I rarely write about politics, but it’s that time of year; I live on the border between two states and have to listen to political ads from both. So please, if this post offends you accept my apologies and wield your delete key.

My feelings are driven by the smugness I see across the political spectrum irregardless of parties and beliefs.

Smugness regarding the rarity of corruption in the US vs. its prevalence in other countries.

The way I see it, corruption in the US is rare primarily because it’s been legalized in the form of lobbying and PACs.

Lobbying has long influenced legislation, but as of 2010, when the Supreme Court effectively eliminated restrictions on outside groups, elections themselves went up for sale.

If you doubt me look no farther than the Americans for Prosperity, owned and run by the Koch brothers, which will spend at least $125 million this year, and the growth of super PACs overall.

In 2000, outside groups spent $52 million on campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, that number had increased to $1 billion. (…) In 2014, as of early October, when the campaigns

had yet to do their big final pushes, overall spending was already more than $444 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Roughly $231 million was from the parties and their congressional committees, the rest from outside spending. The biggest chunk of that by far came from super PACs — more than $196 million.

What each of these wealthy individuals have in common is passion, but unbridled passion is the hallmark of the fanatic—and fanaticism paves the road to a closed mind—one that is evidenced by fear, hate and bigotry.

Legal corruption or not, voting is important—if for no other reason than not voting precludes your right to complain.

Or, as my mom used to say when faced with two bad choices, just “hold your nose” and vote against X as opposed to for Y.

And you can avoid the corruption by ignoring ads, whether pro or con, and evaluating candidates and issues in a holistic and pragmatic way that looks at what makes the most long-term sense.

Flickr image credit: DonkeyHotey

Since it was first announced, iPad commercials have shown kids using them and millions of parents took to them to keep their kids entertained.

One major exception was Steve Jobs, the guru of consumer technology (his kids read hardcopy books).

“They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Jobs wasn’t alone.

Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends.

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, Alex Constantinople, the chief executive of the OutCast Agency, Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium and Lesley Gold, founder and chief executive of the SutherlandGold Group all limit or say no to technology for their kids.

“That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” –Chris Anderson

Limited or outright banned, technology is handled differently by those in tech when it comes to their kids.

Although some non-tech parents I know give smartphones to children as young as 8, many who work in tech wait until their child is 14. While these teenagers can make calls and text, they are not given a data plan until 16. But there is one rule that is universal among the tech parents I polled.

“This is rule No. 1: There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever,” Mr. Anderson said.

In the light of new research, barring electronic screens from the bedroom has taken on new urgency and not just for kids.

The blue light from personal electronic devices has also been linked to serious physical and mental health problems.

(My sister’s doctor warned her months ago, but it took the article to make her stop.)

What the tech world sees is no different from what other people see on the news, but they pay more attention.

Not that any of this will change the ads or overall marketing of tech—it will keep targeting kids—hook them early they’re yours for life—and encouraging people of all ages to use their screens when it’s dark.

So much for the vaunted tech values of authenticity and transparency.

Actually, taking a step back, tech’s attitude seems more in tune with politicians’ attitude—more of a do as I say, not as I do approach.

Flickr image credit: Ernest McGray, Jr.

Today’s message is simple and should come as no surprise: people are more attuned to what you do than what you say.

Following is an excerpt from a reader who is a middle manager in the health care industry.

“Things have been going pretty well in my world. But boy the bigger my organization gets the less personal it gets. Twice in the last few months I’ve e-mailed the concerns of my employees to higher ups and gotten back the message almost verbatim – “if they aren’t happy, perhaps this isn’t the best fit for them” – with no actually reference made to the concern I brought up.

Another Radiology Manager in the system is leaving because she kept hearing that at her manager meetings too and got sick of it.

Yet some of our evaluation points are about our “work family” and treating each other with respect, etc. and taking initiative. To me it appears we put the right thing down on paper and have an unspoken different approach all together on how to treat employees.”

The problem isn’t one of bigger = impersonal, nor is it exclusive to healthcare or large organizations.

The problem is either

• bad management, using “we are so busy” as a cover for “don’t bother us;” or
• hypocrisy, as in “do as I say, not as I do.”

Which is it?

Bad attitude or hypocrisy?

Does it matter?

Whatever the reason ignoring the problem yields the same result: increased turnover with associated costs, impaired efficiency as new people hit the learning curve and a likely drop in customer satisfaction.

Flickr image credit: carterse

As I promised last week, today is a “tour of Mencken’s irreverent view of politics and democracy that will provide great zingers for holiday get-togethers and leave you chuckling.”

Let’s start with democracy, since everyone seems to agree that it’s a good thing. Of course, definitions vary and Mencken offers some great choices in case you haven’t settled on one.

