Minding Gaps

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

Regular readers with a good memory have requested that we rerun this essay on The Masters, golf, and other bad metaphors for business. We are only too happy to oblige.

TJL                

 

by Thomas J. Lee

This week the best golfers in the world converge on Augusta, Georgia, to compete in The Masters. It is a special event in sports. You need not be a golfer—I myself haven't swung a driver in 23 years—indeed, you need not even enjoy sports to find special beauty in the magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas of the Augusta National Golf Course and in the glorious traditions of The Masters.

There's just one problem with major golf tournaments and with golf in general. They give license to so many executives to use this wonderful game as a metaphor, absurd though it is, for business performance.

Sooner or later almost every manager will find himself in a town-hall meeting or a skip-level luncheon or an after-dinner speech when a senior executive—his own boss, perhaps—begins to wax eloquent on golf as the perfect comparison for business. Maybe the speaker will even step away from the lectern and pretend to size up that 20-foot putt for a birdie on the 18th hole, and then go on to expound on the parallels between golf and business. That's what we mean by using golf as a metaphor for business.

By metaphor we are not referring to clichés, which are another problem altogether. A cliché is just an overused and typically tin-sounding word or phrase that has lost whatever zest it once had. Business is full of clichés, too: walking the talk, win-win solution, thinking outside the box, synergy, paradigm shift, pushing the envelope, today's highly competitive marketplace, proactive, a perfect storm, leverage—and we're just getting started. There are hundreds of them, Lord help us all.

In contrast, metaphors can be good or bad. A metaphor (and its like-as cousin, the simile) is a comparison for the sake of shedding light on something. A well-chosen metaphor can be terrific for a speech or presentation. Executives who use golf as a metaphor for business success are trying to be creative, and that is fine. We like creativity.

Some common metaphors in business work well. Low-hanging fruit refers to easy, early solutions. A well-oiled machine suggests an operation running smoothly. Tip of the iceberg conjures up a superficial observation. These metaphors lack something in freshness and creativity, but they make up for it in clarity and color.

Golf, however, is a perfectly awful metaphor in business. It is awful because there are no real parallels between performance in business and performance in golf. What matters in business has nothing to do with what matters in golf. Looking for parallels between business and golf is like looking for similarities between mollusks and molecules. 

I do realize that millions of people enjoy golf, and that is certainly their privilege. They may think of it as a social sport because they golf in twosomes and foursomes, and afterward they enjoy lunch or drinks and dinner. Moreover, many parents (including my own) have taken delight in teaching their children to golf, and it becomes a wonderful family activity. All good.

But the sport of golf is a solitary enterprise. It requires intense concentration, hushed silence, and perfect form, and it is so very leisurely. It isn't noisy or messy, and it certainly isn't fast. It does not require collaboration or innovation or engagement or teamwork or agility or communication of any sort—all of which are essential components of business success. Conducting an orchestra comes closer to running a business than golf ever can. For that matter, a Saturday night jazz quartet is more like a business than a Saturday morning foursome is.

Another bad metaphor is "human capital." Companies commonly refer to the people who work for them as human capital. Please.

I understand the different kinds of capital: economic, physical, intellectual, social. But something repugnant, thoroughly repugnant, happens when we juxtapose the words "human" and "capital."

Substitute the word "chattel" for the word "capital" and you begin to see it. Then take another small step to "indentured servitude" and—well, you can see where I am going with this. As every youngster in the United States learns in school, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were supposed to put an end to thinking of people as capital. It's about time business caught up.

Similarly, many companies think they are saying something good and decent and noble when they tout employees as "our most important asset."

I am all in favor of declaring that people are important, but they are not and never can be an asset. An asset is something you own and control. No business owns its people, and when a company thinks it can control people, it is in for a rude surprise.

The fact is that any employee can quit and go to work for the competition any day of the week. A machine or a forklift or a trademark cannot do that. They are assets. People are people. People have legs and pride and souls, and they can walk across the street to take a job with your competitor. Sometimes they do, too.

One other metaphor, so innocent and even noble in its intent, is actually problematic as well. It is likening the people of a business to a family. "We're just like a family around here," too many CEOs are in the habit of saying.

This metaphor has the same issue as golf has: It just isn't true. An office or a factory may feel like a family because you spend so much time with the same people, and perhaps everyone even has everyone else's back. That is fine as far as it goes, but sooner or later the similarities end.

Here's the bucket of ice water: Families are forever. Companies are not. Families thrive on love and devotion. Companies thrive on revenue and income.

It is true that divorce can ruin a family just as bankruptcy can ruin a business. But companies must make tough but honorable decisions that can have devastating repercussions for some employees. Families make tough but honorable decisions so they can stay together, laugh together, love together. The two are not and cannot be the same.

I probably sound like a curmudgeon today, and that is not my intent. I applaud anyone who struggles with articulating a vision or values or the essence of a workplace. It isn't easy, I know.

But all four of these metaphors are bad because they are emphatically untrue or because they inadvertently undermine the dignity of people or because they promise something they cannot always deliver. With just a little more thought, you can do better.

So enjoy The Masters this week. Enjoy as much golf as you can this summer. Just don't think of this wonderful sport as a metaphor for anything in business, especially performance and success. And the next time someone uses one of those other metaphors, give him a link to this blog.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Side Roads} Climbing Mount Rainier in the Middle of Night

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as explained on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; took you along on an African safari; shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; looked at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears; and described a classic Midwestern snowstorm.

Today we recall my ascent of Mount Rainier, a 14,411-foot volcano in the Cascade Range just south of Seattle, in the middle of night ten years ago this summer. (For the record, I am no longer climbing mountains.) Mount Rainier is the fifth-highest mountain and the single most-strenuous climb in the lower 48 states. Though stopping a little short of the summit, I still regard the climb as successful for lots of good reasons. Here’s the whole story.

Mount Rainier      

by Thomas J. Lee

The first goal of any mountain climber is just to come back alive. That is especially true for tenderfoots like me on a heavily glaciated peak like Mount Rainier. So anyone who returns from climbing Rainier has already achieved his primary goal. If that’s a little simplistic, it’s also as real as a heartbeat; some climbers don't make it back.

There are two kinds of amateur mountain climbers. I call them the “reachers” and the “searchers.” For some climbers, reaching the peak is everything. The destination is all that counts, and they are determined to get there. For others, the journey matters more; the adventure and thrill are paramount. I was always proud to be a searcher.

All along, summiting this 14,411-foot volcano was secondary to the experience and to the knowledge and insight I was searching for. I took away profound lessons for my life, a grasp of nature's incredible power and beauty, terrific memories to last forever, and lots of deep, soulful satisfaction.

True, it all came at a cost: nasty scratches and hockey-puck bruises, feet full of blisters, a high-altitude sunburn, grime that wouldn’t wash away, legs that couldn't climb stairs, and a body that ached so completely and so severely that I constantly had a jar of Advil within reach. Worse yet, I was registered to run the Chicago Marathon a couple of months later, and running was out of the question for a couple of weeks.

