Sean Kelly of Franchise Pick, one of the best bloggers I know, sent an email to his Bizzia colleagues suggesting that we might find it interesting to weigh in from our own perspective regarding the couple who just won Sean’s Franchisee From Hell Award. (Don’t miss the Biz Levity and Small Business Boomers take on it.)
In short, Lacey, Washington Pizza Time franchise owner Luke Benjamin kept the thermostat set at 55 degrees with a policy to turn the furnace off at night, but the employees forgot one night. Benjamin’s solution was to shut off the heat completely (in an area where outside temperatures may sink to 19 degrees) and post the following notice:
“If you don’t want to work here quit, otherwise shut up and do your job. The next person I hear complaining is off for two weeks. We don’t have heat!! You guys screwed up, not us. You want to blame someone, look in the mirror.”
Since Benjamin confirmed the story to King 5 News, including the fact that 1) his wife has a space heater in her accounting office at the facility and 2) that she is the actual boss, Sean (the big softy) is now wondering if they can be saved from themselves.
Specifically, Sean said, “Miki, do they display the leadership qualities of Attila the Hun, had Attila made pizza?”
The answer is no, in spite of them forcing their people to work with no heat.
Attila never screwed his workers, unlike the Benjamins, they may have been pushed hard, but they had a charismatic leader who was no fool and not only allowed, but encouraged, them to rape and pillage to their hearts content. (Note: Leaders have been using rape and pillage to offset hardship for eons. Think earmarks.)
So what about the Benjamins?
Do I think they will change? Not a chance in hell (from whence came their award), since that would involve a change in their MAP, which ain’t gonna happen as long as they think they’re right.
About the only thing I can see making a difference is a swift kick where it hurts the most—their pocketbook—to be administered by their pizza customers and boss-wife-with-heat Benjamin’s Accurate Accounting customers; as one commenter pointed out, it is tax time, AKA accounting profit time.
But the boycott would have to be substantial and last a significant amount of time to have the desired effect. Sadly, and I’m sure the Benjamins are counting on this, ire diffuses quickly when up against convenience and I wonder if the good intentions of those who are incensed now will last when the item is off the current news radar.
Would you remember? Would you do business with them?
The level of accountability finger-pointing in the fiscal world accelerated steeply with the crash of the giant, 20 year-old Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Bernard Madoff. Financial experts are seeking to lay the blame/responsibility for this current financial crisis on regulators, but, as with derivatives, there were warning signs that could—should—have been read by the financially savvy.
Unlike other Wall Street wizards, it is almost certain that Madoff will be jailed, but most will walk away to plum new jobs far richer than they were and accelerate their status as role models to our youth.
Excuses will be made for them; those embarrassed by association will seek to bury their deeds in oblivion, and in a few short years people will forget.
And it gets more blatant with each passing year; witness Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich alleged effort to sell Obama’s Senate seat.
Danny Schechter discusses the acceleration in a fascinating Media Channel column.
“The latest cases are staggering in their audacity in a corporate culture where an illegal act becomes a crime only when you get caught.”
In a recent TV show, the lead character comments, “It’s counter-productive to raise children in a world without consequences,” yet that is what we’re doing.
Kids see that lack of consequences in politics, business, athletics and religion throughout the media and much closer to home in their own lives.
Little by little those charged with educating kids are eliminating accountability, often at the instigation of the parents. If kids complain that a teacher is too tough the solution is to fire the teacher, rather than doing their job as a parent by setting boundaries and standards and then making sure kids are held accountable.
NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof comments that we finally elected an unabashed intellectual to the Presidency (it’s definitely worth reading), but what resonated more with me was the part that ties so closely with that CandidProf has been telling us.
“We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.”
I’ve met people who think that the “Middle East” is a country;
a nurse once explained to me that the war between Serbia and Bosnia wasn’t racial because both sides were Caucasian;
a business type told me that Arkansas and Kansas were next to each other like North and South Dakota;
CandidProf says that his students don’t know that round means spherical, so they think the Earth is a disk;
something like 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.
I’m actually grateful for Palin’s error because it highlights the level of ignorance that has become acceptable and the condition of education in this country.
I’m not saying that it’s necessarily great in other countries, but I don’t live in them either and they don’t bragg about being the world’s leader.
Perhaps it’s time to turn our focus from being the ‘leader’ in fixing the world’s problems to being the ‘leader’ in fixing our own.
The stupidity exemplified in the No Child Left Behind law that has led to a lowering of already low standards in the name of receiving funding is criminal.
We need educational reform that isn’t test-based, but focuses on real learning including critical thinking and is adequately funded.