I’ll start with a basic definition and get more sarcastic from there, Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Mencken didn’t think much of “the people” and my guess is no county was excepted from this scathing comment, Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Hand-in-glove with that thought is this one, Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

He also said, Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. Not only worship, but elect; we jackasses keep electing jackals—party be damned.

Of course, you can’t expect a lot more when Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Finally, Mencken sums up his attitude towards democracy thusly, I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Now on to the politics and politicians.

Again, we’ll start with a definition, A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

He also said, A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. It’s hard to disagree with that comment, too.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that politicians of all stripes say anything to get elected; it’s nothing new, Mencken noticed it, too, If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

2012 is a presidential election year and the show has already begun, A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

Let’s end with one final definition along with the reason for it. Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

And the reason? Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Image credit: Wikipedia

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

The dichotomy between what founders think/say and what they actually do never ceases to amaze me.

I’m not referring to the ‘malice aforethought’ type hypocrites who know damn well that their actions contradict their words, but

• believe no one will notice, AKA, they won’t be caught;
• provide abundant excuses when they are; or
• offer rationalizations to prove why “this time it’s different.”

I’m referring to the inadvertent ones who are totally clueless.

I see this a lot in founders who are so totally focused on short term product development that they ignore or delegate the stuff that will make or break their company down the road.

Culture and business planning, especially staffing plans, are two items that founders often kick to the side or delegate; and while I’m all for delegation some stuff just shouldn’t be.

Culture is the values of the company made visible for all to see. Can you really delegate that with a few notes on a napkin and instructions to a harried colleague?

Founders know that strong financials are necessary if they want funding, but other planning functions, such as staffing plans, often don’t seem as critical, so they are delegated or, worse, procrastinated.

The toll these inadvertent actions take can be huge and often far enough in the future that their actual origins are lost.

This “stuff” can break your social contract.

Do you make time for this stuff?

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My apologies if there has been too much politics lately, but you have to admit it’s difficult to avoid when so much of it is tied to “leadership” issues.

Or the lack thereof.

I rarely read op-ed pieces, but the title caught my, Awful, Awfuler, Awfulest; wouldn’t you click on that?

The author, Gail Collins, had written an article debating which state had the worst “leaders” running for election and chose Nevada as the winner.

Immediately, there were outcries from voters who believed their state had been unfairly overlooked on the dreadfulness meter.

Maine has a candidate for governor whose wife and kids live in their “primary residence” in Florida (the the other house is in Maine); Missouri has honors as the state with the least variety, 26 different candidates since 1980 from just two families; Florida has the dubious honor of a gubernatorial candidate whose company was fined $1.7 billion for fraudulent Medicare billing.

She says that in Net York’s race one candidate seems to tie every issue to his opponent’s sex life, while the main opponent doesn’t talk at all and a minor one is a self-proclaimed madam.

Nevada still won and you’ll have to click the link to learn why. (Hint: One of the candidates claims that Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Texas (a ghost town) are governed under Sharia, which is Islamic law.)  And take a moment to read some of the 229 comments for more hilarious examples and observations.

Why do we continue to accept acts from those in public service that we would condemn in other circumstances?

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/1807572441/

Anyone who knows me knows that hypocrisy and fanaticism are tied for first place on my list of things-that-I-detest.

Political, religious and business hypocrisy continue to make headlines; rarely do I find myself laughing, but this time I did.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the undisputed king of monopolistic uncompetitive practices is boo-hooing to both US and European regulators that Google has an unfair advantage in search.

Ballmer said Microsoft believes Google Inc. has done a number of things to gain an unfair advantage in the Internet’s lucrative search advertising market. He didn’t specify the alleged misconduct.

I am not alone in considering this totally ludicrous. And it’s not what Google does or does not do, but that Ballmer has the audacity to complain in the wake of Microsoft’s own track record.

And therein lays the real problem.

The idea that if ‘they’ do it it’s unfair, immoral, or illegal, but if we do it it’s OK.

We saw it in the arguments of torture being acceptable on the detainees at Gitmo.

We see it in the political and religious leaders who preach high moral codes while practicing immorality.

We see it in business leaders who preach ethics and practice them only as long as it’s convenient.

We see it in parents who demand better education and then condemn any teacher that doesn’t give their child a good grade.

We see it in colleagues whom we complain of slacking only to do something similar ourselves.

We see it in friends who share our private information even as we share someone else’s.

To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the hypocrite and he is us.”

Image credit: Kain Kalju on flickr

Hypocrisy has had a high profile on my blog this summer, especially as it relates to the emerging attitudes of young people.

One of the current hypocrisy poster boys is Senator John Ensign, who really drove home what is acceptable and not acceptable in the prevailing attitudes of those who claim the moral high ground.

The Senator, who roundly condemned then-President Clinton’s sexual peccadillo and subsequent lying to a grand jury, said, “I haven’t done anything legally wrong.” (My emphasis.)