I actually made it farther up the mountain than I had hoped, and I am convinced that we would have made it all the way if we had departed high base camp according to our plan, preferably by 1 a.m. and certainly by 1:30 a.m. at the very latest. Instead, my team finally embarked at 2:45 a.m., which was much too late (thanks to our guide, who chose this occasion for some extra winks).

The beauty we saw was phenomenal. Even from the elevation I reached, we were looking down at Little Tahoma (the state’s third-highest peak, visible to the far left in the photograph above), Mount Adams (the second), the ash-gray and hollowed Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker (the fourth) and, in Oregon, Mount Hood and the Three Sisters. The mountain snow was glaringly white but the glaciers were pockmarked with granular pumice. The air was thin, and the sunlight was almost painfully brilliant. We wore SPF30 sunblock on any exposed flesh and even inside our nostrils. People without sunglasses have actually burned their retinas.

After a day of training, we had set out in the morning and reached high base camp, at 10,100 feet, by 5 p.m. It was already a grueling climb with 35-pound packs on our back. Camp Muir turned out to be nothing more elaborate than a tarpaper shack with sheets of plywood on which we could stretch out our sleeping bags. But by the time we got there, it looked like an antebellum mansion. We enjoyed a marvelous one-course dinner consisting of all the hot water you could want.

Each climber carried his own pre-packaged heat-and-eat food like oatmeal and soup, along with plenty of Gatorade and candy bars. Stretching out on the hard plywood felt wonderful after climbing all day.

Our party consisted of 24 climbers and six professional guides, a couple of whom had done Everest. It was a group of overachievers. Among the climbers were four physicians, an attorney and his two grown kids, several executives, a Harvard grad student from Israel, an accountant, a magazine publisher, a couple of college students, a high-tech entrepreneur, a small businessman, a Microsoft programmer from India, a honeymooning couple, a manager, and I. There were 19 men and five women. From the main base (5,400 feet) to high base camp we hiked all together, through montane meadows and up rocky bluffs and finally onto year-round snowfields (different from glaciers inasmuch as snowfields don’t move).

After reaching Camp Muir, we had time for dinner and then bunked down for some ersatz sleep with blindfolds and earplugs. By 7:15 p.m., it was quiet. Everyone was tired. We dozed lightly until being awakened at 1 a.m.

That seems early but it was really too late, and we didn’t set out for a final attempt on the summit until much later. It's a strenuous, 11- or 12-hour hike just from Camp Muir to the summit and back. Thus, setting out at 2:45 a.m. means that you don’t return to high base camp until mid-afternoon, after the sun has had six or seven hours to bake the front of glaciers. That creates a serious hazard of avalanche, especially in late summer.

Just three days earlier a huge wall of ice (probably the size of an eight-story building) had come crashing down over the main trail across the Cowlitz Glacier, one of 26 glaciers that so gloriously drape Mount Rainier's summit. We would normally have followed that very trail. Because of the debris, we detoured around it; and from a high precipice we could survey the truck-size blocks of ice now littering the trail. Anyone in the way would surely have been killed by these colossal snowballs.

The night sky was bright with a million stars when we embarked from high base camp. We were roped together with carabiners in teams of four, each team three or four minutes apart and headed by a professional guide, as we traversed glaciers and climbed through ridges of rocks and
scree in the darkness. We all wore crampons and helmets with headlamps. Within each team we were usually about 10-12 feet apart from one another, but in especially dangerous spots we were “short roped” to about three or four feet. That way, if one of us fell, he would have no momentum to carry down the others.

To compensate for the late start from Camp Muir, my guide wanted to hike double-time up the mountain. I could do that for a few hours, but at my age and at such a high altitude, I just couldn't keep it up even with all my physical training. (On registering for the climb, everyone is advised to be in the best shape of their life and to train rigorously for months beforehand. I was and I did, but hey, there’s only so much a guy can do.) I also determined that, at least for someone like me, to continue on would be to court more danger than I wished. In that situation, a single misstep could be fatal. Better to be humbled and alive than to be proud and dead, I figured. Finally, after climbing steep inclines for four or five hours through the nighttime cold and a face-scraping wind, I had to confront my own limits.

We were atop a steep, rocky ridge known appropriately as Disappointment Cleaver when a couple of us (the Microsoft guy and I) chose to hunker down and watch the sun rise slowly on the mountain's eastern flank. Though the summertime temperature was 20 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind was gusting to 40-45 mph, it was phenomenally pretty, unlike any other dawn I have ever seen: first a scarlet eyelash, then a brilliant splash of magenta across the horizon for more than an hour.

Later a few more climbers came down the slope in retreat. We roped ourselves together, found our sunglasses and goggles, and began the slow trudge back down to high base camp in the light of day. Only then did we realize how close—just three or four feet, really—we had hiked in the darkness past glacial crevasses so deep we couldn't see their bottom even in daylight. The glaciers that we had crossed were massive (several miles in length and 300-500 feet thick) and repeatedly fractured with crevasses, some of the cracks just inches across but others wide enough to swallow a city block of houses. It was incredible.

Back at Camp Muir, we met up with others who had retreated earlier. All of us waited for the return of those who had soldiered on. After regrouping, it took several more hours of steep, knee-buckling descent (in double-time again!) to get back down to the main base camp.

By then, we could scarcely stand and couldn't walk another step. Our feet were covered with blisters. Our shoulders felt like stone. We were all in serious pain. But we were thrilled that we had tried, and we knew that we were forever changed by the experience. We were also profoundly grateful; two other climbers died in high-altitude falls nearby the previous week, so our own blessings were real indeed.

What did I learn from it? Well, things little and big.

At the very least I learned how to use an ice axe to stop sliding for miles down and off a mountain, whether on my face or on my back, and whether feet first or head first. I learned how to walk in crampons across a glacier and up a wall of ice or fragile, old igneous rock. I learned that volcanoes are covered with pumice that stings your face in the wind. I learned how to breathe at high altitude (frequently and fully expel the carbon dioxide from your lungs). I learned the importance of carrying as light a load as possible up a mountain; every pound, every ounce, counts for far more. I learned just how big a volcano can be and just how deep a crevasse can rive its glaciers. I learned the joy of eating cold pizza for breakfast and consuming a dozen candy bars a day while still losing five or 10 pounds. I learned that I really don't enjoy wearing a beard, and so it's gone already after only a couple of weeks.

I also learned some things that other people learn earlier in life. I learned to be much more careful than I have been, for each step I take through life may be my last, figuratively and literally. I learned that a timely start spares haste. I learned to cherish the moment, to see more in life than I have seen in the past. I learned that things around us may be vastly greater than we, but that we are no small creatures either. I learned that respecting both the fragility and the power of nature is a real and a vital paradox. I learned that reliance on oneself and on one's team is the same thing, for all of us must do both; we must respect both the individual and the team. I learned to go slow, one little step after another, ever upward. I learned to see compelling beauty in self-fulfillment and in the satisfaction of a challenge well met. I learned that we have more courage and strength in our being than we know but, for me anyway, it will be found only for the searching, never for the wishing.

The following quotation, attributed to the legendary Swiss mountaineer Edward Whymper in 1871, was posted inside the door of that tarpaper shack at Camp Muir: "Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end."

Indeed. Indeed.

