Although these three links are aimed at executives, I think you’ll find what they offer applies to everybody.

First is a Forbes article looks at what some CEOs keep in their office and explains how those items reflect the corporate culture—the premise holds true for managers at all levels and even for non-management.

Next is an interview with Richard Anderson, chief executive of Delta Air Lines. He offers some great career advice along with insightful comments on what he looks for when interviewing. Useful no matter which side of the desk you’re on.

Finally, the HBR Editor’s Blog talks about Myth of the Tireless Leader. The post has several links that illustrate and prove that lack of sleep does not yield smart actions, intelligent decisions or innovation. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Who knows, maybe after reading it you’ll stop bragging about how little sleep you need and get the rest required to be truly productive.

Image credit: MykReeve on flickr

Why Can’t We Figure Out How to Select Leaders? was the question asked by Harvard’s Jim Heskett at the beginning of February.

It’s a pertinent question right now, since for more than a decade many of the people held up as examples of great leadership have fallen on their faces and even ended up in jail. Worse still, the companies they ran were destroyed or badly damaged—short term Wall Street numbers were met at the cost of long-term innovation and sustainability.

The Forum drew 88 comments that Heskett says fall in three categories,

• enumerating the qualities that we should look for in a leader without suggesting how we identify and select for them;
• the body of knowledge based on research and practice that can guide and improve the selection process and its outcomes; and
• why theory has had less impact on results than we might expect, essentially identifying reasons for a gap between theory and results achieved in practice.

Two quotes I found very pertinent from the original article,

“At most companies, people spend 2 percent of their time recruiting and 75 percent managing their recruiting mistakes.” — Richard Fairbank, CEO, Capital One

This is so true it’s depressing. I started my company to teach better hiring skills; it was funded by a retired CEO who believed that hiring was a manager’s most crucial task and that few managers were very good at it—boom or bust there was little interest. (Going forward, the information was folded into our overall coaching program.)

“There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired.” –Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers)

Also true. It’s the difference of asking customers what they want and conceiving a product that no one mentioned because it didn’t exist—think iPod. There are no questions to tell you if a candidate can see around corners.

Even hiring a person who has done it before doesn’t mean they can do it again; there are just too many variables in any given situation.

How could you have hired someone to deal with the current crisis when it was unimaginable just a few short months ago.

Perhaps it’s time for companies to stop looking for guarantees, perfection or a savior—no candidate walks on water.

I believe what is needed is to spread leadership throughout the company and avoid hiring imperial egos. What do you think?

I hope you’ll take the time to read both Heskett’s article (short) and comments (interesting and valuable) and then leave your thoughts here.

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A slightly odd combination today, but one I hope will prove of use to you.

A thought-provoking commentary from Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School and Andy Zelleke, co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, discussing why a cap on CEO pay will have little to no affect of the rampant greed so pervasive these days in the corporate suite.

This CNET post last year regarding the legal implications of employee blogging is a must read. Granted it’s not an in-depth study, but it does give you a heads up on some of the concerns and legal implications.

Here’s an interesting item for those of you in companies of 50 or less employees. I’m a long way from knowledgeable so you need to talk to your experts, but I do know that insurance is a very tough road for small companies, especially in the current economy.

“Section 125 plans let companies and their workers pay for health insurance premiums with pretax dollars. Businesses and employees save 7.65% in FICA and Medicare tax, and workers save on taxes by lowering their taxable income.”

Image credit: flickr

I only received one response to my query last week and it was positive, so here again are three food-for-thought links. I wouldn’t want you to run out of stuff to do this weekend.

First up is a post from Denis, who starred in my post, A Follower Leads. Denis is a senior software developer who says he isn’t a great follower, but he’s not a manager and doesn’t seem to see what he does as ‘leading’. The other day he wrote about Group Coherence/Common Purpose—one of the best explanation/discussion I’ve seen on the topic. I think Denis a leader, what do you think?

Next is from HBS Conversation Starter, a favorite source of mine, not so much for the posts as for the responses from readers (which are the whole point). This one is by Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., who offers up what he considers the ultimate interview question—“After you have narrowed the pool of applicants down to those with the skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job, ask each candidate one question: What do you do in your spare time?” I hope that if you join the conversation, you repost your comment here.

Last, but not least, is a link to yet another Harvard offering. It’s the abstract of a paper called Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions. It discusses how “Neuroscience reveals what distorts a leader’s judgment. Here’s how you can keep your own judgment clear.” The teaser is interesting, but you’ll have to decide for yourself whether to buy the entire paper.

OK, that should keep you busy for an hour or so. Have fun the rest of the time!

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I found a great quote on JD Prickett’s blog by Harvard’s Roland Barth.

“Show me a school whose inhabitants constantly examine the school’s culture and work to transform it into one hospitable to sustained human learning, and I’ll show you students who graduate with both the capacity and the heart for lifelong learning.”

