To thrive in today’s world companies need to constantly innovate; innovation requires initiative; initiative is another word for leadership.
Because initiative and leadership are synonymous, leadership needs to be pushed out of the corner office and spread throughout the organization; doing so will encourage growth, creativity and innovation.
If leadership is the fertilizer then culture is the water, without which nothing will grow, and people are the seeds from which ideas come.
By spreading leadership evenly through out your company garden and watering regularly, leaving no unfertilized or dry patches in which a seed will be stunted or die, you assure yourself a bountiful harvest that will be the envy of your competitors.
Normally Saturday is all about multiple links to useful information, but today I have something even more useful.
Every year KG Charles-Harris, EMANIO CEO and founder of M3, attends the Stanford Summit; this is the second year I’ve asked him to share what he learned with you.
I specifically asked that he provide a look at how this premier Silicon Valley gathering saw their role in the coming economic recovery.
As usual, the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit was a breath of fresh air with industry luminaries, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists interacting intensely. The topic on everyone’s minds was, of course, the Grand Recession that the financial industry had brought upon all of us and what would bring us out of it.
One issue was clear in everyone’s minds and that was that the information and computer industries were some of the leading forces that would turn the negative situation into more positive territories. From my point of view as CEO of a software company and leader of a foundation that works with disadvantaged kids, it is clear that innovation and problem solving will be a core factor to bring the US, and the rest of the world, out of recession.
Technology is a two-edged sword and information technology helped create some of the problems.
The efficiency with which trades are executed in the financial markets;
the ability to seamlessly package, re-package and syndicate debt; and
the borderless nature of global finance is all based on computer technology.
As such, tech was a facilitator, not only in the creation of the bubble, but also the in the speed with which it spread from mortgage backed securities to the rest of the economy.
One way or another most people are experiencing the fallout on a global level.
In the same way, it will be due to the possibilities and flexibility of technology that the world will ascend out of “darkness”.
But facilitators are neutral and play both sides, so just as the downturn and bubble were helped along by technology, so the turnaround will happen with the help of technology.
This is what many of us discussed at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit and I would like to share with you the varied thoughts of three entrepreneurs, Lorenzo Carver, CEO of Liquid Scenarios, Jason Seed, CEO of CVSdude and Renee Blodgett, CEO of Blodgett Communications, on how technology will aid the recovery.
In essence, these three have different takes on the value that technology brings and why tech will facilitate the turnaround.
The first CEO I interviewed was Lorenzo Carver, who has extensive experience in the technology, finance and accounting industries, among others. He has founded several companies, as well as having participated in raising billions of dollars in funding for other companies. He is often sought for his strategic advice by both company leaders and venture capitalists.
At present, his major endeavor is Liquid Scenarios, which minimizes uncertainty for investors in different ventures. They provide the various hardcore financial scenarios that an investor needs to calculate—investment amounts, rounds of financing, time to exit, etc.; the different aspects of modeling the future of an investment beyond what spreadsheets can take you. They have major venture capitalists and other investors as clients.
Lorenzo’s comments on how technology would play a part in the economic recovery were quite insightful. “Tech has already had an effect on the recovery, just like it had in the downturn at the end of the dotcom era. In fact, tech has led us out of the doom and gloom mentality with earnings from Google, Adobe and others being significantly better than expected. This has provided people with hope that organizations are continuing to invest. These are important signals, considering the leadership position that the technology industry has in this country.”
I agree with what he is saying, however, I remain a bit skeptical of the significant optimism that exists in the market today. Considering the significant job losses and the continuing trend of more jobs lost, in addition to the continued credit freeze for both consumers and corporations, it is difficult to imagine that we are as close to a recovery as people believe. A slowing downward trend is not the same as an upward trend.
When I asked Lorenzo about this, he said “Of course, as a business leader I am planning for continued hard times and am finding ways of doing more with less; I believe that this will continue for some time.”
In short, technology has played and will continue to play a significant role, but we are still experiencing a downward trend.