 

Coming Next Week

The Work Product of Leadership

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Of Champions and Leaders

Two years ago in this space we waxed eloquent on the amazing final holes of the British Open. Any weekend duffer who has ever pretended to hear the roar of the gallery while approaching the 18th green will recall the thrill that ageless Tom Watson, then 59 years old, gave us that July weekend in 2009. Here is what we wrote:

by Thomas J. Lee

If love like youth is wasted on the young, as Sammy Cahn wrote, so perhaps is sport. Yes, everyone savors the thrill of victory. Yes, everyone feels the sting of defeat. But only the properly aged among us can bask in the warmth of an ever-flickering candle of one more time, just one more time.

For anyone of a certain age or better, watching 59-year-old Tom Watson on the final holes and then in the playoff of the British Open at Turnberry, Scotland, today was to indulge in a little reverie.

Watson had earned his first Open championship in 1975, years before some of the other professional golfers of today were born. But here he was again, where he wasn’t supposed to be. Hadn’t he graduated to the senior tour a decade ago?

In the end, Watson squandered a one-stroke lead on the 72nd hole to end the four rounds in a two-way tie. Then, in a four-hole playoff, he drove into the rough and finally lost to Stewart Cink.

The victor is a relatively unheralded American, but he is no youngster himself. Winning his first major championship today at the age of 36, Cink is already three years older than Watson was when he won the last of his eight majors, 26 years ago.

Nevertheless, the story of the day belonged to Watson, still in the hunt after all these years.

“It would have been a helluva story,” Watson said afterward. “It would have been a helluva story, but it wasn’t to be.”

The spectacle took me back to a triathlon in St. Petersburg, Florida, several years ago. I was competing in the 40-something age group. Having swum a mile in Tampa Bay and ridden the 25-mile bike course through the streets of old St. Pete, I was running strong only a couple of miles from the finish line.

My legs still felt fine, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience when a pretty young woman, probably half my age, pulled up alongside me. For a few minutes, our banter made me feel as if I were in my 20s again.

Then she casually remarked, “You know, when my dad gets to be your age, I sure hope he is in your shape.”

Her well-intended words were like a brick wall in my path. Could I actually be older than her dad?

Nah. You don't think, do you? Suddenly I felt like walking, or crawling.

My legs slowed. I felt weak. Keeping the same pace we’d both been running a few seconds earlier, she sprinted ahead.

Age, it now seems to me, is permission to reflect and appreciate in ways we couldn’t, or just didn’t, when we were rushing headlong into life. Tom Watson seems to know that intuitively.

Reflecting aloud today in the clubhouse after the last hole, he asked himself what impressions or insights he would take away from the week’s experience. He thought a moment and answered: “A lot of warmth, a lot of spirituality.” It was scarcely the answer of a brash young man.

The ageless golfer is a gentleman who knows what it means to be a gentleman. He has always let his integrity do the heavy lifting of inspiration.

No one should forget his courageous decision in 1990 to resign from a Kansas City country club after it refused membership to a Jewish couple. He explained his reasoning only privately, but when the club reversed its policy, he rejoined immediately and publicly. There was no loud grandstanding, and yet there was no mistaking the message.

Stewart Cink won the British Open today, and my hat is off to him. He deserves to be congratulated. But in my book Tom Watson is the real champion. Thank you, Mr. Watson, for a marvelous weekend of golf, and thank you for the splendid example you continue to give to us all.

 

*     *     *

Two years later, Tom Watson, now 61, is competing in the British Open again this weekend, and as of today he is only nine strokes off the lead at Royal St. George in Kent, England. [He would finish the tournament eleven strokes off. The winner was 42-year-old Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland.]

Of equal note, Watson was coincidentally paired with his namesake, Tom Lewis, a 20-year-old amateur whose parents so loved golf and so respected Watson they named their newborn son after the golfing legend. Imagine the thrill it must be for the youngster to be sharing the fairways with him.

Some things get better with age, and Mr. Watson is one of them. 

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Holy Kaw! Minding Gaps Is Now On Alltop.com!

 

I am thrilled to announce that Guy "Holy Kaw!" Kawasaki—best-selling author, Apple's original evangelist, and co-founder of the Alltop aggregator—has just added Minding Gaps to the Alltop blogroll.

Alltop readers can now access this blog under the Leadership tab or by searching for Minding Gaps from the Alltop home page.

Holy Kaw is right!

—TJL                       

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Six Months Ago It Wasn't So Hot Outdoors

As much of the United States broils under the mid-summer sun, we thought we would bring you a refreshing break.

Here is a link to our observations of six months ago, when it wasn't so warm outdoors. The occasion was one of the Midwest's worst blizzards ever.

Stay cool, and enjoy.

A Vision of Parades and Fireworks

 

After the thirteen colonies declared independence from the British crown 235 years ago, the American patriot John Adams wrote to his beloved Abigail back in Massachusetts:

“I am apt to believe [the anniversary of the declaration] will be celebrated by succeeding generations . . . with pomp and parade; with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations; from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forever more.”

Now that, we can all agree, was an extraordinary leadership vision.

 

 

Today is the Fourth of July, the official anniversary of the declaration and the quintessential American holiday. Lo these many years later, we continue to celebrate our independence with parades, flags, cookouts, and of course fireworks.

Lest you ever wonder whether a vividly articulated vision is worth the effort, look skyward after dusk tonight, and see for yourself.

Celebrate exuberantly but safely today, and enjoy a glorious Fourth of July.

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Irony of Seeing and Believing

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

My Dad, a Humble Profile in Leadership

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

A year ago this weekend, the Chicago Tribune published my Father's Day tribute to my late dad. We reprise it today.

 —TJL                         

by Thomas J. Lee

A fellow blogger posed an interesting question online, in anticipation of Father's Day. He asked: What kind of leader was your father?

I had to think a moment. My dad, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 93, was a wonderful man. But probably most people did not regard him as a leader. He wasn't an elected official. Nor was he a high-powered executive. Nor was he active in politics or community affairs.

Yet leadership is not only for the powerful and the prominent. Millions of people offer profoundly inspirational leadership in their everyday lives. So it was with my father. He lived a life of humility, decency, authenticity, and commitment.

Naturally outgoing and happy, he exercised quiet self-control even in the face of considerable adversity. He didn't lose his temper. He didn't curse or cheat or lie. He didn't gamble or drink to excess. He hated war, but he went, and his unit liberated Dachau. In 75 years of driving a car he never had an accident, not even a fender bender. He never even got a traffic ticket. In short, he was a rock, always there when it counted.

Most important, he knew how to love, and he did. The late Ann Landers, who could tell us a thing or two about families, often wrote that the greatest gift a father can give to his children is to love their mother completely, deeply, and unconditionally.

My four brothers and I were the beneficiaries of just such a gift. For more than six decades, probably from the moment he first noticed her at another soldier's wedding in Chicago, my dad loved my mom, and he let it show. He loved her completely. He loved her deeply, and he loved her unconditionally.

I have a particularly warm memory, framed like an old faded photograph in my mind's eye. When I was 10 or 12, I would wander into the kitchen before dinner, only to find my dad and my mom in a bear hug of an embrace while potatoes simmered on the stove.