I agree passionately that the school’s culture is the basis for its accomplishments and that the principal’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) is the source, whether active, passive or by benign neglect.

Unfortunately, the culture described above is constrained, distorted or totally destroyed by education policy—Dallas Independent School District is a great example of how truly bad policy can destroy learning.

Prickett, a school administrator (not in Dallas) hit the nail on the head when commenting on the pressure to produce good test-takers he said “the price of short-term success is long-term failure.”

No Child Left Behind, test performance-based funding and similar idiocies over the years have focused education directly on short-term results.

And that sounds like any number of banks, auto companies, insurance carriers and other corporate entities whose short-term thinking and drive for quarterly results left them constrained, distorted and totally destroyed.

Short-term thinking and quick profits of any kind are incapable of breeding long-term success in business or education.

Too bad. It’s solid K-12 education and life long learning that truly fuels our economy, underlies our democracy and makes for a strong, engaged populace.

Of course, the full effect of actions such as DISD’s are a long-term function that won’t be felt until long after the members of local, state and federal legislators are out of office leaving a mess significantly worse than the current economic debacle.

Even when Congress does do something it’s often botched. They’re rushing out a $150 billion education aid package spread over two years and more than doubling the current DOE budget. A flash flood of money that will be hard to manage and too much is bound to be wasted.

And, of course, there’s the ideological fight as opposed to whether it will work.

“Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.””

True, but maybe the federal government’s role does need to change, especially in mandating expensive requirements—No Child Left Behind, multiple security measures—and leaving the States to find ways to pay for them or be penalized; an action similar to a company mandating doubling the number of new products in development with no increases in budget or head count (yes, that’s been done many times).

When did ‘decade’ and ‘long-term’ become dirty words?

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I love it! I just read a great article called Leadership Malpractice. Not by the media or some external pundit, but by Harvard Public Leadership Lecturer Barbara Kellerman, author of Bad Leadership and Followership.

What a terrific idea. Kellerman says that since “leadership is increasingly considered a profession,” so leaders should be subject to the same punishments as other professionals, such as doctors and lawyers.

Doesn’t that sound like an idea whose time has come?

Kellerman points out that business leaders are appointed; “in the first nine months of this year a record 1,132 CEOs quit or were shown the door” due to poor corporate performance, a few are behind bars, but even truly rotten performance carried no serious consequences, in fact, “most left with their financial futures handsomely secured.”

“No insignificant number of top executives have been culpable of negligence, failures that caused injury to others. To take only a few glaring examples, top executives at A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, or for that matter at General Motors, all failed abysmally to protect employees and stockholders alike.”

Leadership has become a profession in and of itself.

“It is taught in professional schools, in schools of government and public administration, and in nearly all business schools. There are countless books on how to exercise good leadership, and countless courses and seminars, both in and out of the academy, in which leadership is taught. It’s time then to apply to leadership the same standard that we apply to other professions. Similarly, when this standard is not met, even minimally, it’s time to hold leaders accountable by suing them for malpractice.”

Once someone is on the ‘leadership track’ they move forward with amazing speed—and less and less scrutiny the higher they go. When they foul up, they are often eased out, rather than being fired—an action that would make the person who hired/promoted them look bad.

By the time they’re appointed to the corner office they are practically untouchable; with few exceptions this applies to the entire C suite. Oh, they can be fired, and they often are, but that rarely impacts their career.

There is much talk of accountability, but most is empty.

Perhaps leadership malpractice would finally bring some serious accountability to the guys out front—the same guys whose monster egos and Teflon finishes keep them walking away unscathed.

What do you think?

PS: Here’s your chance to nominate the best and the worst for Business Week’s Managers of the Year.

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Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: hellolapomme

Yesterday’s NYT Bits wondered who is the smarter of two Harvard dropouts, Bill Gates of Microsoft or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Neither bothered attending class, but Gates caught up “in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term.”

Zuckerberg was to busy with Facebook to even do that. “So in an inspired last-minute save, he built a Web site with all of the important paintings and room for annotation. He then sent an e-mail to the students taking the class offering it up as a community resource. In a half an hour, the perfect study guide had self-assembled on the Web.”

Sorry, what Zuckerberg may not have been de facto cheating, but I certainly wouldn’t term it ethical. At lease Gates did the reading himself.

These two men, and other’s like them, are the role models for today’s students. I know, most people think it’s no big deal and a lot of them are very impressed.

I’m not.

No matter how successful they’ve become, they’re attitudes seem to belittle school, essentially saying that it’s OK to not do the schoolwork and pass in any manner you can.

Great examples to set for our future business leaders.

As to the media hype regarding entrepreneurs who start businesses in their dorm rooms, sure, there are a few that make it big. But the great majority of companies are started by seasoned business people and the most successful have advanced degrees.

Am I just a dinosaur, out of touch with acceptable behavior? What do you think?

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