phen settlement rip-off, although the two lawyers were only convicted this week.
For decades, the Feds have been scamster heaven and that hasn’t changed, “about 32 percent of the combined monies paid out by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are fraudulent”—often enabled employees—and by 2007 more than $100 billion was spent on contractors for the Iraq war (you can outsource anything) and you can bet your bottom dollar there’s been plenty of fraud there. Just business as usual.
Of course lying, cheating and fraud aren’t new, but what’s depressing is that they seem to become more and more acceptable. Worse, all the signs are ignored until the situation blows up causing massive damage to thousands of people.
Maydoff and the other hedge fund scamsters operated for years with everybody ignoring the warning signs until the Wall Street bomb blew up and investors wanted their money back. At that point all those houses of cards came tumbling down.
Yet as recently as last August Congress was seriously considering turning over the private pension funds to these same people responsible for the financial crisis—even as those funds were crashing.
Remember when you were young and some boring older person told you that “if it seems too good to be true it probably is”? The problem is that as people grew up they tacked two words onto that phrase and those two words helped get us where we are today.
I hate leaving things on a down note, so here is something to raise your spirits and your skills.
Dan McCarthy over at Great Leadership hosts a terrific leadership carnival and the latest one just went live today. Click on over and check it out, I guarantee that there’s something there for everyone—and probably more than one something. Enjoy!
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.
Are you as disgusted as I am? There is no shame and it’s unlikely to change.
If you can grab it do so and screw everyone else, they don’t matter. Only you matter.
AIG received 170 billion in taxpayer money and they plan to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday.
According to Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman, “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.”
The bonuses go to the “leaders” in the financial products division which is the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
AIG says that the bonuses are contractual.
In the brave new world of the Twenty-first Century ethics are defined by law and morality is old fashioned unless it’s about someone else.
As a wise man once said, “An ethical man knows he shouldn’t cheat on his wife. A moral man wouldn’t.”
If these executives are the “best and brightest” we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.
The contract doesn’t mean squat anyway since the recipients could turn the bonuses down just as a number of CEOs have recently.
Just think, if they did perhaps some of their colleagues wouldn’t be laid off.
And if you think this is an isolated incident of the “Thain mindset” take a look at the ad that Visa is running once again. I saw it once in Business Week last year and found it in terrible taste, but then it disappeared.
I thought the company had realized that their timing for a new status card was atrocious, but I guess I was wrong. This full-page ad appeared in the March 16, 2009 issue.
Perhaps the card is targeted at the recipients of that $165 million.
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.
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,
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.
Are there any basic attitudes that you can build into your company’s culture that will encourage, let alone mandate, ethical/moral behavior in the decision making process when ‘moral’ equates to risk?
Shortly after I started writing Leadership Turn I did a 
Sometimes it seems as if the economic crisis is acting like an earthquake that’s turning over rock after rock and all kinds of icky things are crawling out much to our dismay. A few months ago I wrote about the 
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.
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.