Such a warm sense of security washed over me. Some of my friends had parents who yelled at each other. Others had parents who brooded in silence. Not I. Not my brothers. We had a security blanket up over our shoulders and snug under our chins. We had the luxury of never, ever worrying.

My dad always loved my mom, and my mom always loved my dad, and that's the way it was. It was just that simple and it was just that wonderful and it was always just that way.

Only a few weeks before my mother died in 2004, I visited the two of them in their apartment in Florida. What I witnessed on that visit was like a scene out of an old black-and-white movie starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson or Donna Reed.

My mother sat at the kitchen table, her days so very numbered, and yet with a smile of calm, divine peace across her face, as my dad, a gifted tenor who had once aspired to the operatic stage, sang love song after love song to her. He must have sung for an hour, maybe two, and he sang from his heart. He sang: "Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't love nobody but me." My mother died a happy woman, for she was loved.

Most of all, I remember Dad as a man who worked hard, who made the most of what he had, who lived his life with passion for his art as well as for his wife, who humbled himself and honored others, who recognized duty, and who devoted himself to the things that matter, which is to say, to the people around him.

Will you abide one last anecdote? It is from the day I learned to swim. I tell it because it says so much about the man my father was.

There was to be a kind of commencement exercise at the old YMCA pool in my hometown. All the kids would swim the length of the pool, and then, one by one, we were to be called up by name and given a certificate.

Now it's odd what we remember from our childhood. Of that day, I remember a feeling of anxiety, knowing that my mother was home with my little brothers, and my dad was at work.

Back then, Dad always had to work on Saturday mornings. So the other kids would have families in the gallery cheering them on. But not I. I was on my own. That would be okay. I could handle it. I would be fine. I would just buck it up.

So one by one, in alphabetical order, the instructor called the names of all the swimmers. I remember hearing the instructor call out Ade, and Bobby, and Mike, and Steve. And one by one, each of them walked over to get his certificate as the gallery erupted in cheers.

The closer the instructor got to my name, the more alone I felt. I braced myself for a little polite applause from the other parents. The instructor called my name. I got up, walked over, and reached out for my certificate.

Sure enough, the applause was polite. But just then a voice rang out from the gallery, loud and clear and echoing around the pool: "Way to go, Tommy!"

I looked up. It was my dad. Somehow, he had got off work, and he had made it over to the YMCA to watch me get that certificate.

Ever since, whenever I have needed some encouragement, I have harked back to those few words, and I have picked up the pace and tried a little harder. My dad's voice is never far away. He is my cheerleader, even now, after he is gone.

By my measure, this is certainly the stuff of leadership. My dad was an ordinary, everyday hero. His achievement in life wasn't winning an election or getting a big promotion or living in a fancy house. Rather, it was leading a fine, long life and filling it with honor and love.

And so now, for another Father's Day without him, it's my turn, and I just hope he can hear me: "Way to go, Dad! Way to go!

 

Coming on Monday

 The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

Welcome, Mister Mayor

 

I note with more than a tinge of pride that Chicago's former mayor, Richard M. Daley, has chosen my alma mater, the Harris School of Public Policy at The University of Chicago, as his first commitment after leaving City Hall.

Hizunah will offer ten lectures each year for the next five years.

As the academic home of 85 Nobel laureates, The University of Chicago is often regarded as airy and rarefied. It is that, but it has long had its feet planted firmly on the ground of Chicago's neighborhoods and its heart in the bosom of Chicago's business and political elite. 

Since graduating more than 20 years ago, I have maintained a close relationship with the Harris School as a mentor to graduate students. It truly keeps me thinking young.

Perhaps we can enlist the former mayor to join us. After all, a certain former U of C law professor and his wife each served as Harris School mentors before moving to Washington, D.C. The mayor would be a splendid mentor indeed. 

Welcome, Professor Mayor!

— TJL                

 

Coming on Wednesday

When Straight Talk Backfires

Coming on Friday

Ten Strategies for Talking Straight

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Is a Meme, Anyway? And Why Should Leaders Care?

by Thomas J. Lee

Yesterday I was going through a cardboard box of old clippings, which I was saving for a very important but (ahem) very forgotten reason, when I came across an 11-year-old Wall Street Journal article headlined "The Words of Tomorrow." It offered definitions for words and phrases that we would need to survive in the 21st Century.

Some of these words and phrases have rapidly come into common use in the decade since: identity theft, time suck, and Frankenfood. Others were near misses: blosphere, for what we now refer to as the blogosphere. Still others deserve wider usage, such as voice novel, for an endless voice-mail message, and 404, for clueless (from the Internet error message). Of course, the article could make no mention of words or phrases that were yet to be coined—app, smart phone, or social media—that would become part of our vernacular with lightning speed.

One entry caught my eye. It is a word I see with irritating frequency online, usually on sites devoted to technology and media—but only online. I have never seen the word in print—on paper, that is—other than in this Wall Street Journal list. Apparently that is because I never read Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which is now on my Kindle wish list, and which introduced the word to readers who apparently saw no particular need to adopt and use it. Thirty-five years later, maybe they still don't.

The irritating word is memes, which the Journal's glossary defined as "building blocks of culture, similar to genes but passed on by imitation, not heredity." The Journal cited examples of memes such as "tunes, ideas, catch phrases." A meme may be technology (a way of building arches, for example) or a belief (in life after death, for example), or any other concept, preference, habit, or what have you—in other words, it is anything that can be copied from one person's mind to another's person's.

For a long time, whenever I came across this word online I winced. Though short and arguably useful, it struck me as pretentious and obnoxious. Maybe that's because it was never accompanied by a brief definition. It was just there, an ugly verbal scar. I didn't quite understand it, and I saw no need to try.

I have gotten over that, and I now do see some use for this word. Not that I will begin using it—especially without defining it—but I do think it can be useful in certain contexts, one of which is gaining insight into leadership.

For anyone interested in the management and leadership of large organizations, applying the concept of memes to leadership helps us understand the importance of leadership development up, down, and across an organization.

Altogether too many people, many of them managers and leaders themselves, are walking around with an outdated meme of leadership. They think of leadership as the sole responsibility of executive-level administration, and conversely they see management as the province of middle tiers and front-line supervision. This coarse distinction shows up even in the pages of the Harvard Business Review.

The outdated meme creates two problems. First, it tends to remove senior management from the gritty, day-to-day reality of the company. Not that all senior managers become remote, but many of them do. Second, it absolves the middle and lower tiers of a company's administration from active responsibility for change, for they are likely to see themselves not as engines of change but as mere cogs on the gears.

A newer and better meme of leadership is to think of it not in terms of a hierarchy or a pecking order at all, but rather as work—as responsibilities, as tasks, and especially as communication. The rival responsibilities of leadership and management leverage each other, but they are fundamentally different.

In this meme, the work of management is all about ensuring steady, reliable, consistent performance. A manager who is managing well is ensuring the performance of a team to certain predetermined expectations.

If the expectation involves spending money, we call it coming in under budget. If it involves completing a project by a specific date, we call it meeting a deadline. If it involves doing something or producing something within acceptable parameters, we call it complying with a standard—quality, perhaps, or safety. When it involves making or selling or issuing enough of something, we call it clearing a quota. There are many other kinds of similar challenges around production processes, contractual obligations, legal procedures and requirements, ethics standards, cultural imperatives, and much more.

