Three great interviews sharing what to do and one commentary on the opposite.
Do you long for simplicity, especially in software? Jason Fried built his company 37Signals because he hates complexity. Read more about his attitudes in Inc’s excellent article, you may be surprised.
Next is the story of and an interview with Steve Chang, co-founder and chairman of Trend Micro. Learn why two failed startups didn’t dampen his entrepreneurial fire and what drives him to innovate.
I love this interview with William D. Green, chairman and C.E.O. of Accenture. He tells his first training seminar as a manager where he was told the 68 (no joke) things he needed to do to be successful; Green decided there were just the three Cs.
The first is competence — just being good at what you do, whatever it is, and focusing on the job you have, not on the job you think you want to have. The second one is confidence. People want to know what you think. So you have to have enough desirable self-confidence to articulate a point of view. The third thing is caring. Nothing today is about one individual. This is all about the team, and in the end, this is about giving a damn about your customers, your company, the people around you, and recognizing that the people around you are the ones who make you look good.
I don’t follow sports, but Wally Bock’s offers a comprehensive commentary on the amazing unprofessionalism of Brian Kelly, whose actions are a case study on the fastest way to trash your people. But I wonder how many people will actually find them offensive or just shrug and say no big deal.
Finally, the ongoing sex scandals of the Catholic Church have offered up some of best examples of how leaders dance around the truth, never really admitting their errors even when they claim to be sorry. Cardinal Egan is a Church leader who has danced for decades before his house of cards comes crashing down, but even now he hasn’t stopped dancing—or blowing smoke. When will those in power understand that an apology means nothing when the deed is diluted, denied or rationalized.
“To reduce “female brain drain,” global companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and dozens of others are increasingly offering a variety of flexible work options.”
Don’t get me wrong. These companies aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their corporate heart or caring social consciousness, they’re doing it because it makes financial sense, AKA, vested self-interest.
“Business analysts and executives say talent retention and the forces of demography are the chief reasons large, traditional companies accommodate the needs of female employees. Fifty-eight percent of college graduates are women, and nearly half of all professional and graduate degrees are earned by women…the number of women with graduate and professional degrees will grow by 16 percent over the next decade compared with an increase of only 1.3 percent among men.”
“Whether you can hear it or not, a time bomb is ticking in C-suites worldwide. Its shock waves will resonate for decades. The explosive: indisputable demographics. Surveys…indicate that the number of managers in the right age bracket for leadership roles will drop by 30% in just six years. Factor in even modest growth rates, and the average corporation will be left with half the critical talent it needs by 2015.”
It’s not just large firms, SMB companies are active in the effort, although they often skip the language and the programs are more informal—which is why they’re often described as “being like a family.”
Although the work-life trend started with women, the guys want it, too, and Millennials assume it as a right.
The economy will turn around—it always does; more Boomers will retire; demographics will prevail; talent will be scarcer and the companies that already know how to offer balance will have an enormous recruiting edge.
What do you go to bed thinking about; what dominates your dreams; what do you ponder during the day?
Your aches and pains; the gray hair you found; the new outfit you bought, but aren’t sure is right?
Do you dwell on the words or email that may be a slight—or not?
The colleague you’re not sure likes you; the boss who seems OK, but…?
It’s more than a matter of the glass being half full or half empty.
Like the dog that worries a bone, constantly thinking and talking about anything focuses you on it; prioritizes it and makes it paramount until it dominates all other thoughts.
Focus works in both directions—it can launch you to the heights or toss you into a dungeon of doom—taking your family and friends with you.
Most importantly…
Focus is a choice.
Choose wisely.
I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving and a bountiful life.
Yesterday I shared quotes from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos that focused on entrepreneurial topics, especially stock and its price.
Today, we’re going to look at Bezos’ vision for Amazon marketing.
Let’s start with what you thought of the last Amazon ad you saw. You’re probably scratching your head and thinking that it wasn’t very good, since you don’t remember it.
There’s nothing wrong with your memory or the ad, for that matter, because there was no ad.
“Instead of shelling out big bucks for lavish trade shows and TV and magazine ads, Amazon pours money into technology for its Web site, distribution capability, and good deals on shipping. … “It is pretty unprecedented that their brand has ascended so quickly without a large marketing budget,” says Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer at brand consultant Landor Associates. “It’s not about splaying their logo everywhere. They are all about ease of use.”
