It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Three and a half years and nothing’s change. Not that I expected it to, but one always hopes. That said, my opinion hasn’t change. The only thing any of the men recently outed as harassers and worse are sorry for is being caught — not for their actions — which will make it harder to do it in the future, although I’m sure they will — people have very short memories

Join me tomorrow for a look at one of the major reasons nothing has changed and is unlikely to in the future.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

The more they stay the some.

Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Both of these go a long way to explaining the unchanging culture that fosters gender harassment in the workplace, most prominently in STEM fields.

…666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors.

Does a woman or minority in a leadership role actually have more ability to help level the playing field? Not hardly…

…when minorities and women behave in a way that calls attention to their race or gender characteristics — i.e. by advancing others like them — it separates them from other white male leaders, causing them to be devalued by their peers.

Schmoozing and small talk are considered lubricant in business negotiations, but they don’t work for women.

Men who engaged in small talk were likely to get positive ratings on questions about trust, overall impressions and solid foundations for a future relationship, (…)  When it came down to final offers, they were willing to give the men who chit-chatted nearly 8% more than they offered women who engaged in small talk.

Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book about startups and the Valley called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. There are exactly four women mentioned in the book and one is his wife.

In the first 90 percent of the book, I counted three females: a human resource staffer, a woman whose husband ran NetLabs, and Horowitz’s wife Felicia, a woman with “award-winning green eyes” whose focus seems to be family and her husband’s success. He doesn’t present a real-life female peer until four pages from the end, when he hires Margit Wennmachers, a marketing guru-turned-venture capitalist whom he dubs “the Babe Ruth of PR” and “Sultan of Swat.”

There are many anecdotal stories from women founders on the varied ways they are hit upon by potential investors, but this one in Forbes is first person sourced.

I met the author several months ago and was floored by the stories she had to tell about her dealings with mostly male investors. Like many men (as she writes), I knew women in tech faced a certain degree of chauvinism and harassment, but I’d had no idea it was so barefaced and routine, in an industry that thinks of itself as egalitarian and forward-looking.

In the real world, however, it seems that traction is the best way to stop investors from hitting on you.

Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass, thinks it’s the fact that her startup has started to gain significant traction and now investors who once had an upper hand actually want a piece of her business. And they don’t want to say or do something that could mess up their chances.

In a 2009 post about repentance I wrote, “Repeating the behavior makes it obvious that there is no real remorse and that you see getting caught as the true offense.”

Or, in the words of Friedich Nietzsche,

“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we may have ‘improved’.”

Flickr image credit: Wesley Fryer

These are heady times for politicians, pundits and strutting egos.

Which makes it a very good time to recall the words of a truly brilliant and insightful man.

“The difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein

I’d add that true genius knows them.

Are you smart? Are you impressed with those considered brilliant?

Do you look for signs of genius in your kids?

Can you really tell at an early age?

Monday was Albert Einstein’s 137^th birthday.

Einstein was nicknamed “der Depperte” — the dopey one — by the family maid, because he was slow to learn to talk.

He couldn’t find a job teaching, so worked in the patent office in Bern, Germany, while he wrote some of his most important papers.

He was still there when he wrote the paper that underlies E=mc2.

He didn’t get an offer to teach for another four years — and almost didn’t accept because of the low salary and his description to a friend isn’t exactly complimentary.

“So, now I too am an official member of the guild of whores.”

Although Einstein’s family knew he was famous that didn’t understand why. His answer when his son asked him offers great insight to his attitude.

“When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved. I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”

Entitlement was neither part of his life nor of his beliefs. He was a socialist and detested and fought the discrimination so rampant in his adopted US homeland.

He lived by his values, expeditious of not, and died by them, too, when he refused treatment (an attitude the “live forever tech crowd” should embrace).

“It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

BI has a great overview of Einstein’s life that is well worth reading.

And after you’ve done so, take a look at how your own values stack up.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Having trouble getting people to do things differently or do something new?

According to Henry Thoreau, “Things don’t change, people do.”

Over the years, I’ve watched managers and companies try to change the outcome without changing the input.

