When I went looking for quotes from P. J. O’Rourke I expected a bonanza considering he is a political satirist, journalist, writer and author. I only found three worth sharing, but those three are excellent.

You certainly don’t have to be a Boomer to relate to the sentiment in this comment.

“I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ”learning experience.” Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ”learning experience.” It makes me feel less stupid.”

All you can say about O’Rourke’s view of blame and responsibility is ‘ain’t it the truth’.

“One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.”

Finally, O’Rourke does a spectacular job of identifying the real source of human travails throughout history.

“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”

As I said, quality is worth more than quantity.

Image credit: Wikimedia

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/

Leadership has become a catchword, a panacea, a supposed solution to whatever ails us as a nation and a world. It is what people get degrees in, strive to be and worry that they are failures if they aren’t recognizes as leaders.

There is a fantasy that positive leadership is an integral trait of positional leaders no matter how many times that has proved to be a false assumption.

Another assumption about positional leaders is their ability to see the big picture; also proven to be untrue. Here are two excellent examples of narrow, short-term thinking—one stupidity that just happened in a small biz and the other from a corporate titan 56 years ago.

The former is another stupidity from Subway, the company best know for $5 foot longs and a bullet-ridden foot. The most recent foot shot happened in Dartmouth, NS when a worker was fired for giving her own lunch to two fellow apartment dwellers after a fire left them homeless (she also offered them lodging in her own apartment which wasn’t damaged in the fire); Quiznos, being more publicity-wise, hired her.

The older stupidity was perpetrated by the original Bell Labs, one of the most prolific research organizations that ever existed, and is a story that has been repeated in one way or another by companies large and small ever since.

Executives recognized that many of those moving up the management ladder lacked the broad thinking skills that would enable them to function as leaders in the future, so they set out to provide an intense program to remedy the situation. The remedy succeeded beyond their expectations in that the attendees learned to thing for themselves and those thoughts didn’t dovetail with the slavish corporate mentality the executives desired the program was shut down, … executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. (I hope you take a moment to read this fascinating story.)

It should be noted that authoritarian leaders, whether of companies or countries, have always known that education and strong positive values are anathema to their continued power.

How do you define leadership?

Join me tomorrow for a look at this question.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/4192572927/

See all mY generation posts here.

The economy is improving a bit, enough that companies are doing some hiring. And, just as in the past, the same idiotic attitude is surfacing.

It starts with a reference to the need for employee engagement and that ‘experts’ say that the companies with the best long-term success rates retain and grow their human resource base from within the company to ensure it.

But when a company fulfills its human resource needs by hiring from the outside, in most cases, it’s picking up the “rejects” from other companies.

And that part sends me ballistic.

Of all the totally wrong-headed attitudes I’ve heard on the subject of hiring, there is only one that is comparable and, in fact, they go hand in hand.

During every recession I’ve seen the theme is that the only employees worth hiring are the ones who are still working.

Even now, in a recession that dwarfs the previous ones and companies have cut 50% or even more of their workforce and are still cutting, those who are laid off are tagged as “dead wood” or “difficult.”

My blood still boils when I remember the excellent people who were completely trashed by that attitude.

I do agree that growing people from within is good company policy; however, there are dozens of reasons why a company not only would, but should, hire at levels other than entry.

• No company can go through significant growth and not hire from the outside—it’s a given part of that growth. For example, most startups and high-growth companies have neither the diversification, nor the depth, of talent needed when growth kicks in, so they hire at all levels.
• Hiring strictly at entry level and promoting only from within can create a hidebound culture steeped in a not-invented-here mentality, not only for products, but for processes—as happened at both IBM and HP.

There are dozens of other reasons (think about your own experience), but the reject and the dead wood attitudes are not among them.

The dead wood/difficult premise is BS, flawed, short-sighted and plain stupid.

The common belief that “stars” are independent of their circumstances just doesn’t stand up to analysis.

Most people work to the quality of their managers and the validity of the company’s culture—if they don’t shine it’s because they aren’t engaged; give people good managers and good culture and they can all be stars.

It is beyond stupid to lay work quality issues at the door of employees with no consideration of management or culture.

Image credit: TheTruthAbout… on flickr

Few things are constant, but management stupidity when it comes to retention is one of them.

Before Wall Street pulled the rug out of under the economy global demographics made the need to cherish workers at all levels obvious.

Estimates of the national shortage run as high as 14 million skilled workers by 2020, according to widely cited projections by the labor economists Anthony P. Carnevale and Donna M. Desrochers.

Then came the downturn and executive retention stupidity is once again running rampant.

Two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers. nearly two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers.

The assumption is often that Gen Yers are the least loyal and most mobile, says Robin Erickson, a manager with Deloitte’s human capital division.

However, a companion survey of employees found that only about 37 percent of Gen Xers said they planned to stay in their current jobs after the recession ends, compared with 44 percent of Gen Yers, 50 percent of baby boomers and 52 percent of senior citizen workers who said the same.

Everyone surveyed worried about job security. Gen X and Gen Y were most likely to complain about pay. But a ”lack of career progress,” was by far the biggest gripe from Gen Xers, with 40 percent giving that as a reason for their restlessness, compared with 30 percent of Gen Yers, 20 percent of baby boomers and 14 percent of senior workers.

Gen Yers, meanwhile, were more likely than the other generations to cite ”lack of challenges in the job” as a reason they would leave, while baby boomers more often chose ”poor employee treatment during the downturn” and a ”lack of trust in leadership.”

Let me spell this out.

The economy will turn around.

The Boomers may stay in the workforce for now, but they will retire.

Gen Y is being held back because of the economy and may never catch up, certainly not fast enough to run American enterprise when the Boomers retire.

That leaves Gen X, which is being ignored.

Stupid attitudes towards employees is nothing new for the folks running companies, but this one is really going to come back and bite not just them, but our country’s competitiveness.

One can only hope that the stupidity is global, so we’re not the only ones dealing with it.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit:  ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr

See all mY generation posts here.

See all mY generation posts here.

Now check out this truly stupid action

Please join me tomorrow for America’s Tragic Shame.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: erix! on flickr

How do you set policy at your company?

In Saturday’s links we have an example of just how badly companies write policy.

“His severance package gave him 6 months salary guaranteed, plus a 3 month extension if he still hadn’t found a job at the end of the 6 months. The culture of the company is such that most people just don’t notify the company when they find a new job, and so end up getting the full 9 months of severance. As a manager, he told people he had to lay off to do this (not report their new job), and his manager told him the same thing. He recently met with a former HR manager who is also now laid off from his former company and she is doing the same thing…not telling and just collecting the extra 3 months. She says it is common practice.”

The numbers are nothing to sneeze at, for an executive at $100K annually that’s 50 thousand dollars; Assuming it’s the same at all levels, a far more junior person, say $40K/yr, its ten grand. Even today that pays the mortgage for several months.

Sure, it’s unethical to take the money, but it’s also appears to be common practice in this company. It’s difficult to believe that the company, in the form or the CFO or someone else in finance, isn’t aware of what’s going on; HR certainly must know, since one of its own is doing it.

Who writes a policy such as this? Maybe HR, but since it involves severance it would be signed off by finance and, depending on the size of the company, the CEO.

So the question becomes WHY? Why would the executive team approve a policy that could cost the company tens of thousands of dollars when it could least afford it?

WHAT were they thinking? Two things come to my mind…

• The board favored a stingy severance package (although six months doesn’t seem stingy) and this was management’s way around that; or
• management is completely asleep at the wheel.

What do you think?

Image credit: MichiganMoves on flickr