Amazon has done well in the recession for the very reasons that Wall Street lambasted them after the dot com bubble burst.
Wall Street wanted short-term profits, while Bezos focused on the long-term.
When I was looking for yesterday’s quotes, I also found these two and they say it all.
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”
It takes enormous strength of character to stay focused on the future when investors are pounding on you to focus on immediate returns.
Too many CEOs sell their company’s future by focusing on keeping investors, analysts and the media happy in the short-term.
I want to share three comments from Jeff Bezos today, because tomorrow’s post is about him.
They all focus on the financial side and point up the great difference between Bezos and many other CEOs when it comes to money and stock.
If Bezos is anything he is pragmatic and real—no BS. And that is just as true when he is talking about entrepreneurial topics as about his business.
The truth in this comment has only increased over the years and will continue into the future. “Good ideas will always get funded, so that’s not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.”
“It’s part of the territory with Internet stocks, that kind of volatility. It can be up 30 percent one month, it can be down 30 percent in a month, and a minute spent thinking about the short-term stock price is a minute wasted.” Obviously, Bezos never wasted any minutes on the subject.
If you’ve followed Amazon at all, you know that every time Bezos invested in better technology or added product lines Wall Street predicted its imminent demise. Even today, after a decade of success, the analysts question Amazon’s every move.
Bezos takes it in stride, still focusing on the long term and customer satisfaction, as he has all along.
“No. I’ve taken plenty of criticism, but it’s always been about our stock price and never about our customer experience. After the bubble burst, I would sit down with our harshest critics, and at the end of the meeting they would say, “I’m a huge customer.” You know that when your harshest critics are among your best customers, you can’t be doing that badly.”
Join me tomorrow for a look at Bezos’ approach to nonmarkteing.
Southwest Airlines, like Zappos, has a corporate culture that is head and shoulders above most and is the envy of their competitors.
Southwest’s culture is so important that the company walked away from a deal to buy Frontier Air Lines.
It is that culture has helped Southwest weather the current financial storm and it zealously guards that culture because it knows it is the true foundation of its strength..
As Gary C. Kelly, Chairman, President and CEO, said in the during the Q2 Earnings Call,
“Excluding special items, we reported a second quarter profit of $59 million and that was $0.08 a share. And I would say given the deep recession that that is a very solid performance and, of course, I’m very proud of our people on every front. We continue to manage through the economic crisis with a lot of change and all the while our folks are delivering a very high-quality operation and outstanding customer service, so I’m very, very proud of them.”
The call was primarily with analysts, although many investors probably joined it, and the introduction included the following statement,
“This call will also include references to non-GAAP results; therefore, please see our earnings press release in the Investor Relations section of our website at Southwest.com for further information regarding our forward-looking statements and for a reconciliation of our non-GAAP results to our GAAP results.”
So if you’re Southwest and known for a fun culture, how do you incorporate that into something as eye-glazing as explaining GAAP, AKA Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, at your annual meeting?
Easily. You just ask David Holmes, known as the Rapping Flight Attendant, to explain it.
Remember the old line “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”
It’s not true. Most people who go into teaching do it because they have a true passion—at least when they start.
But passion is hard to sustain when all you hear is that
you are too easy/hard;
you give too much/not enough homework;
you too often receive little-to-no respect from parents, kids, administrators and even your colleagues;
more time is spent on politics than lesson plans;
you spend more time teaching basic manners than educating; and
your de facto hourly pay rate is around minimum wage in spite of a 9 month work year.
Some manage it and they are the ones who truly leave their mark.
Most of us remember the teacher(s) who really touched us, who opened our eyes and helped us see the world differently.
And we remember the worst we had, but the majority fall in-between and become a blur.
some of the best come to teaching from other successful careers.
One of the highest profile of these is Tom Bloch, who left H&R Block (the family business founded by his father) after 18 years, five as President, and a salary of nearly a million a year to teach math at an inner-city middle school in Kansas City, because he wanted to make a difference—and he has.
Listen to this interview and then read his story in Stand for the Best. Share it; maybe it will inspire others to apply their passion to teaching, but if nothing else, perhaps it will encourage them reconsider their own attitude towards teachers.
The second one is an article you’ll probably be hearing a lot about. No matter what you think of the content, the question is whether John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, should have stepped into the political wasp nest of healthcare. After youread the article, be sure to click the comment tab at the top and scan through some of them. Interesting reading.
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder KG Charles-Harris.