When successful, management creates alignment. Alignment is the deliverable or work product of good management. It is the equivalence of expectation and performance. Alignment is a good thing; misalignment is bad. But remember: Alignment is not the product of leadership. It is the product of management.

Further in the same meme, the work of leadership is altogether different from the work of management. Leadership is all about change. A leader who is leading well is successfully bringing about a particular, big change, either culturally or operationally.

Leadership entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and supporting change—attitudinal or behavioral—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people, and often in an environment of uncertainty and risk to oneself.

The change or breakthrough may involve launching a new product, or expanding geographically, or merging cultures after an acquisition, or fending off a unionization vote, or adopting a new technology, or meeting the changing needs of customers. There are many kinds of such challenges.

When successful, leadership creates engagement. Engagement is the deliverable or work product of good leadership. It is the predicate of change. Engagement is a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership throughout the organization.

This, then, is the new meme of leadership we need to spread: Good leadership creates people engagement. Good management creates people alignment. Both are important. Companies need engagement to change, and they need alignment to fulfill their commitments. Clarifying and exploring that distinction, it seems to me, should be the first task of any leadership development initiative.

 

For the few of you who want to read more on the concept of memes,

here is the Wikipedia entry, and here is a link to amazon.com, where you can buy

a copy of Richard Dawkins's 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

 

Coming on Friday

 When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

25 Years of Incredible, Exhilarating Change

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature that presents business data, usually appears on the first and third Monday of each month. It will return on May 16. In its place today, we are publishing a date-specific essay.

You can read any or all of our Numbers posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

One other note: This essay was written last week, prior to the announcement late Sunday by President Obama of the successful military strike against Osama bin Laden, and in any case focuses on the broad sweep of change over the last 25 years. 

  

—from A Day in the Life of America           

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I am in a pensive, even somewhat maudlin mood today. Twenty-five years ago this morning, my daughter burst into life. I spent the rest of that day handing out cigars and chocolates to friends and strangers alike, telling everyone that I—yes, I—was a dad, and crying abundant, heartfelt tears of abundant, heartfelt joy.

By odd coincidence May 2, 1986 was also the day on which the publisher of A Day in the Life of America dispatched 200 of the world's best photographers across the United States. Their assignment: visually record for posterity whatever they saw on that one day. The happy result was a splendid volume of exquisite color photographs that captured American life on the very day my daughter was born.

A quarter-century later the volume of photographs is a prized possession, and Hilary Muriel Lee is everything and more a father could want: responsible, decent, funny, bright, and adventurous. Now a law student, she still finds time for blogging, sports, reading, travel, movies, cooking, friends, and volunteering. Best of all, she is a diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs, and she is coming to appreciate the storied heritage of the Green Bay Packers as well, bless her heart.

That's the maudlin part, for which I ask your kind indulgence. The pensive part involves reflecting on how much the world has changed in just the last 25 years. These are times of heady change indeed. Consider the fact that, in 1986:

• There were no cell phones. In fact, my nickname for Hilary is Beeper, derived from the beeper I carried with me so that Hilary's mother could alert me to the onset of labor.
• Nor were there any personal computers to speak of. Yes, a handful of hobbyists were experimenting with the Apple IIe, but 99 percent of Americans had never given a thought to owning a computer. Why would they? What on earth would they need a computer for? (My first computer, purchased in 1988, had 640 KB of memory and a truly massive hard drive for the time: 20 MB.)
• Federal Express was in its infancy. WalMart stores were in a handful of small towns. Technology meant fax machines, VCRs, and Sony Walkmans. IBM made Selectric typewriters. Cameras used film, and disposable cameras were the latest thing. The Euro and email were futuristic dreams. Smokers could still light up on airplanes and in offices and restaurants. Men wore ties to the office. Women wore (huge, floppy) bow ties.
• The Cold War was a permanent fixture; there was no serious expectation that the Iron Curtain would ever lift. Scarcely anyone believed that the foundation of communism was shaky. (I remember attending a presidential press conference in the mid-1980s and quietly snickering when another reporter asked President Reagan about the possiblity the Berlin Wall would come down.)
• You could buy a new Pontiac or Oldsmobile, and you could fly in a DC-10 on Pam Am or TWA or Northwest Airlines. You could drink a Schlitz, read Gourmet, and watch "Dallas" on a Zenith. When you received a letter in the mail, and you often did, it was either typewritten (on a typewriter, that is) or handwritten.
• China was very much a poor, developing country. Its harbors were filled with junks, its streets with bicycles, its countryside with peasants. The thought of China as an economic power was the stuff of fantasy. Americans were just beginning to trust Japanese products.
• Terrorism was remote, incidental, and, for Americans, all but an irrelevancy. When it did occur, it was in a far-off land like Sri Lanka. No one imagined the United States would ever go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan, let alone experience anything remotely close to the events of September 11, 2001.
• Junk mail consisted of circulars and catalogues delivered by the postal carrier, and Spam was something your mother once bought in the grocery store. Microwaves were a new gadget that some people already had in their kitchens. Water came out of the faucet, not a bottle. Television offered only a half-dozen channels; cable TV had not yet come into its own.
• The Chicago Cubs hadn't won the World Series since 1908, a span of 78 years. Now they haven't won the World Series since 1908, a span of 103 years.
• Few people had heard of Bill and Melinda Gates, Sarah Palin, Lindsay Lohan, Donald Trump, Nelson Mandela, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Jon Stewart, Warren Buffett, Osama bin Laden, Lady Gaga, Bernie Madoff, Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Lance Armstrong, Rush Limbaugh, or the Jonas Brothers. Actually, no one had heard of the Jonas brothers. Not even their mom and dad.
• Nor had anyone ever heard of the Internet, Google, Starbucks, Silicon Valley, Harry Potter, global warming, .com, the Weather Channel, online dating, Seinfeld, BlackBerry, Facebook, Enron, email, the Tea Party, CNN, business casual, 9/11, Kindle, "Dancing With the Stars," downloading, YouTube, truthiness, Six Sigma, Viagra and ED, e-books, megachurches, apps, laptop, Bluetooth, the Taliban, blogging, the Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon, GPS, walk the talk, free trade, Twitter, websites, Fox News, "American Idol," Blockbuster or Netflix, digital this or digital that, or iAnything.

That's truly phenomenal, isn't it? So much of what we know of the world, so much of what we take for granted, didn't exist just 25 years ago. Moreover, literally billions of people who are alive today—45 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of India's—were not yet born 25 years ago. All their assumptions, perceptions, and expectations were malleable, as they had to be formed along the way. (In fact, the youngest parents in 2011 were not yet born in 1986!)

So the next time you hear someone offer the old canard about change—that nothing ever does, that everything remains the same—remind him of this. Point out the fact that, quite to the contrary, actually everything changes, and it changes faster and more profoundly than you might ever imagine, ever appreciate, or ever remember.

Oh, and one more thing: Happy birthday, Hilary. May you always be lucky enough to live in periods of such incredible, exhilarating change.

