On August Max Schireson voluntarily stepped down from his CEO role to become Vice Chairman of MongoDB.

He did it to spend more time with his family.

He wasn’t forced out and no pressure was applied.

Schireson took a hard look at his life and decided that, based on his personal value system, he needed to change it.

It wasn’t bad, just not what he wanted it to be.

My hat is always off to everybody who puts their personal values ahead of the way our society scores the game.

But what about the countless men who would make the same choice if circumstances didn’t prevent it?

The same things that impede women from viably combining aggressive careers with family also impede men—in spades to at least the 10^th power.

The people who want to see their kids grow up; want a relationship with kids and spouse, want choice-sans-repercussions, want to live their values aren’t a minority.

Jack Welch famously stuck his foot in his mouth on this subject.

Five years later the old white guys are still running 75% of the Fortune 500 and many are still saying the same thing—as are too many of the 25% who are neither old, nor white, nor guys.

But what I find truly depressing is the prevalence of old-white-guy MAP in Millennials.

Image credit: Fortune Live Media

I’m starting to appreciate the ethos of Whisper co-founder/CEO Michael Heyward a lot more these days.

What changed my attitude were his comments at the Fortune Brainstorm conference regarding threats, whether violent or suicidal, child abuse/porn and hurtful responses.

“You can’t use the service to hurt other people” (…) The company searches for words and terms that indicate threats, crimes or suicide. And it has human moderators that will pull down abusive, inappropriate material and take further action if it seems necessary. (…) “You’re talking about actual people’s lives. We take that very seriously.”

Unlike Mark Zukerberg at Facebook.

Perhaps Heyward can also find a way to help the women who post about the sexual harassment they endure in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Whisper started with lots of celebrity rumors and still receives thousands of frivolous secrets, but if it stays true to Heyward’s ethics and vision it could play a real role in making the world a little better place to live.

And that is a nice legacy to put on a tombstone.

Join me tomorrow for a look at my personal ethos and what I’d put on my tombstone.

Flickr image credit: Jeffrey

If you were asked what skills are in shortest supply in the workforce you would probably think first about computer and related skills.

While that is correct, some simple soft skills are just as difficult.

This year’s pair of April surveys confirmed that, as in previous years, employers are having trouble finding people with advanced computer and interpersonal skills, punctuality, and reliability.

Think about it.

Problems finding people who understand that they need to

• consistently show up at the agreed upon time; and
• always do what they say they will do.

Not exactly rocket science, but a substantial problem.

The first shows that 36% of businesses in the manufacturing sector that responded to the survey are having moderate difficulty finding workers who are punctual and reliable, while 11% report great difficulty in finding workers with those traits. In the services sector, it’s not as bad — 22% of respondents report moderate difficulty finding punctual, reliable workers, whereas only 3% report great difficulty.

The interpersonal skills are a far more significant concern.

In an age when face-to-face communications is giving way to texting, IMing and email, the ability to work in close proximity with people and not only get along, but bond to create high performing teams, is becoming more and more difficult.

Hard skills, from learning new programming languages or moving from technical work on a financial program to developing mobile apps are learnable, as are all hard skills.

Changing and redirecting the character traits that lead to being punctual and reliable or teaching interpersonal skills to a (probably) uninterested party are most often exercises in frustration.

These are the core reasons why attitude and aptitude are more important than current skills when hiring and a subject we’ll look at in more depth this week.

Image credit: Denise Krebs

Lou Gerstner (IBM) says it best, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”

Dick Clark (Merk), Rex Tillerson (ExxonMobil), Robert Iger (Disney) and Steve Jobs (Pixar) all agree, as do a host of other bosses.

There’s no getting around it—everything comes down to culture.

The millions of dollars spent developing strategy provide no value unless the strategy is implemented.

“I wouldn’t say that their strategies are useless, but if they added a separate ‘people’ process on the strategy process they would be a lot more effective.” That process is execution, which many consultants and academics have largely ignored because it is seen as merely tedious detail.

Culture embodies more than a company’s values; it embodies the company’s ability to execute.

Too many bosses treat building culture also as tedious detail—exciting to visualize and discuss, but procrastinating the hard work required to create and sustain it.