They’ve talked/explained/begged/pleaded/threatened, but nothing changes.

They are suffering from Einstein’s version of insanity.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

If change is the goal, it’s best to start with yourself.

“To change what they do, change how you think.”

You need to change because the way you think, what you think, how you think, and what you believe — in other words your MAP — dictates the authenticity of what you do and the responses you get.

No matter what great ideas you read, hear or talk, no matter what great leader you try and channel, you will always walk your own MAP.

Image credit: Newtown graffiti

The more they stay the some.

Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Both of these go a long way to explaining the unchanging culture that fosters gender harassment in the workplace, most prominently in STEM fields.

…666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors.

Does a woman or minority in a leadership role actually have more ability to help level the playing field? Not hardly…

…when minorities and women behave in a way that calls attention to their race or gender characteristics — i.e. by advancing others like them — it separates them from other white male leaders, causing them to be devalued by their peers.

Schmoozing and small talk are considered lubricant in business negotiations, but they don’t work for women.

Men who engaged in small talk were likely to get positive ratings on questions about trust, overall impressions and solid foundations for a future relationship, (…)  When it came down to final offers, they were willing to give the men who chit-chatted nearly 8% more than they offered women who engaged in small talk.

Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book about startups and the Valley called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. There are exactly four women mentioned in the book and one is his wife.

In the first 90 percent of the book, I counted three females: a human resource staffer, a woman whose husband ran NetLabs, and Horowitz’s wife Felicia, a woman with “award-winning green eyes” whose focus seems to be family and her husband’s success. He doesn’t present a real-life female peer until four pages from the end, when he hires Margit Wennmachers, a marketing guru-turned-venture capitalist whom he dubs “the Babe Ruth of PR” and “Sultan of Swat.”

There are many anecdotal stories from women founders on the varied ways they are hit upon by potential investors, but this one in Forbes is first person sourced.

I met the author several months ago and was floored by the stories she had to tell about her dealings with mostly male investors. Like many men (as she writes), I knew women in tech faced a certain degree of chauvinism and harassment, but I’d had no idea it was so barefaced and routine, in an industry that thinks of itself as egalitarian and forward-looking.

In the real world, however, it seems that traction is the best way to stop investors from hitting on you.

Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass, thinks it’s the fact that her startup has started to gain significant traction and now investors who once had an upper hand actually want a piece of her business. And they don’t want to say or do something that could mess up their chances.

In a 2009 post about repentance I wrote, “Repeating the behavior makes it obvious that there is no real remorse and that you see getting caught as the true offense.”

Or, in the words of Friedich Nietzsche,

“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we may have ‘improved’.”

Flickr image credit: Wesley Fryer

In January, 2008, when I was writing Leadership Turn, I wrote that politicians aren’t leaders.

We have no leaders, let alone statesmen, just ideologues, elected by like-minded ideologues, who care only about getting reelected, bringing government money back to their constituency and making lucrative connections in the event they aren’t reelected or are caught by term limits.

The following month I considered the difference between politicians and statesmen.

Politicians talk it — Statesmen walk it
Politicians run to win — Statesmen run to serve
Politicians are ideologues — Statesmen are open-minded
Politicians, “it’s all about me” — Statesmen, “it’s all about them”
Politicians focus on the next election — Statesmen focus on the future

In 2010 I reprised parts from them in another post about the idiocy of ideology.

Einstein also said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Americans must be insane; we will go to the polls flip the party in charge and expect different results.
Based on the past, what we will get is a different ideology that screws up differently, not better results.

Sadly, nothing much has changed in the intervening years; a notion that will be proved tomorrow.

Please note that much of the interest and value in these posts is found in the comments and discussion they generated.

Flickr image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

A link at SF Gate led me to When You Should Quit Being An Entrepreneur at Business Insider. It’s one of those articles with an interesting premise written by someone with no authority on the subject and little real-world experience. This was mentioned in the comments, which have more value than the article.

The most glaring misstatement was that shutting down your startup equaled failure.

Admitting that you are riding a dead horse does not equal failure.