 

Coming on Wednesday

A Surprising Way to Influence People

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Big Lessons in Leadership from 'I Love Lucy'

 

Madelyn Pugh Davis died on Wednesday, April 20, at the age of 90. Together with her collaborator Bob Carroll Jr., she wrote every episode of the legendary television comedy I Love Lucy. Original episodes of the Emmy Award-winning program aired from 1951 to 1957. Sixty years after it premiered, reruns of this pioneering situation comedy continue to be broadcast around the world.

For the uninitiated, I Love Lucy depicted the misadventures of a wacky New York City homemaker whose husband was a Cuban-American bandleader. It starred Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo, Dezi Arnaz as her husband Ricky, and Vivian Vance and William Frawley as their neighbors and landlords Ethel and Fred Mertz.

In 1998 I wrote an essay for the Journal of Employee Communication that celebrated I Love Lucy and teased out some truths about leadership and organizational communication from three of its episodes. Here, in commemoration of Ms. Davis, is a condensed and updated version of that essay.

—TJL                

 

 

  
 

by Thomas J. Lee

Probably everyone remembers the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and her pal Ethel go to work on an assembly line in a candy factory.

Their job is simple. As candy comes down a conveyor belt, they must wrap each piece of chocolate in paper and place it back on the conveyor.

Their boss is a humorless drill sergeant of a manager with no tolerance for mistakes. The dour supervisor warns that if even a single piece of unwrapped candy gets past them, they’ll both be fired. Then the boss bellows: “Let ‘er roll!”

Suddenly the conveyor belt begins moving, and it rapidly picks up speed. Trying to keep up, Lucy and Ethel work faster and faster. But they fall further and further behind.

Growing desperate, they clumsily hide the evidence. Unwrapped candies go in their pockets, under their caps, into their mouths, down their blouses—anywhere they can think of.

The scene is hilarious, and untold millions of viewers have chortled over it. First broadcast in 1952, the episode has frequently been rerun ever since. Other Lucy shows are equally precious, the work of comic genius.

So novel and popular were those early episodes of I Love Lucy that Manhattan traffic actually fell quiet each Monday evening when Lucy came on. Telephones around the United States went silent. Marshall Field’s, the grand Chicago department store, shifted its evening hours from Monday to Thursday. “We love Lucy, too,” the sign on its doors said.

Today only the eggheads among us would dare attribute anything remotely philosophical or high-minded to such a wonderful, light-hearted program. Yet it must be said: I Love Lucy was truly more than comedy. Between its lines lay bright little nuggets of wisdom on issues of leadership communication.

Indeed, more than a half-century after Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz invented the live-audience situation comedy, a selection of I Love Lucy episodes can be viewed not solely as terrific television comedy, which they surely were, but also as provocative reflections on how people in organizations attempt—and so often fail—to communicate for some higher purpose. 

Several well-known episodes of I Love Lucy offer lessons in this regard, though many of the situations are dated and, by today’s standards, arguably sexist or at least quaint. Here is a look at some insights or lessons you can draw from three of them: "Kleptomaniac," "Lucy Tells the Truth," and "Job Sharing."

 

"Kleptomaniac"

First broadcast in April 1952, “Kleptomaniac” has Lucy concealing from her husband, Ricky, the fact she is chairman of the annual bazaar and in charge of holding onto prizes prior to the event.

Ricky discovers a wad of currency in her purse and a closet full of valuables. Later, he and Fred catch Lucy apparently red-handed in the act of stealing. Without any other information, they conclude that she is a kleptomaniac.

Of course, Lucy could just as easily have told Ricky she was chairman of the bazaar. Instead she decides that he doesn’t really need to know, and she appears oblivious to any sense of risk associated with withholding the information.

Forgetting the wad of currency, she even tells Ricky to check her purse for cab fare, whereupon he discovers the money. Then she proceeds to lie about it.

Her gambit is necessary to set up some television laughs, of course. But for us, decades later, it’s terrific grist for some second-guessing about "need to know" communication.

The episode raises a number of issues. Why, and why not, should people share information? Who ought to know information of what kind? What compels a person with information not to share it? What happens when people glean incomplete information for themselves? How does one form impressions on the basis of incomplete information? What happens when people reach too far in attempting to verify a hunch?

 

"Lucy Tells the Truth"

Another episode, “Lucy Tells the Truth,” raises issues such as applying spin, dodging the bullet, and telling the complete truth even to the point of hurting people.

In this episode, which first aired in November 1953, Lucy enters into a $100 bet with Ricky, Ethel, and Fred that she can tell the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth, for 24 hours. (Two movies—Nothing But the Truth (1941) starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard and Liar Liar (1997) starring Jim Carrey—were based on a similar premise.)

Of course, that isn’t easy for a gal like Lucy. Telling the whole truth at bridge club the next day, she roundly insults each of her partners. They get revenge by forcing Lucy to confess her age, weight, and original hair color. Lucy complies but offers: “It feels good to tell the truth. You should try it. We’d all be much better friends if everyone told the truth.” To which Ethel retorts: “Somehow I doubt it.”

Sure enough, Lucy, having already unburdened herself of the truth, becomes brutally frank and nearly loses all three friendships. The particular issue raised by this show, and I think worth discussing in a management team, is the appropriate role of truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth—in organizational communication.

Naïve appeals for complete candor imply there are no circumstances warranting discretion or self-restraint, and we certainly know better. On the other hand, the rule in most organizations seems to be excessive reticence, even to the point that, at one large international corporation, the director of employee communication learned of a billion-dollar merger involving her company as she drove to work one morning, listening to her car radio. The question is: Who should know what? When? How?

Moreover, does “spin” really serve any legitimate purpose? Some would argue that, by selectively reporting or distorting facts even a little, it invariably backfires. Every manager should remember that employees are always there to see the truth for themselves. Indeed, they are constantly on the alert for any sign of hyprocrisy, and when they find it, they do not soon forget it.

 

"Job Switching"

I save the best for last. “Job Switching”—the episode that puts Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory—is surely one of the funniest ever, and it offers more grist for discussion than Lucy and Ethel’s shenanigans alongside the conveyor belt would suggest.

Dating back to September 1952, the program raises questions of communication in teams and of misunderstandings about the work and contributions of coworkers.

In this episode Ricky and Fred exchange roles with Lucy and Ethel. The two men begin cooking and keeping house while the two women go to work in the candy factory. Ricky and Fred, obviously too self-confident to bother reading written instructions and follow directions, turn out to be terrible housekeepers and even worse cooks.

Ricky makes sure he uses “plenty of starch” in laundering Lucy’s hosiery. Fred’s seven-layer cake comes out less than one inch tall, and the two men agree that a pound of rice per person is “just about right” for dinner that night. The volcano on the stove erupts just before Lucy and Ethel get home. The women don’t fare any better. Lucy is assigned to make chocolate dough balls alongside a stoic, stone-silent coworker. Obviously unskilled, Lucy cannot get the assistance she needs, for want of any communication.

At one point, spotting a fly buzzing around, she slaps her chocolate-laden hand first into the chocolate dough, then against the face of her coworker, who goes tit-for-tat. More than hilarious, the slapstick underlines the importance of collaboration.