Bosses who ignore the tedious details jeopardize their careers and put their companies at risk.

Flickr image credit: Max Klingensmith

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

Launching an app is all about speed, often because there is so little difference they need to grab users before similar app gains traction.

So, like the construction company that cuts corners and in doing so delivers an unsafe structure, consumer apps are often launched with little regard to security.

“There’s so much focus on acquiring customers and delivering products and services that security is not top of mind.” –Tripp Jones, a partner at August Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

This isn’t an insider’s secret, but one that is well known to both the industry and those who prey on it.

The result is that as an app’s popularity skyrockets, so does its appeal as a hacking target.

Tinder, the popular dating app, last month acknowledged flaws in its software that would let hackers pinpoint the exact locations of people using the service. Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, also said last month that hackers had gained access to customer data, including passwords and phone numbers.

Combined with previous hacks, the Target breach in December may have been the final straw for millions of people who are turning back to cash.

“…debit/credit card and personal data has also been reported stolen from Michael’s, Neiman-Marcus, Sally Beauty Supply and kickstarter.com. Plus, there’s the mother of all “oopses:” An Experian -owned database holding a stunning 200 million consumer records was cracked by a Vietnamese identity theft ring, it was revealed earlier this month.”

If people turning to a preference for cash transactions really is the start of a trend as opposed to a short-term fear reaction startups are especially vulnerable.

Even younger users, who seem to care little about privacy, will react negatively if (when) they are subject to identity theft.

More and more people are coming to understand that “secure site” is more oxymoron than fact.

Data security is much like the real-world infrastructure that politicians rarely fund, because the return in votes is too low.

Much like the bridge that needs to fail before people support the money required to upgrade it, sites need to be hacked before management is willing to focus on security.

Image credit: HikingArtist

How would you respond if you were head of a global professional company with more than 1,400 partners, 18,500 employees and a culture built on values, trust and honor when the values were ignored, trust was broken and the organization dishonored by someone at the highest level?

That was the challenge that Dominic Barton faced shortly after he became head of consulting firm McKinsey.

The values that Marvin Bower, its longtime managing director, instilled included putting the clients’ interests above the firm’s, providing independent advice and keeping confidences. These ideas were imparted from one generation to the next, mentor to apprentice. But after Anil Kumar’s arrest [he pleaded guilty] in late 2009, Mr. Barton, who had been elected to head the firm just months earlier, decided that the honor-driven, values-based system was not enough. What the firm needed was some rules.

Powerful people do not take kindly to rules and nobody takes kindly to rules that result from someone else’s actions—especially when they impact one’s income.

Ethical people like to believe that defining values and modeling them across the organization from the top down is enough.

It’s not.

An exceptional CEO I worked with who detested politics believed it was enough that his senior staff couldn’t use politics to get ahead with him. What he refused to recognize was that even though the political games didn’t work on him they wreaked havoc on those below the game-players.

This is especially true in the current world where greed, whether for wealth and/or power, is epidemic and “enough” no longer has any meaning.

But to work, the rules must apply evenly to everybody, at all levels, including the rule maker.

Flickr image credit: Andrew Scott

I read an interview with Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza and several things stood out that would be useful in hiring and juice your corporate culture.

Juice your culture, because, as you grow, your culture will assimilate and mimic the traits of those you hire.

D’Souza was a diplomatic brat whose family moved every two years. The result was an ingrained learning curve and appreciation for those different from himself.

We learned how to love the world. There’s this great richness of diversity, yet people are far more similar than they are different. You’re not as likely to learn that when you grow up in one town, in one environment, in one culture or in one country.

This applies as well to those who change companies, since every company has its own culture and every manager a subculture.

Culture is a reflection of values, so the trick to good hiring is to know what which values in your own culture are truly critical.

It’s not important if previous cultures were similar to yours; what is important is understanding in which cultures the candidate thrived and how they compared to yours. As discussed Friday, skills and performance are not independent of environment.

The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.

Good cultures foster personal growth, which requires personal awareness and a willingness to recognize what needs to change.

Finally, talent and attitude are far more important than current skills.