Everyone I spoke with at the Stanford Summit recognizes this and manages accordingly. In this environment it is all about cash management and to the extent technology can aid in this it will continue to be a winner.
Last year I met Guy Marion, Executive Vice President of CVSDude, an enterprising and innovative version control platform, who had traveled all the way from Australia to attend the Summit. CVSDude is the leading worldwide provider of Subversion hosting and developer solutions to distributed teams.
This year I had the pleasure of sitting down with their CEO Jason Seed, who, over this past year, has driven significant progress, including opening offices in Silicon Valley. When asked about how the tech industry is/would contributing to the economic recovery, he was very clear on the major factor technology brings.
“The major benefit of the technology industry is the efficiency it delivers to all organizations. Clearly both efficiency and effectiveness will be the major drivers of an eventual recovery.” Clearly Jason is correct in mentioning this. Since the inception of technology, efficiency and effectiveness have been the drivers of innovation. Clearly, what we are now seeing in the economy is a retrenchment started by finance, but continued by the search for efficiencies and doing things more effectively using technology.
Many of the people laid off in this recession will have their jobs replaced by technology. They and many more will find that to regain employment some level of retraining will be necessary. This is certainly true for many in Detroit, the epicenter of employment losses.
Jason’s company focuses on delivering these efficiencies to global teams of developers, whether they are distributed across large geographic areas or who work in the same office. Regardless, being able to have scalable, reliable, secure systems to manage version control and other software issues is a core enabler of effective development.
Finally, I discuss the role that technology will play in the economic recovery with Rene Blodgett, CEO of Blodgett Communications. I kidded Rene that maybe she was the sister or wife of Henry Blodget, the infamous dotcom stock market analyst from Merrill Lynch. In fact, she’s not related in any way to “Hype” Blodget, despite her involvement in promoting technology companies.
Blodgett Communications partners with clients, getting to know their business in an intimate fashion, in order to differentiate and create thought leadership. Their core expertise focuses on the absolute fact that revenue and sales are always at the forefront of each management team’s objectives, so they develop media strategies that minimize cash outlay while enhancing cash generation.
Rene believes the way technology will lead us out of the recession is through enabling better decision-making. She says, “It is clear that technology enables analysis of data and acquisition of information in a way that gives companies the tools to understand options and reach conclusions in ways that were previously impossible. This is especially true about business intelligence and predictive analytics; companies, like EMANIO, will be at the forefront.”
Thank you, Rene. It is absolutely true that EMANIO is at the forefront of the information and analysis revolution and I am in complete agreement when you say, “It is only through improved decision-making that we will be able to get the economy on an even keel again.”
To summarize,
Lorenzo believes that tech is already leading us out of the recession and that the “green shoots” that we are seeing are due to the performance of technology in companies or technology stocks’ effect on general sentiment.
Jason believes that effectiveness and efficiencies driven by technology will lie at the base of a robust recovery.
Rene’s conviction is that it is better decisions enabled by technology that will differentiate winners from losers and lead us out of the doldrums.
All our sentiments are valid and interesting, but we’ll have to see how it develops going forward before we can judge how accurate we are.
When it comes to company success there is much talk about leading and influencing, visions and inspiration, but when the subject of benefits comes up then it’s all about the bottom line.
Did you know that no benefits (other than those negotiated by a union) are actually required by law for any worker, full or part-time?
So why should companies have benefits? Just think about how much better their bottom line would be without them. Wow!
Then think about how demotivated, unproductive and disinterested their employees would be. Double wow!
The smartest employers (AKA good leaders) offer all the benefits they’re able to offer to the people who work for them, even part-timers. Sure, they’re limited by financial consideration, but they do as much as they can.
A startup CEO told me that he had insisted on good insurance coverage in spite of his investors’ gripes. Why? Because, he said, his people were more willing to put in 80 hour weeks when they didn’t have to worry about their families. Interestingly enough, his company also offered slightly below market pay and far more modest stock options and still filled their openings with top talent (this was during a boom period, too).
Another small biz owner I know, with sales of less than $2 million, offers Aflac, exceptional working flexibility, including working from home, and just added a 401K, although many similar-sized companies just moan about how they can’t afford anything.