Lucy and Ethel, having each failed at other assignments, get one last chance, wrapping candy. The speed of the conveyor belt is a little metaphor for the increasing expectations that management holds out for workers. At first, Lucy and Ethel are able to keep up appearances, if only by hiding the evidence.

The supervisor returns, judges everything all right, and declares: “Fine. You’re doing splendidly.” Then she calls to the conveyor belt operator: “Speed it up!”

By day’s end Lucy and Ethel have eaten more chocolates than they ever wanted. Before the credits roll, Ricky and Fred predictably acknowledge a newfound respect for Lucy and Ethel’s work, and vice versa.

Though formulaic, the story works; and it prompts us to ask whether, in the workplace, we truly do appreciate the contributions made by other individuals and departments. What with all our silos and rivalries, the answer is plainly no.

There’s another moral to this story, too. Lucy and Ethel must feel the way that contemporary employees feel as they are constantly pushed to produce more and perform better without adequate or appropriate training, support, or understanding. Better and more communication can bridge that gap between the needs of employer and employee. So it should. So it must. 

You could take a similar analytical look at many other episodes of I Love Lucy (or of other television programs, movies, and plays) and find many more insights on organizational communication and leadership. Or you could just sit back and watch these comedies for the purpose they were intended: as harmless fun.

Either way, it's reason enough to rediscover the many reasons we all loved Lucy.

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

My Love-Hate Relationship With Wikipedia

by Thomas J. Lee

If anyone should love Wikipedia, it is someone like me. I have long had a passion for reference books in general and for atlases, dictionaries, and encyclopedias in particular.

Moreover, as a blogger and an author, I am constantly consulting reference works. I used to be on first names with a reference librarian at my local library. Now I have Wikipedia to keep me company.

But it's time I come clean. I am addicted to Wikipedia, in a dysfunctional way, but I actually hate it. It is true. I loathe it, even if I use it all the time. I curse it constantly. The best you can say is that I have a love-hate relationship with it.

Wikipedia is admittedly easy to use. It does serve as a nice, quick reference. It has far more entries than any other reference work. But it is replete with errors of fact and with glaring omissions in material that I know well—more than the news media and vastly more than any other reference work. You simply cannot rely on Wikipedia for accurate or complete information. Moreover, it is probably the worst-written, worst-edited, and worst-organized reference resource ever published.

For these reasons, Wikipedia is extremely frustrating. The world needs a resource that is equally comprehensive in subject matter and instantly accessible, but that is also well-written, well-edited, well-organized, and, above all, accurate and complete. Wikipedia isn't it, and I doubt it ever will be.

For the last few weeks I have been collecting excerpts from Wikipedia to document my argument. It has been easy. Probably every other entry I check has a grievous error or omission of some sort, or an editorial tic that is weird or exasperating or both. Here are just a handful:

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}   Approval Ratings of Silicon Valley CEOs

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

 

Are Our Attention Spans Actually Growing Again?

 

by Thomas J. Lee

For the last two or three generations, ever since television invaded American homes, the average attention span has been shrinking. Everyone bemoans it, even as Madison Avenue copywriters specialize in the 30-second advertising spot and political handlers in the 10-second soundbite. The entire public is just assumed to be suffering from attention deficit disorder.

With the advent of the Internet and especially social media like Facebook and Twitter, attention spans were assumed to be shrinking even more. Web sites are routinely "optimized" to appear among the first few on a Google search. Tweets are confined to just 140 characters. Text messages abbreviate you as u.

Now comes Peggy Noonan, a gifted speechwriter who gave President Reagan so much of his eloquence, to suggest that perhaps we have seen the worst of it. In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, she suggested that our attention spans just might be growing once again, and that we may have the Internet and speeches to thank for it.

She cites huge numbers of visitors to online speeches by politicians, authors, and academics known only to relatively small numbers of people. One example: An online speech by Wisconsin businessman Ron Johnson was responsible for his candidacy for the U.S. Senate; a few months later he sailed to victory over a three-term incumbent. Another example: Links to countless TED talks land on just about everyone's Facebook page and in just about everyone's email inbox, and people actually click on the links and listen to the entire speeches.

Noonan concludes: "A funny thing about politicians is that they’re all obsessed with 'messaging' and 'breaking through' and 'getting people to listen.' They’re convinced that some special kind of cleverness is needed, that some magical communications formula exists and can be harnessed if only discovered. They should settle down, survey the technological field and get serious. They should give pertinent, truthful, sophisticated and sober-minded speeches. Everyone will listen. They’ll be all over the interwebs."

A former speechwriter myself, I think Noonan has correctly observed and commented on a real phenomenon. She is absolutely right about the clips and links arriving by email, and she is absolutely right about people clicking on those links and patiently listening to entire speeches, too. I just hope business executives are paying attention.

Besides, when was the last time anything you came across on Facebook or Twitter has actually influenced you to think or behave differently? Have you ever purchased something because of what you read or saw on Facebook or Twitter? Have you ever done anything, let alone cast your precious ballot, on the basis of what you read or saw on Facebook or Twitter? Neither have I.

I, for one, am all in favor of lengthening our collective attention span, and it sure looks as if that is exactly what is happening, thanks in part to the Internet, of all things.

 

Coming Monday

 New Data on Engagement and Shareholder Return

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

[Side Roads] The Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing [Side Roads], an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; and looked at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

Today we wax eloquent on winter, Midwest style.

by Thomas J. Lee

I have lived my entire life in the Upper Midwest, and I really cannot imagine living anywhere else. This is home. Millions of other Midwesterners feel the same.

Even a week like this one, which brought one of the worst blizzards of my lifetime, is something to be cherished and remembered not so much as an ordeal, which it plainly was for some, but as a red-letter date in a legacy we all share. It's a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they are true: The Great Groundhog Day Blizzard is the kind of thing we will tell our grandchilden about.

Surely someone I know is cursing at the ten-foot snowbanks and making plans to move south, but not I. Not my closest friends. No, we chuckle at it all, and we pride ourselves in the resilience and character of our stout Midwestern stock. Then we look around, and we realize that we are living in the alabaster of a Currier and Ives lithograph. The sky is cerulean. The sunshine is buttery. The spruce trees are verdant with lace on limbs. Everywhere the landscape is holy, clerical, innocent.

Wednesday was a snow day here. Everyone was home. Offices, stores, schools, banks, the mall—you name it, everything was closed, and everyone knew that everything would be closed, so we all slept in. The predawn quiet was exquisitely still. Still dozing, I could hear the approaching grunts, scrapes, and beeping of two snowplows working in tandem. When I finally arose, I looked out on a splendid desolation of white.

Apart from the plows, not a single car or truck came past my home until 9:30 in the morning. When I opened the front door, I found myself looking at a five-foot drift. When I opened the garage door, I was looking at an eight-foot drift. Even for a boy from Wisconsin, this was serious snow.

The neighborhood kids were laughing as they headed off to the sledding hill in Century Park, just a few hundred yards from here. A young father pulled red plastic saucers carrying his little charges. They wore scarves across their faces, but their eyes beamed, because they were with their dad. Other grownups grabbed their shovels, yanked at snowblowers until they growled, and set to work. Eventually the sidewalks bore narrow canyons through snowbanks taller than the tallest tale I've ever told, and that's pretty tall.