It’s also stupid to say that a startup fails if it does anything other than go public.

Based on that Zappos was a failure, as are the thousands (millions?) of startups that grow moderately, if at all, but provide a decent living for the entrepreneur, not to mention jobs for others.

And there are those that choose to stay private, such as SAS and its $2.43 billion in sales.

Shutting down a startup doesn’t mean you quit being an entrepreneur; being an entrepreneur is as much a matter of right idea / right time / right place / right circumstances as it is of your MAP.

And entrepreneur is not the same as entrepreneurial, which you can be in any size company, and defaming corporate jobs as of less value and that by working in one you are a failure is pure garbage.

As so many of the comments pointed out, failure only happens when nothing is learned and even that isn’t failure if you consider Einstein’s comment that expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over is insanity, not failure.

In my book the only time you can actually fail is when you are dead and as long as you weren’t the cause you still didn’t fail.

Flickr image credit: taygete05

Daniel Pink offers up some interesting thoughts on why carrots don’t bestow the benefits of employee engagement.

The idea that carrots aren’t the best management approach isn’t new, but he points out something that is often overlooked.

We forget that mastery is something human beings seek because we’re human beings. We like to get better at stuff, because it’s inherently satisfying. That’s why people do recreational sports, why people play musical instruments on the weekend, why people do crafts and things.

However, I do believe that rewards have their purpose, not as the motivation to do something, but as the acknowledgement that it was done well.

If that were not true then all of the various competitions associated with what people do on their own time for pleasure wouldn’t exist.

We humans have a strong tendency to compare what we do with similar things done by others.

We treasure not only the prizes, trophies and ribbons of our more formalized efforts, but also the everyday comments when others recognize how well we do it.

From the outside you may not see much difference between carrots and acknowledgement, but when you are on the receiving end the difference is glaring—and the difference is in the presentation.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.”

Managers who cling to carrots instead of acknowledgements are crazy.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

Several of the links yesterday related to intelligence, smarts and wisdom, so I thought that would be a good topic today, too.

Einstein is considered a genius, but it seems that he had a different view, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson being intelligent or smart isn’t everything, “Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”

Alan Alda adds a dimension to that with his observation regarding being smart, “Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.”

Voltaire said,”Common sense is not so common;” actually, I think it’s rarer than intelligence.

Some people equate intelligence to education and believe that filling one’s mind with book learning is a valid goal, but I tend to align with Plutarch words, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.”

Perhaps it’s the fire that leads E. B. White to believe that “Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”

Throughout history there has been much debate and varying opinions regarding intelligence in the different races, but John Fowles thinking seems to offer the final word, “There are only two races on this planet – the intelligent and the stupid.”

Stock.xchng image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1254880

Mid-term elections are coming up, so I thought I would share some something I wrote a couple of years ago.

In general, I’m not a cynical person, In fact, I’ve always said that I’d rather be a chump than a cynic, but I also believe in two old adages,

(This post generated some interesting comments.)

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.

The first time it’s a mistake, the second time it’s experience and the third time it’s stupidity.

I try very hard to avoid the third time.

But time and experience have taken their toll and my cynicism has increased over the years—especially in politics.

We have no leaders, let alone statesmen, just ideologues, elected by like-minded ideologues, who care only about getting reelected, bringing government money back to their constituency and making lucrative connections in the event they aren’t reelected or are caught by term limits.

In most elections I find myself going to the polls, holding my nose and voting for whomever I see as the least offensive candidate—the one I believe will do the least damage—and maybe even buy us a bit more time to find real solutions.

But I don’t hold my breath.

Solutions mean going against entrenched interests—the same interests that pony up the money needed to win the next election.

And so it goes.

Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Sad to say we’re at the same level that created them—if not lower.

(This post generated some interesting comments.)

Einstein also said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Americans must be insane; we will go to the polls flip the party in charge and expect different results.

Based on the past, what we will get is a different ideology that screws up differently, not better results.

Better results would require real leaders and even a few statesmen if we were lucky, but again, I’m not holding my breath.

What do you think would really make a difference?

Image credit: Atom Smasher