My friend, who owns a tiny, neighborhood restaurant, gives her waiters their birthday off with pay—and has almost no turnover.
Part of the problem in large companies is that Wall Street penalizes companies that do take care of their people (Costco) and lauds those that use every trick to avoid spending that money (Wal-Mart).
But make no mistake—taking the best care possible of your people will yield a high return in the form of lower turnover, higher productivity and more creativity.
Is your company fair? Are you fair to your people? Is fairness part of your MAP?
How often have you heard (or said), “That’s not fair!”
People more or less accept that life isn’t fair, but are more than likely to walk from a company or manager they perceive as being unfair.
What do people expect within the business world in terms of fairness?
The obvious is that they don’t want to be shafted a la Enron. But fairness refers to more than the obvious, most often to the company/manager doing what they said they would do, i.e., walking their talk.
Fairness is what people want and companies/managers promise, but frequently don’t provide. For example:
Fairness excludes politics
Official – people will be promoted based on what they do
De facto – people are promoted based on who they know
Fairness is egalitarian
Official – everybody will fly economy class when traveling
De facto – senior managers fly first or business class
Fairness includes parity
Official – similar skills are compensated similarly with any differences the result of merit
De facto – compensation differences result from expediency, prejudice, or favoritism
All that’s fine and sounds wonderful if, in fact, fairness is part of your MAP.
Why be fair? If ‘doing the right thing’ doesn’t come all that naturally to you, is there a reason to embrace it anyway?
In other words, what’s in it for you?
Quite a lot, actually.
Fairness reduces turnover (and its associated costs), increases productivity, and fuels innovation.
These, in turn, make you look good as a manager, help your company’s street rep, which has a major impact on the caliber of the people applying for positions, making it easier to higher great people.
Bottom line: better reviews and increased compensation for you.
And what the experts recommend for them will work for you.
Forbes has an article how to control CEO rage, but the best part is the accompanying slideshow highlighting the anger of a few of the most famous and infamous—those who lied, cheated and stole their way into history.
The Washington Post calls it the “Silent Language of Leadership,” but ignore the ‘leadership’. What is described is the silent language of influencing people, whether you are a CEO, Bernie Madoff or parents struggling to get through to your teenager.
Sometimes the boss decides it’s time to leave, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it—Sarah Palin did it the wrong way. See how it should be done; this is good information no matter what level you’re on.
Finally, how much disclosure should be required of the CEO of a publicly traded company? It’s a hot topic since Steve Jobs surgery was announced as a done deal.
Monday Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).
A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.
“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”
I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. Now I can’t find it because I was so darned connected online I didn’t actually pay attention to the title or where I filed it.
This leads into the video below. I was reminded of Emotional Intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman’s TED talk a couple of years ago. If you want to know the connectedness between emotions, business, and “noticing”, this will be time very well spent. Close your door. Now. Tell you’re boss you are doing professional development. You are.” x
I recently wrote that“No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.”
All I can add is that we better start noticing before all the lights are turned off for good.
Now go see your friends and tell them; have a ‘noticing’ contest together with a ‘doing’ contest.
Before you can practice random acts of kindness you need to notice.
These days it’s called ‘engagement’ and smart managers are looking for ways to increase it. They want to incorporate practices and attitudes in their group’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that will improve productivity and increase engagement.
Two such items are
basic business knowledge and
a large dose of pragmatism.
Business 101
Naiveté regarding business frequently leads to non-reality based ideas and attitudes. If people have a fuzzy or rose-colored view of what has to happen for the company to be successful, there’s no way they can contribute effectively.
Worse, this lack of knowledge can make them resistant to the procedural changes necessary to the company’s successful evolution as it grows, shrinks, or changes.
It’s not necessary, or even possible, to provide the in-depth business knowledge that comes from an MBA or 30 years as a successful CEO, but wise managers can provide basic understanding of the actual forces at work within the company, industry and even the economy in general at times such as this.
