Pardon this semi-rant, but humans are so arrogant.

Tech tech are some of the worst, but fintech, animal tech and food tech, may even be worse.

By word and/or action, the idea that they know best resonates through everything they do.

Banker arrogance, and the products it produced, gave us the 2008 financial meltdown.

Animal breeders gave us pets, with a host of enhanced medical problems, in return for a certain look.

And long before people freaked out over today’s GMO, humans have been doing selective breeding for more than 9000 years.

Boy, did they succeed.

On Sunday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that zookeepers at the Melbourne Zoo are weening some animals off of fruits because they were too sweet for the animals’ own good. Red pandas and primates had been gaining weight, and some had signs of tooth decay as well.

Whole fruits, not juice (aka liquid sugar) are supposed to be healthy for humans, because they are high in fiber, but when the sugar content is increased so drastically do the rules hold? Does the effort our bodies must make to process the fiber truly offset the higher sugar content?

I can’t really answer that, but I do know there aren’t a lot of people who choose veggies over fruit when offered a choice.

Image credit: Michael Tieso

To build a solid culture that will stay true to its values, yet flexible enough to grow with the company you need get past the idea that positional leaders don’t need management skills or that managers don’t lead.

Jim Stroup, who wrote a blog called Managing Leadership, the archives of which contain tremendously useful information on leadership and management for bosses at all levels, used to point out in numerous posts the absurdity of separating the two.

“No one has proven that leadership is different from management, much less that it is a characteristic inherent in individuals independently of the context in which those individuals operate, one that they carry with them from one organization to another and which they then instill into groups otherwise bereft of it.”

A comment left on a 2008 Washington Post column by Steve Pearlstein regarding the leadership failure that led to the economic crisis neatly sums up the problem with defining leaders based on their vision and skill at influencing people to follow them.

“What a great summary of the economic problem. However this was not a lack of leadership. Defining leadership as influencing people to move in a specific direction, the financial and economic elite successfully led the country into the economic disaster. The problem was a lack of management that failed to identify the signs of the pending disaster.”

Honing the skills to only do one or the other well short-changes your people and your company — but it’s how you win.

Being proficient in both leading and managing will

• prevent visions from blindsiding you;
• provide strong motivation;
• increase productivity and creative thinking;
• create an environment in which people are challenged and grow to their true potential;
• ensure a higher level of personal satisfaction; and
• increase your tangible rewards.

And if those 6 results don’t motivate you, the sophistication and mobility of today’s workforce certainly should.

Image credit: Rodney Campbell

Our first view of culture looks at Lehman Brothers, whose corporate death touched off the financial meltdown in September 2008. In case you didn’t see a news article there is a 30 million dollar 2200 page report on what went wrong, but if you don’t feel like tackling that here is a readable review and analysis you’ll find useful.

While Lehman’s huge indebtedness and other mistakes have been well documented, the $30 million study by Anton Valukas, assigned by the bankruptcy court, contains a number of surprises and new insights, several Wharton faculty members say.

Another symbol of the mortgage mess is Freddie Mac, which Charles Haldeman is turning around using the same template he has used in the past.

Haldeman applies the same management principles to any company he joins. “The first day you come in,” he said, “you literally don’t know one person. You’ve got to have a template … some philosophy to bring” that can be applied to an organization and the culture that already exists. Haldeman said his ideal management model has eight necessary ingredients:

• Make integrity and high ethics prerequisites.
• Create a workplace that’s open, direct, candid and honest.
• Make sure employees understand the company mission.
• Develop a business plan that all employees can understand and repeat.
• Communicate the mission and plan constantly.
• Give other people autonomy.
• Enforce teamwork.
• Senior managers must spend time walking around.

Our third view explains why the right culture needs to be in place before collaborative-enabling technology can work—no matter what the under 30 crowd believes.

The tools alone have failed to make the company collaborative. … Are the tools the problem? More likely, the problem is the organization. When tools fail to create value, it’s usually because decision-makers adopt tools before the company’s culture and processes are collaboration-ready.

Finally, a more personal look at culture, because finding your way around a new culture is critical to your long-term success at that company.

Adjusting to an employer’s corporate culture may be the hardest part of starting a new job. In a recent survey by OfficeTeam, nearly one-third (32%) of workers interviewed said acclimating to a new corporate culture poses the greatest challenge when re-entering the workforce after an extended absence.

And it applies whether you have been out of work for awhile, recruited from your current position or joining your first company after school.