Why did you start M3? I started the M3 Foundation when I became aware of the plight of black boys in school. In the San Francisco Bay Area, 73 percent of black boys drop out of school (nationally the average is 54%). These statistics places one of the wealthiest areas of the world on par with war torn areas like the Congo or very impoverished nations like Laos. The statistics, along with meeting some of these kids, shocked me into action.
Another issue was that I wanted my own children to receive a good public school education.
To ensure that this happened, it was necessary to put a structure in place that enabled teachers to do what they were supposed to, i.e. teach students who were performing at or above grade level.
Sadly, most teachers and schools are unable to do this because of the significant portion of students lagging several years behind grade level; that results in remedial teaching and a lower level of education for all.
How did you come up with the approach? The approach was based on common sense. We cannot expect people who are lagging behind to work less and still achieve the same results as those who have worked more in preceding years. Also, we have to make a fundamental decision. Are these boys unintelligent, or is it their environments that are affecting them negatively?
We put together a program which used sports and hip-hop as a carrot and focused on providing homework assistance, extensive mathematics tutoring and surrounded the boys with role models (UC Berkeley male students) as tutors and team leaders.
The program is intense; we work with the boys three times per week for 4 hours in the afternoon and 4-6 hours on Saturdays. One of the keys to the program is our excursions; it is difficult to have vision and dreams when one never has been exposed to something beyond the few blocks of inner-city where one resides.
What have been the most difficult roadblocks? We are encountering road blocks all the time. We are still a startup, though we have proven that black low-income boys can perform well. We now have an average GPA of above 3.0 across all the school sites where we are active.
The most difficult roadblock we encountered was being shut down by the school district because of a perception that we discriminate. We have created a model for the most difficult student population, African American boys from low-income backgrounds, and have proven it works. Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, it is difficult to serve this population since we are unable to select students based on race, gender or other characteristics.
Luckily, thanks to the assistance of one of our Board members, we were able to move beyond this with the school district and are now experiencing them as good partners.
Of course, we are always experiencing challenges of hiring strong team members, retaining and motivating students, working with parents, and many other issues.
Is M3’s approach scaleable? When I started M3, one of the goals was to create a scalable and cost-efficient model. Because these were some of the founding thoughts, we constructed the program around these objectives and are managing to have a cost per student that is significantly lower than other programs working with these types of students. In fact, we have lower costs and better results (in most cases).
We have managed to accomplish this by leveraging the resources we have through partnerships with other organizations and also measuring everything we are doing to ensure we get the results we desire. If we fail to achieve the results, we are able to evaluate our performance from an objective perspective.
This has been difficult to engender since most non-profit organizations are more “touchy-feely”; we want to ensure that we are both empathetic and results oriented.
A personal note from KG. I cannot have this opportunity to speak to all of you without appealing to your generosity.
Since more than 50% of US African American males fail to graduate high school, and 64% of those who drop out end up in the penal system, one of the strongest ways to lower crime is to ensure that these boys receive a good basic education.
The absolute proof is that less than 1% of college educated black males end up in prison while 64% of drop-outs end up there.
Please feel free, whether to fight crime, enhance education or because of racial pride, to donate to M3. Please visit our website; click to donate or send a check to M3 Foundation, 832 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94710
In spite of the importance of Obama’s success in office, there is only so much I can read on a subject before I become jaded. As a result I try to make my sources as objective as possible, which is difficult when the subject is political.
I’m also not a political junkie, so in looking for ‘how’s it going’ information I tend to skip sources with rigid ideologies, since I pretty much know what they will say.
(I must say I find it amusing and satisfying that we finally have a president that both the far right and far left don’t like.)
I did find three articles to share, two short and one longer.
The first is a compendium of opinions from a varied group of Wharton professors, one phrase I really liked was when Obama was termed “short on ideology and long on pragmatism,” an attitude I wish the entire country would adopt. I also found it amusing that he was downgraded for attacking too many major topics at once—healthcare, the economy, two wars—as if he had any choice.
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,
Three great interviews sharing what to do and one commentary on the opposite.
When the economy slows, it’s easy to ignore retention factors because management kids itself into believing that replacing people is no big deal.
What do you talk about in your life?
Yesterday I shared quotes from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos that focused on entrepreneurial topics, especially stock and its price.
I want to share three comments from Jeff Bezos today, because tomorrow’s post is about him.
It’s is a quick read, but really useful; a guest post I did for 
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder 
The first is a 
