If you follow any form of news you know that sexual foible has once again reared its immortal head and laid several leaders low.

This time, one of the high-flyers who fell was a woman.

David Petraeus, retired four-star general and director of the CIA, resigned, while Christopher Kubasik, destined to become Lockheed Martin CEO on January 1, was fired.

Their downfall was to be expected; every guy who has been caught playing around has watched his career sink in the harsh glare of the media spotlight.

The difference is that this time one of the women involved is being treated to that same spotlight.

Up to now Paula Broadwell has had the kind of career that positioned her for a stellar path over the next 25 years.

Her biography on the Penguin Speakers Bureau Web site says that she is a research associate at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She received a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A self-described “soccer mom” and an ironman triathelete…

40 is young to have your career cut short, but the American public is unforgiving when it comes to anything that involves sex—especially true in our wired world.

I’ve always found it amusing to hear it claimed that “a woman wouldn’t [X], they are different.”

I think women are capable of being just as arrogant, just as stupid and just as conniving as any male out there.

The difference lies more in their survival instinct, which has been honed by several thousand years of pure necessity.

So even as the coercion eases the instinct has stayed strong.

Additionally, it’s a numbers game.

There are far more high-profile males than high-profile females, so the number of men who act out and get stupid is significantly greater than the women who do the same thing.

Flickr image credit: Tom Raftery

Today is about resume stupidity by recruiters and management and the resulting lies.

It is about the stupidity of a required set of buzz words that recruiters use to screen candidates.

It is about the stupidity of managers providing that list.

It is about the stupidity of lying—even when the lie is a recommended action.

Recruiters like screening lists because it eliminates the need for a lot of up-front work on their part, i.e., they don’t have to talk to anyone who doesn’t use those words.

Forget the fact that there are many ways to describe something and most people describe their work using the words of their current management.

Way back in the late 1970s I worked with companies that built communications equipment (DTS, ROLM, etc.) and most software managers required experience designing real-time switches for telecom.

I had a fabulous engineer who designed real-time switches for a process equipment maker.

The software manager was furious; ranting on that it wasn’t telecom.

That made no sense to me; it seemed logical that real-time was real-time whether a switch was flipped or a valve was closed.

So I asked him to please explain the difference, so I could understand.

He started to talk and then stopped. There was a long silence and finally he told me to have my guy there for an interview the next day—he was hired on the spot.

It’s not that I was technically knowledgeable, but real-time is real-time made sense and the other didn’t.

The same goes for many “absolute requirements”—degrees, industry, etc.

As to the lies, I guarantee that sooner or later any lie you put on your resume will come back and bite you—even when it is a recruiter who recommends it.

Flickr image credit:  Frank Jania

How much has really changed for entrepreneurial women in the last 50 years?

Not as much as you might think or as much as meritocracy hype might lead you to believe.

In the actual world of advertising in 1966, when the current season [of Mad Men] began, the most talked-about figure on Madison Avenue was the trim and determined Mary Wells, who hopscotched over the era’s endemic prejudices to develop Wells Rich Greene, the iconic agency she would run for more than two decades.

One reason stories like Mary Wells are so startling is that there are so few of them.

Yet even these successful women entrepreneurs are disappointing when you consider that most are in fashion, cosmetics/beauty products, advertising, retail, media, etc.

Although funding a tech company is almost as difficult for women as it always has been they are having more luck getting web startups funded—but  it’s still an uphill battle.

Would you expect anything different when high profile experts in the entrepreneurial community are still making stupid comments more suited to the 1950s.

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. [emphasis added] But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon…Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with. –Paul Graham, prominent investor and co-founder of Y Combinator

Sex is a long way from being out of the picture as Candace Fleming, founder or Crimson Hexagon, learned.

Another potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes.

(And I doubt that he looked like a Chippendale.:)

The point of all this is that women aren’t going to slink back to the kitchen anytime soon.

They will keep overcoming obstacles to have babies.

Some of which will grow up to be IPOs, while others will be entrepreneurs.

(If you are hung up regarding women entrepreneurs next week’s post will show you why your attitude is sure to hang you out to dry.)

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FYI

The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) is conducting a survey that looks at social media regulation within organizations, such as how companies are embracing new platforms as a productivity tool as well as restricting access – or even asking for Facebook passwords.

Participants completing this survey will receive a free copy of the preliminary results, which will be sent to you once all responses are collected and analyzed. Privacy is important to us; your responses will be combined with others, and your personal information will remain confidential.

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

You have every right as a boss to subjectively quantify your people’s efforts, thoughts and attitudes against requirements of which they are clearly and explicitly informed.

You have no right to assign values, such as stupid, wrong, spiteful, etc., to your subjective quantifications.

The first is judging; the second is judgmental.

Do you judge or are you judgmental?

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Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system.  It’s so easy a CEO can do it.

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Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

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The most recent act of executive ultra-stupidity brought down not only Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s CEO, but also Richard Schulze, its founder who was CEO for 40 years and Chairman for ten.

All over what was, according to Dunn and the 29-year-old woman subordinate, a platonic friendship, albeit one with some very tasty perks for the gal.

Schulze is out because he learned about it last December, but didn’t mention it to his board, HR or ethics officer. (Hell of a way to cap 50-plus years of amazing success.)

The report cited the effects of the relationship, including disruption in the workplace, damaged employee morale and perceived favoritism that undermined the employee’s supervisor’s attempts to manage her.