Flickr photo credit to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/

I have a stack of books waiting to be read, some I buy and some are sent by publicists for me to review.

Then there is the constantly growing list of books I hear about or see a review and want to read.

But I have only so much reading time and it’s shrinking as we get closer to the launch of our new product (stay tuned).

So I created a new category called Reviews and Recommendations and included MAPping Company Success’ ‘Book Reviews’ and Leadership Turn’s ‘Reading Recommendations’. I hope you find it useful.

Today, I have some interesting recommendations for you.

The first is from Jeffrey Krames, a literary agent who tells the fascinating story of a self-published book that sells for nearly $50 with an unwieldy title that instantly became a top Amazon seller. Whether or not you want to tackle the book you’ll enjoy its story.

Two European authors—Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur—spent years putting together a stunning book on business models entitled BUSINESS MODEL GENERATION. The two authors had a great deal of help with the design and content of the book, as it was  co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries… Within 48 hours the book ranked as high as #74 on Amazon, an amazing feat for most any business book and especially this one. Since then, the two versions of the book have occupied two of the top 25 slots on Amazon’s list of bestselling management books every single day.

After reading dozens of day-by-day articles and commentary on the financial meltdown, none of the myriad of books written about it really grabbed me. However, when I read a review of Henry Paulson’s newly published On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System in Business Week I was intrigued.

What got my attention (and made me ill) was the following quote.

“All were concerned with excessive risk taking in the markets and appalled by the erosion of underwriting standards,” he writes in his penetrating memoir, On the Brink. Yet they felt forced by competitive pressure to make loans they didn’t like, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary says.

“Isn’t there something you can do to order us not to take all of these risks?” was the gist of a question posed by Chuck Prince, who was still running Citigroup as the bank bumbled toward disaster.

This from some of the most powerful business “leaders” in the country.

Image credit: ginnerobot on flickr

Money makes the world go round. It’s one of the main causes of divorce and, right now especially, is on everyone’s mind.

I tend to agree with George Bernard Shaw that “Lack of money is the root of all evil.” That or an insatiable desire for more and more of it.

Way back in 1877, Russell H. Conwell said, “Money is power, & you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it.” The problem these days is that people substitute ‘all out’ for ‘reasonably’.

I don’t know who said the following or if they are just folk wisdom, but they certainly are accurate.

“All I ask is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.”

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

“While money doesn’t buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position.”

I also like Lord Mancroft’s comment, “Money can’t buy friends. But you can afford a better class of enemy.”

But Francis Bacon really hit a homer with his statement, “Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.”

According to Samuel Butler, “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income,” which is a good description of our current situation.

Then, of course, there is Emile Henry Gauvreay’s almost perfect description of the attitude that got many of us where we are today, “I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike.”

If you want to significantly improve your life you should embrace Bacon’s words, while eschewing Gaureay’s.

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One way out…

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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.

Do you know which two words?

But me.

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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!

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There are many lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis, but one of the most important is that we the people should stop following and start leading ourselves.

In other words, we each need to take responsibility for our own actions and think critically about the words and actions of those in positional leadership roles.

In business, we need to rid ourselves of the idea that positional leaders don’t need management skills or that managers don’t lead.

Jim Stroup points out in numerous posts that “No one has proven that leadership is different from management, much less that it is a characteristic inherent in individuals independently of the context in which those individuals operate, one that they carry with them from one organization to another and which they then instill into groups otherwise bereft of it.”

We need to stop defining leaders based on their vision and skill at influencing people to follow them.

A comment left on a Washington Post column by Steve Pearlstein regarding the leadership failure that led to the current economic crisis neatly sums up the problem with that definition.

“What a great summary of the economic problem. However this was not a lack of leadership. Defining leadership as influencing people to move in a specific direction, the financial and economic elite successfully led the country into the economic disaster. The problem was a lack of management that failed to identify the signs of the pending disaster.”

Mike Chitty’s team approach is an unlikely solution since you can’t mandate that whichever [leader or manager] is superior will listen to or act on the ideas of the subordinate, while making them equals is rarely successful.

We need to lead ourselves and stop waiting for someone else to show us how, tell us why or lead our actions. 99% of us know what’s good—not just for ourselves, but for the world.

We especially need to stop

• putting ideology ahead of success;
• avoiding accountability by citing all those whose lead we followed;
• excusing our own unethical behavior on the basis that others do the same thing; or
• believing that [whatever] is OK, because our religion forgives our actions.

Everyone cleaning up their own back yard will alleviate a large part of the problem, and then we can work together for the good of everyone, not just “people like us.”