Funding that shouldn’t be the problem once we stop spending $70 billion a month on the war—not that I think much of it will go towards education.
The stupidity of parents in brainwashing their kids into believing they are special and entitled to good grades and good jobs merely because they exist is tragic.
This entitlement stupidity is likely to carry on to future generations, unless it gets good and stomped down when it comes in contact with reality.
What ignorance can you add to the list above?
What ideas do you have for combating the problems?
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.
They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!
The best opportunity in decades to create growth is being squandered.
Yep, it’s happened… just as it does every time there’s a fearsome economic downturn. The cost-side micro-managers are back in force.
Forget about creating demand, because everyone knows that as soon as money gets tight people stop spending money. Forget about inspiring the entire company to work toward a common goal of building long-term strength and market dominance. It’s time once again to cut everything in sight and micro-manage every decision from top to bottom.
It’s nothing new. But it is amazing that, despite decades of research that proves that companies who invest in demand-creation during downturn fair better during the downturn and much better afterward, the first thing that happens in most otherwise smart companies is to cut, cut, cut and manage, manage, manage.
It’s happening from the Fortune 100 all the way down to small regional companies. And it is killing the future potential of those companies.
I just witnessed the most appalling and extreme example of my 30 years in the business world. The holding company that owns a medium-sized, internationally dominant company fired all of the company’s top managers due to the economy. We’re talking chief executive, head of international sales, head of international marketing, plus several others. In their places, they put one cost-side micro-manager to “whip things into shape quickly.” There’s no real need for much in between, because he is going to be dictating the limited strategies that everyone else will carry out.
I wish I owned one of their competitors who have wanted to overtake their long-term brand dominance, because this is the best time in their history to accomplish that goal. Employees are demoralized. They don’t dare try to make any decisions or suggest anything strategic. All the brilliance that was the reason for their being hired is of no apparent value. This is a plum ripe for the picking.
Now, this is obviously an extreme example, but the Wall Street Journal is full of examples of just this kind of thinking, as top executives pull back into a cave of cost-side micro-management. Cari Tuna wrote an article last Monday in the Wall Street Journal about the damage done by micro-managers. As she notes in a quote from one interview, “Who wants to be in a company where you are not allowed to think?” She observes rightly that there is a complacency among employees of micro-managers. But that only touches the surface of the damage done.
Such managers are the antithesis of leadership. By taking charge to fix everything in sight, they not only demoralize the smart people they paid so much to employ, but they also make the company vulnerable to attack from a broad range of competitors who might never have believed they could effectively knock them out.
We just watched Starbucks decline dramatically even before the worst of the economic downturn was revealed. That happened due to cost-side micro-management combined with a lack of understanding of what customers had actually been buying from them.
Magnify that exponentially, and you have what we are about to see in the marketplace. Well-known companies and brands are going to be micro-managed into such weakness that we will see a very different set of leading brands in many product categories in five years.
How can you survive the economy and still maintain your strengths, so you have a bright future 6, 12, or 18 months from now?
Don’t lose sight of what your customers really have been buying. That may take some new research, because most companies don’t really know why their customers buy from them. Here’s a hint: if you think it’s due to your price, your product’s performance, your quality, your availability, or any other “functional” factors, you are wrong. Managing those factors will only make you weaker at a time when you need to enhance the ego-satisfaction fulfillment of your customers. In a downturn, people want to feel better about themselves (I call that “self-satisfaction”) and to believe that other people think better of them (I call that “personal significance”). Miss those and you are imminently vulnerable.
Charge more than you think you can. Almost every company out there believes they have to charge less than customers are actually willing to pay… even in a time of recession. Every research study we have conducted (and that is tens of thousands) has shown that most companies in a category are over-delivering on price (meaning they could be charging more). That’s a lot of money thrown away. And remember: it takes an average of three dollars in gross income to generate one profit dollar lost. So every dollar you don’t get is actually worth three that you have to generate later.
Stop measuring outcomes; measure causes. Very few companies measure or track changes in the causes that drive the final outcomes they desire. By only looking at final outcomes, it is impossible to know how to improve those outcomes. You must understand and measure changes in the factors that drive greater demand and profitability and customer loyalty in order to affect sales, net profit, stock price, and all the other final outcomes corporate executives are held responsible for.
I say it every time I can. This is the best opportunity in decades to grow dramatically and to come out on top in the 6 to 18 months a recession typically takes to cycle out. Don’t allow fear to drive you into cost-side micro-management and undermine your chances to achieve that goal.
What steps is your company taking to remain strong and not become vulnerable?
Last month I wrote an article linking to a study at Harvard on the dangers of hiring based solely on experience.