You want your people to understand
the Business Mission Statement;
customer desire as the driving force behind product development (why build it if they won’t buy it?);
financial controls, what they are and why you need them;
why/how to avoid blue sky approaches and impossible wish lists;
the reasons for requiring excellent documentation;
the importance of quality and manufacturability; and
other business-specific subjects.
Teaching these should be active, not passive; merely posting the information on your intranet won’t get it done. Use brown bag lunches or company-wide webinars, followed by local discussions, to create a positive learning process.
Finally, be sure you encourage people to use what they’ve learned.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism should permeate your MAP, the groups and the company culture. It should be like stain as opposed to paint—not just covering the surface, but also sinking in.
By practicing pragmatism as well as preaching it, you encourage a reality-based culture where
setbacks are easier to deal with because they are recognized and acted on quickly;
employees speak up because they are assured that the messenger will not be shot;
rose-colored glasses are obvious;
growth and change of the culture without corrupting it is encouraged; and
“not-invented-here” syndrome is veer batten.
Pragmatism works best as a part of a MAP that everybody is encouraged to embrace.
It helps to create a company in which not only can everybody see what the Emperor is wearing, but also have no compunction about discussing it.
Most managers know that lousy customer service is one of the fastest ways to reduce the bottom line.
But what most managers forget in the daily press of doing way too much with drastically reduced resources is that their employees are also their customers.
As I’ve said in the past, one of the hats every manager wears is employee service manager (ESM) and reviews are a critical part of that.
Done right, reviews are a positive experience for both manager and employee; in some cases even a time to bond.
If the goals in January were done well, which means that they had a deliverable date and were quantified and measurable, then evaluating how someone is doing is simple.
An article in Business Week discusses the added weight being given to mid-year reviews as a result of business turmoil in the current economy.
In fact, the only goals that are fair to employees and managers alike always include those three points.
As a manager you should never forget…
As an employee you should always request…
Due date
Quantified action
Measurable results
And while a good review means that you’re honest and authentic with your people, that doesn’t translate to abusive or destructive.
Offering
recognition of what the person does well; and being
candid about areas that need improvement
are two hallmarks of a good review.
The third is no surprises, which means that you’ve been giving candid feedback throughout the year.
Skipping any of these is setting you and your people up for review hell.
When I wrote The Swamp And The Alligators: a (slightly irreverent) guide to career planning and the search process I had a chapter on career planning. Here is the first paragraph
“The world we live in is not conducive to planning in general, let alone long-term, i.e., strategic planning. There are very few good, visible role models who practice strategic planning. Elected officials don’t plan beyond the next election, while the government doesn’t seem to plan at all. Wall Street’s de facto definition of long-term is one quarter and companies are forced to accept and act on that definition or have havoc wreaked upon their stock. Even short-term planning is more reactive (fire fighting) than proactive. When planning is done, it’s frequently approached as a project comparable to climbing Mt. Everest with the end product required to outlast the Tablets.”
That was more than 15 years ago and nothing’s changed—people still aren’t comfortable planning.
There’s a simple trick to planning, whether for your career, family or company and I’m going to share it with you. In order for it to work, you have to stay conscious of the idea behind the action all the time.
Are you ready?
PLAN IN PENCIL
It doesn’t matter if you’re using a computer, plan in pencil.
Planning in pencil means accepting at the outset that plans change as life changes and that’s OK.
No person living or dead could have predicted the current economy. Even those who saw the looming problems in derivatives and sub-prime mortgages couldn’t forecast what is happening.
Plans need to be flexible, to bend and sway with the winds of fortune and the life changes that can’t be predicted.
PLANNING IN PENCIL is a state of mind, the part of your MAP that allows you to move forward at warp speed, yet still turn on a dime.
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,
If leadership is the fertilizer then culture is the water, without which nothing will grow, and people are the seeds from which ideas come.
losers and lead us out of the doldrums.
When it comes to company success there is much talk about leading and influencing, visions and inspiration, but when the subject of benefits comes up then it’s all about the bottom line.
What do people expect within the business world in terms of fairness?
It doesn’t matter if you’re using a computer, plan in pencil.
