In today’s world those classed as truly wealthy are also considered leaders.

I have a politically moderate friend who believes that how people spend their money is no one’s business but their own. I used to feel that way, but the growing concentration of wealth is changing my mind.

What are the responsibilities of wealth? Is there a “line in the sand” beyond which spending on “I want” becomes immoral?

Possibly Meg Whitman’s spending $140 million to become governor of California can be defended (although personally I don’t see how), but Mukesh Ambani’s new home in Mumbai has to have crossed the line.

…cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens…estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet.

60,000 square feet for a family of five is ‘humbler’?

The extravagance of the ultra-wealthy is increasing no matter the political system and these are the leaders that young people seek to emulate.

What do you think? What should be expected of a leader? Would you draw a line? If so, where?

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhariani/4801125226/

An article Monday asked, “Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?“

(Scary reading for managers for years to come if the parental attitudes that produced the examples continue.)

It was a comment at the end by Mark Bauerlein, author of the best-selling book The Dumbest Generation and a professor at Emory University, that prompted this post.

“A healthy society is healthy only if it has some degree of tension between older and younger generations. It’s up to us old folks to remind teenagers: ‘The world didn’t begin on your 13th birthday!’ And it’s good for kids to resent that and to argue back. We want to criticize and provoke them. It’s not healthy for the older generation to say, ‘Kids are kids, they’ll grow up.’

“They won’t grow up unless you do your job by knocking down their hubris.”

‘Hubris’ is defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.”

Reading the article made me think about the level of hubris in today’s world, which seems far more widespread than at other times in history—from the financial executives who toppled the global economy to workers who insist on doing it their way to all those who believe ‘my way or the highway’ is a good life/world-view.

What is missing are the healthy counter voices that knock down the hubris.

That knock down isn’t accomplished through

• rhetoric;
• replacing one version of hubris with another;
• agreeing because it’s less effort or to avoid making waves; or
• turning a blind eye when the pig says, “All animals are created equal only some are more equal than others.”

Hubris is knocked down with active voices, common sense and personal consequences for violating an ideology-free common good.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/relevanceinadnauseum/4385225951/

Yesterday was my birthday and it was lovely. I did nothing useful or productive all day, just enjoyed puttering and reading, and then was taken to dinner. As I said, lovely; and I sure wasn’t going to spoil the day with a patch of creative writing.

But a hilarious post at Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership about Big Ed Whiteacre’s magic mirror reminded me of something I wrote last year that compliments it perfectly.

Be sure to read Wally’s post; I’ve included mine below.

Power, Arrogance and MAP

I recently questioned whether, in fact, the imperial CEO is indeed dead as many are saying.

Wednesday Dan McCarthy was inspired to write 10 Ways to Avoid the Arrogance of Power after reading The Arrogance of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Business School. Pfeffer says,

“The higher you go in an organization, the more those around you are going to tell you that you are right. The higher reaches of organizations–which includes government, too, in case you slept through the past eight years–are largely absent of critical thought. … There is also evidence, including some wonderful studies by business school professor Don Hambrick at Penn State, that shows the corroding effects of ego. Leaders filled with hubris are more likely to overpay for acquisitions and engage in other risky strategies. Leaders ought to cultivate humility.” He ends by advising not to hold your breath waiting for this to change.”

I think much of Dan’s advice is good, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for the advice to be taken.

I think that power corrupts those susceptible to it, not all those who have it; there are enough examples of powerful people who didn’t succumb to keep me convinced.

Susceptibility is woven in MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and is especially prevalent in today’s society of mememememememe with its sense of entitlement.

Changing MAP and stopping drinking are similar, since the individual has to choose to change. All the horses and all the men can’t convince the king to change—that only happens from the inside out.

Moreover, as I’ve frequently said, MAP is sneaky; it will pretend to change and then revert to its normal pattern when no one’s looking.

We, the people, can’t force them to change, but we can learn to sustain our attention span and keep looking.

Image credit: Svadilfari on flickr and Jim Frazier on flickr

The Hart Research Associates poll showed that top executives are even more disliked than politicians. … The vast majority of potential jurors see corporate CEOs as greedy and willing to break the law.” —LA Times, 11/10/09

It’s a sad day when business leaders are lower on the trust pole than politicians. Actually, I didn’t think any group could be rated lower than politicians.

The saddest part is that the great majority of men and women running small, medium and even large companies don’t lie, cheat or steal; they aren’t particularly greedy and they don’t break the law.

The problem is that many of those who do fit the profile, and there are plenty, run high profile companies in the same or related industry—think financial services and autos to name two glaring examples.

I think part of what’s going on is the spread of the lemming mentality.

You see it a lot in the venture world. During the internet boom no matter how good your business plan if it wasn’t .com you could pretty much forget getting funded. These days the magic markets are green/clean tech, healthcare and mobile anything. In other words, if one jumps off a cliff all the rest will follow.