Which mean that if Clinton had admitted screwing around with Monica Lewinsky it would have made it a “distraction” (Ensign’s term for what he did.) as opposed to the felony created by lying.

Ensign is prominent member of the Promise Keepers leadership, which lists seven basic tenets, the third being, “A Promise Keeper is committed to practicing spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity” and the fourth, “A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and Biblical values.”

Ensign violated both and compounded the violations by having his parents pay off his mistress.

These don’t count, since Promise Keepers isn’t a legal entity and, obviously, lying to your followers and constituency isn’t illegal—just unethical and immoral.

What kids will absorb is that there are no real repercussions; Ensign still holds his Congressional seat, will probably win reelection, hasn’t changed his role in Promise Keepers, and is still cheered when he gives a speech. And if reporters dare to raise additional questions, his response is “I’ve said everything I was going to say about that.”

We may ring our hands and lament the lack of accountability of society in general and the Millennials in particular, but we don’t have to look very far to find the cause.

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Last Thursday the John Ensign (US Senator) scandal triggered a post about the hypocrisy kids see these days in so-called leaders; not their lies, but their over the top do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitudes and actions.

In response, Dan Erwin commented that rather than standards, i.e., set rules, he preferred to teach his kids about covenants, because “Legalism, in all its forms, is really death-giving stuff. I go back to covenant…covenants get renegotiated.”

By definition, a covenant is “an agreement, usually formal, between two or more persons to do or not do something specified.”

But Ensign’s hypocrisy was pushed off the hot seat by the same day when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was caught in an affair.

While I think Ensign’s worst hypocrisy ties to his position in Promise Keepers, it pales in comparison to Sanford’s when you consider his historical stances.

I agree with Dan’s covenant approach because I’ve always believed that humans and absolutes aren’t a working or winning combination.

But to renegotiate a covenant, whether with a spouse or constituency, requires at least a modicum of rationality and Sanford’s own words put that in question.

Over a 20-year period, ”There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn’t have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line.”

Shades of President Clinton, whom Sanford roundly condemned during the same period.

Those times “took place during trips outside the country to ”blow off steam” with male friends.”

All the while preaching and campaigning based on a “family values” persona.

“…he would die ”knowing that I had met my soul mate.”

Isn’t that what his wife is supposed to be?

”I owe it too much to my boys and to the last 20 years with Jenny to not try this larger walk of faith.”

Owe it to what? The last 20 years of lies? Can you find anything rational in this statement?

Out of curiosity I did a completely unscientific poll of young people I know ranging in age from mid teens to mid twenties.

Much to some of their parents surprise they were fairly well informed on the subject.

None seemed either shocked or surprised and most said that the bad part was the stupidity of getting caught.

They said they saw getting caught as the real error in most of the stuff about which they’d read or heard during their lives.

And that is what’s truly sad.

While the destruction and disillusionment caused by leaders such as Madoff, Skilling, Sanford and all their act-alikes is terrible, the level of cynicism bred by this kind of hypocrisy is the truly tragic damage being done to our future.

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(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)

Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.

Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.

But you know what?

I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want to admit, it just adds another layer to the lie.

As Becky Robinson pointed out in her comment I could have just as easily used the Evangelical community—Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Jim Bakker, Lonnie Latham, Earl Paulk, Paul Crouch, Douglas Goodman, Frank Houston, etc., etc., etc. and, of course, the Catholic Church.

Dan Erwin made two very salient points.

In his first comment he said, “If you reframe the context from leader to bureaucrat, then the ethical expectations change.”

Amen, Dan. To assume that an elected official or any person-out-front automatically possesses all the sterling qualities of a “leader” as defined by the media, pundits and leadership industry has no basis in fact.

The second point that hit me was, “The notion of “standards” etc. is often a set-up for failure.”

This is getting closer to what angers me so much.

Not the sex, not the lies, but the standards.

Standards that they defined, preached and worked so hard to shove down everyone’s throat—standards that not one of them has even come close to practicing.

Mark Sanford voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment citing a need for “moral legitimacy” as his reason. Now he cites the Bible and the story of David and Bathsheba as his reason for not resigning.

As to the apologies, are they for the action or for getting caught? Americans are so focused on the sex and accept the apologies so readily that the hypocrisy becomes mere background noise.

It’s the Richard Nixon mentality all over again. As Nixon said in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,”

The reigning slogan these days for too many “leaders” seems to be “do as I say, not as I do,” which both angers and confuses their followers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dan also said, “No question but what they’re hypocrites…of the worst kind. They made claims they didn’t follow through on. However, the issue parents (and grandparents, too) have to deal with is the education of your children.”

We’ll explore Dan’s thoughts and personal example of this in the next Leadership’s Future on Thursday. Please join us.

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