“Further, the C.E.O.’s relationship with this employee led some employees to question senior management’s commitment to company policy and the ethical principles the company champions,” the report said. “During interviews, some employees said that they felt that the rules appeared to apply to every employee except the C.E.O.,” it said.

When will they learn?

When will ‘but me’ be exorcised from executive/management thinking?

When will management learn the importance of walking their talk and that the higher the position the more important that becomes?

Three questions, but just one five-letter answer—never.

Image credit: unkown

Yesterday I said I would share ways to find employees who would be invested in your company and not just in themselves.

The best place to start is to take a look at the stupidest hiring practice I know and why it is so stupid, i.e., only hiring people who are currently working or not off more than six months.

I’ve seen this attitude before during other recessions, but to see it this rampant now, when the economy is still shaky and the job market hasn’t turned around is beyond belief.

As I told the managers who contacted me and I’m telling all of you, I have no empathy for managers who say they can’t find good people.

Pundit managers (those who share their views through articles and blogs) are constantly saying that attitude is more important than skills; add willingness and ability to learn and the value skyrockets and if the candidate is a good cultural fit the value jumps by an order of magnitude.

Manage them well and you will get additional benefits that money can’t buy—gratitude, appreciation and loyalty—all because you gave them a chance.

The wisest engineering vp I ever met once told me that he would rather have a programmer who knew multiple languages than an expert in the one he needed at the moment. He said that technology would keep changing faster and faster and he needed people who could learn on the fly and change with it. He said that a proven ability to change was more valuable than expert status.

When hiring stay focused on the fact that your next top performer won’t necessarily

• have the best grades;
• attend a prestigious school;
• work for your competitor,
• in your industry or
• even be working at all;
• be younger than X;
• have a full head of hair, with no gray; or
• fit easily into your comfort zone.

The bottom line is your success is the result of your ability to recognize jewels where others see only lumps of coal.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

Many of the news reports and stories I read leave me with the same unanswered question, ‘why’?

Why do people with everything do such incredibly stupid things?

Why do they risk losing it all—and often do?

To paraphrase a question, what’s in it for them?

And more importantly, what can be done about it?

Bill George, Professor of Management Practice and Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics at Harvard Business School wrote an article on the subject. Focused on positional leaders in a variety of circumstances it considers “Why Leaders Lose Their Way,” but his solution, while correct, is old and tired. Not to mention that he’s preaching to the choir—those who listen are on the right path already and those who should won’t.

While George’s approach offers nothing new, Dave Balter, founder of BzzAgent, provides a much more compelling story that should provide a wake-up call to anyone who’s ego is on the way to, or has already gotten, out of hand.

Interestingly, there is a ‘why’ on the other side of the coin, too, but it’s one that goes unnoticed, buried in positive actions and the (well earned) praise sung by the media.

I’m referring to the actions of people such as Angelina Jolie, Bono and now, Matt Damon. If you aren’t aware of the role he’s created for himself, read about it. It surpasses by far anything else he’s taken on before.

Image credit:  MykReeve on flickr

On March 25^th I read an article on the newest perk, teaching employees how to start their own company, being used to lure talent; I choked and saved the URL for today’s post.

A few days later I read Bill Taylor’s reaction to the same article at HBR. To say that Taylor, who is a co-founder of Fast Company, is a big booster of entrepreneurial efforts is like saying Google is a modest success, but his reaction was the same as mine.

Rather than rehashing what he said (click and read it) I want to point out why jumping through hoops to hire from a certain tiny percentage of available talent is insanely stupid and tomorrow I’ll offer alternatives.

• Insane because, as Einstein so aptly put it, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
• Stupid because there is a wide range of talent available that would work its butt off for the right reasons.

Why it’s insanely stupid

1. The candidate who joins a company primarily for money, stock or whatever is hot du jour will quickly leave for more money, stock or hotter du jour. In other words, when joining a company is “all about me” there is nothing invested in the company, its values/culture, products or even its success, so when (not if) the going gets rough there’s no vested reason to stay.
2. Many companies and managers hire as much for bragging rights as for need. In other words, do you really need to hire god or will an angel or even a mortal do the job just as well?
3. One manager’s star is another manager’s failure. In other words, past achievement is an indicator, not a guarantee, of future performance.
4. Candidates have definite cultural ideas and needs. In other words, people perform based on how synergistic their cultural and managerial needs are with the same elements in their employer.

(Note: although the focus here is on software development, I’ve seen the same insanely stupid hiring in most fields and industries at one time or another.)

Companion posts,

• Insanely Smart Hiring
• Insanely Smart Retention and Stars

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thewhitestdogalive/3100357559/

I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of the amount of pure stupid going around.

Now it’s Mark Hurd, but he is just the latest in an epidemic of stupid.

I expect stupid from teens, after all, brain science has proved that teen brains are in a process of change and during that time the frontal cortex isn’t functioning.

Dr. Paul Thompson, UCLA School of Medicine: “As you get older, you don’t necessarily get more brain. The outer layer of the brain is actually thinning.”

Dr. Judy Rapaport, NIH: “You end up with a sort of leaner, meaner thinking machine by the time you’re an adult.”

But it seems that many aren’t thinking.

Call it Extreme Makeover: Career Edition and Ty Pennington just screamed, “Let’s do some demo!”

I think the brain research needs to be redone to account for regression after 40.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michiel/4348942883/

See all mY generation posts here.