On a different, and seemingly unconnected subject, everyone has read and heard the term ‘risk’ and ‘risk assessment’ in conjunction with our current economic hell (sorry, I’m tired of all the euphemisms) and most of us wonder what the drugs of choice were for those who were paid to assess said risk.
If it’s not drugs, maybe the folks at the Fed made their decision based on the old adage set a thief to catch a thief or to embrace the spirit of Halloween when they made the announcement.
As Malcolm Polley, chief investment officer at Stewart Capital Advisors commented, “It’s like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.”
Aren’t you excited? Your tax dollars at work paying what will be a hefty salary to a guy who played a major leadership role in the current credit crisis.
Ah, America, where so many white collar sins reap such rich rewards.
Hat tip to Mark at Biz Levity who turned me on to this news item and so hilariously skewered it.
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:
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?
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.
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.
Talk about something with no real meaning—except when looking at the man-hours spent teaching and writing about it or the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on acquiring it.
And I find the practice of identifying ‘leaders’ early in their careers particularly repugnant for two reasons.
1. The idea that you can identify future ‘leaders’ from their actions on the playground or in high school or during their initial working years is inaccurate at best and stupid at worst.
Those identified as kids are the ones who excel at getting noticed, love the spotlight, have a good story to tell and are typically attractive and mainstream. The nerds and misfits are rarely noticed as future ‘leaders’—think Steve Jobs.
Picking them out for special training during their first five years of work eliminates all those who work for bad bosses or for companies where entry level hires are grunts with no real responsibility.
Choosing them because they have an MBA is really ridiculous—all the degree proves is that they could afford grad school (either had the money or went into debt) and that they made it through. That’s it.
Further, the ‘early leader’ approach eliminates all those late bloomers giving them far less opportunities to excel.
The second reason is much worse.
2.Those ‘chosen’ start getting extra attention and mentoring from day one of being identified, so the traits that got them noticed get stronger. Stronger isn’t always better.
They are anointed, singled out for greatness, they are special.
Being special sets you apart; suddenly you’re better than the others and that means that there must be different rules for you because you’re special, better—and entitled. An attitude best summed up by Richard Nixon when he said, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
And that sense of being anointed a ‘leader’ is partly responsible for the current debacle.
Or is it a pyramid?“A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves promising or paying abnormally high returns (“profits”) to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business.”
“A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, without any product or service being delivered.”
This is what came to mind after reading CandidProf’s post yesterday; I finally decided that’s it’s both, making is a pyra-Ponzi scheme.
As CP described the situation it’s definitely a pyramid, his college is funded based on how many students are enrolled as are most K-12 schools in this country. Further, lowering standards and focusing only on retaining students in order to continue funding certainly fits the no service being delivered description of a pyramid.
The Ponzi element is seen in high promises from such initiatives as No Child Left Behind, which has done nothing to stem the downward spiral of learning—in fact, it has made it worse.
NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Bob Herbertquotes from a study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society that states, “The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.”
He ends by quoting “An article in Monday’s Times spotlighted some of the serious problems that have emerged in the No Child Left Behind law. Among the law’s unintended consequences, as Sam Dillon reported, has been its tendency to “punish” states that “have high academic standards and rigorous tests, which have contributed to an increasing pileup of failed schools.”
After reading CandidProf’s post, my Russian business partner, Nick Mikhailovsky, commented,
“Actually, the average education quality has significantly degraded over here as well. Although the reasons are different the outcome is the same and applies to both basic and higher education.
Our reason is simpler—low salaries in education.
Everyone who needed money or couldn’t bear living in poverty has left education. After 15 years of that, there are almost no good teachers or college professors left. The old ones retired, and young people aren’t willing to live in poverty when they have plenty of other opportunities and all their life in front of them.”
Hmmm, Russia seems to be dumbing down by salary, but considering the salaries we pay our teachers we’re trashing US education from the top down and the bottom up.
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,
In short, Lacey, Washington Pizza Time franchise owner Luke Benjamin kept the thermostat set at 55 degrees with a policy to turn the furnace off at night, but the employees forgot one night. Benjamin’s solution was to shut off the heat completely (in an area where outside temperatures may sink to 19 degrees) and post the following notice:
The level of accountability finger-pointing in the fiscal world accelerated steeply with the crash of the giant, 20 year-old Ponzi scheme orchestrated by 
“We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
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 
Now I’m wondering what the drugs of choice are at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which apparently took titles and job description as proof of competency and hired Michael Alix, 
Are leaders and managers getting dumber or is it just who is assessing them?
college professors left. The old ones retired, and young people aren’t willing to live in poverty when they have plenty of other opportunities and all their life in front of them.”