I have a friend who says that the more expensive the suit the lower his initial trust level; I might agree except that I’m sure that the folks wearing them are aware of the prejudice. Therefore, I have to believe that they are either arrogant enough to believe we are all dumb/disinterested/ignorant not to notice or they just don’t give a damn.

The real question in all this is what are we going to do about it?

Are we going to wring our collective hands, tar all business with the same brush, lament the mentality that drives our distrust and then let it all sink back into the muck when the economy turns around—out of sight, out of mind?

Or are we going to get active, demand better accountability, force business leaders to toe an ethical line and avoid our normal memory loss?

Image credit: powerbooktrance on flickr

Seems that every day thre’s another news item about a boss who has gone astray in some way.

The bosses who got us into our current economic mess over the last few decades did so because of their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

MAP that kept telling them that they were so brilliant that they knew best; the majority of people bought into that vision—until the house of cards crashed and burned.

But as a wise man said, you can learn from everyone.

When I was growing up I had an aunt with whom I didn’t see eye to eye, to say the least. Yet, it was because of this aunt that I learned something that became a cornerstone of my MAP.

My aunt had a glass topped dressing table and, like many women of that era, she would place inspirational clippings and notes under the glass. That’s where I first saw

Profit from the mistakes of others—you don’t have time to make them all yourself.

As much sense as it makes, even back then, it’s been one of the hardest for me to follow. I seem to profit well from small and medium mistakes, but have an unhappy tendency to make the really large ones myself.

The same can be said for many of our business, financial and political ‘leaders’—not to mention ourselves.

This isn’t the first economic crisis brought about in the name of profit and maximizing shareholder investment, just the worst in a long time.

As I read the news a line from the sixties hit “Where have all the flowers gone…” keeps repeating in my mind—“when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?”

Image credit: mikekorn on sxc.hu

Today I have two offerings about money and those who have it and one sanity update.

Let’s start with the sanity. A couple of months ago I asked if women really were less risk-prone and cited a woman=led startup that was planning on doing geo-thermal drilling in the worst earthquake zone in the country; apparently that project has been delayed.

Next, in case you missed it, is the newest listing of the Top 10 for CEO pay. I couldn’t decide between the two versions, CNN and the NY Times, so here are links to both; each has slightly different peripheral content.

Finally, for 30 years the rich have been getting richer. Think about it, in 1977 the top one ten-thousandth of households took home 0.9 percent of the nation’s income; three short decades later it took home 6 percent, but what’s happening now? Will it bounce back and continue? This analysis offers good information and doesn’t require a degree in economics to understand.

Image credit: MykReeve on flickr

Do you get the feeling that corporate management has gone to hell? That those in positions of power, the folks whose visions we’re supposed to follow, are all crooks?

I have a friend who feels this way, but I don’t.

There are thousands of companies in the US and the majority are led by solid, caring managers who really do their best to do it right. Sure, some do it better than others and some are downright inept, but they aren’t crooks or scam artists.

So where did all the guys in the headlines come from? We know many of them have been around for years or even decades, but few noticed and most didn’t care.

What happened?

I think that the tiny percentage in the news these days are the guys who are 98% bad, but who’ve been previously covered by the other 2% that is comprised of luck, brilliance, or blindness in the peanut gallery.

And of those three saving graces, two are cosmic jokes, but responsibility for the third rests squarely on us—because we went along with it.

Image credit: sxc.hu

Jeffrey Krames, author of Inside Drucker’s Brain, wrote a great piece detailing why the imperial CEO is dead—or should be. (Hat tip to ManagingLeadership for the link to this post.)

Krames quotes Sungard’s CEO, Chris Conde, “The CEO is like a conductor—he conducts and orchestrates a system. It is very arrogant to think you can make better decisions than the thousands of people below you. The role of the boss is to make a handful of decisions that cannot be made by anyone else and to maintain the collaboration systems. I really think the rise of these collaborative systems is redefining organizational structures and the role of the CEO; they are the last nail in the coffin of the imperial CEO.” and goes on to detail the advantages of collaboration.

All of which I heartily agree with.

The problem is that the imperial ego isn’t dead, it’s not only alive and well, it’s still kicking butt instead of having its butt kicked.

As I said Tuesday, we’re a long way from ending the sense of entitlement felt by so many executives and worse, executives-to-be.

It’s a NIMBY kind of problem. People understand logically that doing to the new generation that which was done to them isn’t really payback and that it should stop, but feel that it should stop after them.

Survival-forced collaboration may diminish the imperial CEO power, but I doubt it will go far in changing either their MAP or their sense of entitlement.

There will still (always?) be a percentage that believes they deserve giant compensation packages and that they could make a better decision/choice if they just had time. They won’t rush to empower their people and will be dragged kicking and screaming in to the collaborative future.

And just because the guy four levels down is making profitable decisions for the company doesn’t mean he’ll get a ride on the imperial jet any time soon.

Image credit: flickr

Now check out my vision of the future

Image credit: flickr