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Now see what to do about it

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It is the rare leader who leads beyond what is expected of him.Those who do are often labeled as unfit to lead and dismissed.

There are not that many examples of such rare leaders.  General MacArthur was certainly one.  He stood up to President Truman, who was quite happy to play at war in Korea without winning it, which cost many thousands of lives for no real gain.  Gen. MacArthur’s dismissal by the President was a terrible blow to his honorable record of service throughout World War II, an embarrassment to the Army he commanded, and the beginning of an approach to conflict that has plagued us ever since.  But his dismissal was also completely rational, because he was not working to expectations.

Leaders, who wish to keep their jobs, work to satisfy expectations.

Understanding this is critical to our understanding of what has recently happened in the financial and mortgage markets.

The key here is understanding that leaders lead only with the support of their constituency (i.e. stockholders or boards of directors in the case of corporate leaders or voters in the case of politicians).  A leader cannot get away with major strategic direction that his constituency does not approve, such as running full-bore into selling sub-prime mortgages.  This is not a matter of a few rogue leaders who ran ahead of their organizations without oversight or accountability.  Every head of every organization caught with their mortgages down was in that position with the full knowledge and support of his constituency.  That includes Wall Street, banks, and both GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).

Even the criminal actions of overstating balance sheets in order to gain the huge bonuses being offered had to be done with the knowledge and approval of a constituency.  For instance, Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae could not have gotten away with overstating his balance sheet repeatedly to gain the $90 million he earned over 6 years (as the organization was actually failing) without both his board and the Congressional oversight committee assigned to watch his actions approving of it.  In fact, in 2004, when Armando Falcon, the chief regulator who “blew the whistle” on these shenanigans, went before the Congressional oversight committee, he was all but tarred and feathered for his efforts.  No one seemed interested in hearing about anything untoward, because the objective of increasing mortgages to low-income families was being addressed.  End of subject.

Corporate executives also are being whipped for the “outrageous” sums of money they earn, primarily as a reward for pushing stock prices ever higher.  As I have written many times, the tactics they use to accomplish this are more often than not the death-knoll for the long-term success of the organization, but that doesn’t stop the board of directors and stockholders from applauding their efforts.

The problem comes down to, “Who really cares before the damage starts to show?”  Top executives are not stupid.  Neither are politicians (the few years I worked with Washington politicians proved to me that almost all believe they have the best interests of their constituency in mind).  They know exactly where their support comes from and what that constituency wants from them.  Despite all the worries about sub-prime mortgages that were voiced over most of the past decade, no one really cared.

Why?  Because expectations were being met.  The deceit was in hiding the truth from the constituency.  What made the sub-prime fiasco possible was the fact that risk was being “diluted.”  Every time a package of mortgages was sold to investors, the real hidden risks were lost in the mass.  That effectively removed the effect of what would have been the most vocal constituency: those who would have spoken up by keeping their checkbooks closed had they known the real risk.

The only constituency that really knew what was going on in most cases was the one gaining from it.

The same thing is going on in corporations across the country.  Decisions about how companies are being run are coming from the wrong constituency.  The expectations are being driven by boards of directors and stockholders, who care little about the long-term health of the company as long as short-term gains are good enough to increase their personal portfolios.

So, what is the answer?  Can we expect companies to survive and do the job for which they were created, i.e. job and wealth creation for those who invest their time and money into it, when persons with no long-term interest are defining the expectations for corporate executives?  Can we expect government-overseen organizations or programs to have positive long-term effects, if those defining expectations are only interested in narrow outcomes that can create far greater damage but that provide personal gain for them (even if it is only in terms of pandering to the base desires of their constituencies)?

Leaders lead to expectations.  Isn’t it time we started setting expectations that don’t just “use” an organization for personal success and instead start expecting long-term success that builds the organization creating that success?

We are being asked to take a greater personal role in addressing climate change.  Can’t we also take a greater role in demanding corporate responsibility? If not, we may be witnessing the end of the independently-run corporate model in America.

We are delegating far too many decisions that affect us as long as things seem to be “going right” (no matter how obvious the risks are), and then expecting someone else to make things right.  Isn’t now the time for the real constituency to stand up and make its voice known?

We can do it through our investing.  We can do it through our voting and regular conversations with our political representatives.  We can do it in through an unwillingness to let others speak for us, while we sit back and demand that everything go perfectly right for us.

How would you address this without giving even more control to a constituency that would drive the wrong expectations?

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