And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?

Your team and therefore your culture are stronger when people crave new challenges that not only stretch their current skills, but are outside their comfort zone.

People who aggressively drive to constantly learn, grow and change are only a challenge to management when they aren’t given those opportunities.

When that happens everyone suffers; the individual; the team; the company; and you.

Flickr image credit: ennox_mcdough

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

Ask any recruiter or manager who has been around for awhile and they’ll tell you there is only one guarantee when it comes to talent: supply and demand are always at odds.

The danger is highest for those to whom hiring is newest and founders can be especially vulnerable.

Obviously, founders and others in a startup are excited and high on what they are creating or they wouldn’t be there.

And therein lays the danger.

In the heat of competition from other startups and the excitement of converting the candidate to their vision interviewers forget or avoid asking certain questions.

Worse, if the candidate is super-hot or possesses badly needed skills interviewers often avoid asking anything that might spoil the deal or turn the candidate off.

But it is of little use to hire even extraordinary talent if they don’t stay or bring in someone who will trash the culture and tear the team apart.

Which questions are most often ignored?

The tough questions, which are, by definition, any question to which you don’t want to hear the answer.

Simply stated, tough questions are the ones that bring a negative answer when you want a positive one and vice versa—in effect killing the deal.

Here are some sample tough questions and their potentially deal-killing answers:

• Q: Does the project turn you on?
  A: Not particularly.
• Q: Then why are you here?
  A: I heard I could make a lot of money and get a ton of stock options.
• Q: What do you find attractive about the position?
  A: The perks are awesome.
• Q: Do you like our location?
  A: Well, it’s about an hour from where I live.
• Q: How soon after accepting can you start?
  A: I’m in the middle of a project and would have to finish, and I’d like to take a couple of weeks off—say, about three or four months.

Money questions are often a minefield.

• Q: What kind of compensation package do you want?
  A: Well, I just got a raise, a promotion, and a large stock grant and currently I have six weeks of vacation, and I’d like to improve on that.
• Q: Our salary range goes to $100,000.
  A: Oh, I’m currently making 95 and have a review due in a couple of weeks.

The important thing to keep in mind about tough questions is that if the response kills the deal or raises serious red flags you are better off to know it sooner rather than later, before you spend time crafting an offer or having to contend with a hire who damages the company.

There are other important benefits from asking though questions.

Bringing potential problems out in the open gives you the opportunity to solve them, but first you have to identify them.

Finally, the discussion itself is valuable.

You learn more about a person’s priorities, ethical structure, style, and personality when discussing difficulties and solving them is the beginning of the bond that is the basis for the most productive relationships.

Image credit: HikingArtist

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

Flattery and agreement can be a lethal combination for a CEO, according to research by Sun Hyun Park, James D. Westphal and Ithai Stern.

“Our theory suggests how high levels of flattery and opinion conformity can increase CEOs’ overconfidence in their strategic judgment and leadership capability, which results in biased strategic decision making,”

In the same vein, John O’Farrell, Andreessen Horowitz, says that founder-CEOs need to be especially careful.

“Hire people who are different from you, and who will have the courage to challenge you when it matters.”

The road to failure hell is paved as much with yes-people, which leads to homophily, as with good intentions.

What you want are those who think differently, but have similar values.

Values are the foundation of your culture, not race, creed, gender, university, sorority/fraternity, fashion brand, etc.

Whatever your culture, by using it as a hiring filter you can get out of your comfort zone and stop hiring people like yourself—who are most likely to become yes-people.

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

Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
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.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

Have you heard of Dov Seidman? The man who built and runs a multimillion dollar global company around the idea that the most principled businesses are the most profitable and sustainable.

That’s hard to believe in a world where every day stories bombard us proving over and over that ‘ethical leadership’ has attained the dubious honor of being an oxymoron, whether in business, politics and even in religion.

In a world focused on ‘how much’ and ‘how many’ it’s important to remember that what we choose to measure is an accurate reflection of what we value.

Seidman offers a cogent argument that the more important question is ‘how’, as he discusses in his book, “How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything” and the following video.

Image credit: The MIX