After shoveling out, some of my friends decided to take a coffee break together, and we wound up at a friend's lovely home. Pete was just putting away the snowblower. He pointed to a twenty-foot snow tunnel that he and his son had carved. In the back of the house, on the deck, was a drift that almost reached the upstairs balcony. We coulda jumped off, we shoulda jumped off, and we woulda jumped off if only we were half as old and twice as dumb.

Live long enough in the Midwest, and you live through some phenomenal winter storms. A few of them you remember, if most of them you eventually forget. This storm—this one, the Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011—this is one that we will all remember for a long, long time.

So here are some pictures (all from the Chicago Tribune's web site, which has hundreds more) of the Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011. Above, some University of Chicago students take a break from the books for a snowball fight. Below, commuters come home early Tuesday and trudge from the train to their cars. Lake Shore Drive's longest-ever traffic jam. An abandoned CTA bus on Lake Shore Drive. Two young women put the finishing touches on their Frosty in Wicker Park. A crosscountry skier glides down LaSalle Street in the Loop. Terminal 1 at O'Hare Airport offers the shortest lines of the year. Picasso's famous sculpture winks at a passerby.

 

 

 

 

With appreciation to the Chicago Tribune

 

Text (c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

[Side Roads] For the Packers and Bears, Their Greatest Game Ever

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing [Side Roads], an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; and shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

Today we look at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I grew up just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin. For the last thirty-odd years I have made my home in or near Chicago, Illinois. Each of these cities has a team in the National Football League. Both teams are as old, as venerable, and as legendary as the league itself.

Their rivalry is storied. Think of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Think of Palmer and Nicklaus. Think of Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Think of Manchester United and Liverpool, of Ali and Frazier, of Evert and Navratilova. Rivalries all, each pales against the heroic test of wills that has defined the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears since their founding in 1919.

The Packers and the Bears have played each other 181 times, twice a year for almost an entire century. They have each won more world championships than any other team. Curiously, only once before, in 1941, have they faced each other in post-season play, and never before have they played each other for a championship. That will change Sunday afternoon, when the Packers and the Bears face off in Soldier Field on the shore of ice-laden Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago. Without question, it will be their greatest game ever. Our grandchildren will probably hear stories of it.

The winner of this game, for the National Football Conference championship, will go to the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl is traditionally the crowning glory of American football, but this year it is so incidental as to be all but irrelevant and anticlimactic. Rather, this weekend's game, between the Packers and the Bears, is what really counts for these two teams. For them it is all that counts. If the winner of this game loses the Super Bowl, it will still be victorious in the eyes of its fans, for it will have vanquished the only team that matters.

Now I love Chicago. Truly I do. I went to graduate school here. I raised my family here. For years I wrote a newspaper column here, and I have spent most of my career here. I love the lakefront, the architecture, the museums, and the symphony. I love Navy Pier and Lake Shore Drive and the Archicenter boat tour and Wrigley Field and the University of Chicago and the rickety old Red Line and even O'Hare Airport. Almost all my friends live here, all but a few of them benighted Bears fans, and I even love them.

But I am not, and I never will be, a fan of the Chicago Bears. Never. Never, never, never. To the very marrow of my bones, to the synapses of my brain, to the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers, to the valves of my heart and in the plasma of my blood, I am a fan, through and through, of the glorious Green Bay Packers, and that is the way it will always be.

It has always been thus, too. As far back as I can remember, the Green Bay Packers were the very center of every autumn in my hometown, a few miles down Highway 41 from Green Bay. My brother actually attended the famous Ice Bowl, the NFC championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, when the temperature at kickoff was 13 degrees below zero. Today, I own one of those gaudy yellow foam cheese heads, and I even have a frozen brick of genuine Lambeau Field turf in my kitchen icebox. I really do.

Green Bay is an improbable city to have a major sports franchise. It has a population of scarcely 100,000 people, in sharp contrast to the millions in greater Chicago and other cities with NFL teams. That alone makes the Packers unique, but there is much more to the story.

The Packers are the only major sports team to release their balance sheet every year, and they are the only team to be owned by the general public and operated on a non-profit basis. The team's by-laws call for all its assets to be given to charity in the event the team is ever moved from Green Bay. That would be unlikely in any case; since 1960, the Packers have sold every single seat for every game in their stadium. Over the course of a half-century, not one ticket has gone unsold, and there is a waiting list of thousands. No other team in major sports can claim anything remotely close to that.

Even the great George S. Halas respected the Packers. In the 1950s, Halas, the founder and longtime head coach of the Bears, drove the 200 miles to Green Bay during the off-season to urge the citizenry to build a stadium for the Packers, which were struggling through a sustained slump and had little immediate prospect for success. Until then the Packers were playing at the Green Bay East High School field (just coincidentally, the alma mater of legendary New York Times sports columnist Red Smith). Without a new stadium, the NFL would move the team from Green Bay. Voters listened to Halas and approved the new stadium.

Still the hapless Packers continued to lose. Two years later a granite statue of a man named Vince Lombardi arrived from the East Coast. He would be the new head coach and general manager of the sad-sack team. The year before his arrival, the Packers had lost all but one game in their new stadium. That season still stands as their worst ever.

The next year, under Lombardi, the Packers began winning. They started the season with a victory over the Bears and finished with more wins than losses. The year afterward, they won their division; and the year after that, they won the world championship. They would win the world championship four more times under Lombardi, including the first two Super Bowls. Today the Super Bowl trophy carries his name.

There's an important lesson for leaders everywhere in the Lombardi play book, for the great coach won all those championships with most of the same players on that pathetic, losing team he inherited: Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jimmy Taylor, Jerry Kramer, Ray Nitschke, Forrest Gregg, Max McGee, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, and more. They were all losers, and they knew it. Lombardi came along and made them believe in themselves, and so they did. Once they believed in themselves, they played like winners.

You can expect both teams to play like winners Sunday. The Bears have come out of nowhere to win their division; at the start of the season, experts were predicting they would win only four of their sixteen games. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler passed and ran for two touchdowns each last Sunday. The Packers have survived more than a dozen significant injuries, and they have rolled over two excellent teams en route to their NFC championship berth. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is at the top of his game. The Packers beat the Bears three weeks ago in the regular-season finale, but the Bears prevailed back in September.

The convenient and conventional thing for me to say here would be: "May the best team win." But I cannot bring myself to do that. Not for this game. Not for any game between these two teams. No, my sentiments are all to one side. They are all on the side of the venerable, the estimable, the great and glorious Green Bay Packers. I can only speak my truth, and this is it. 

GO, PACKERS!

 

Addendum on Sunday, 23 January 2011:  The Packers won, 21 to 14, in a hard-fought game on loose turf that made proper footing difficult. Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler was hurt in the second quarter, and third-string quarterback Caleb Hanie drove the Bears to two touchdowns in the second half but also threw two interceptions, one of which ended the game. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked masterful on an early touchdown drive but was otherwise lackluster. Fortunately, the Packers defense stepped up to the challenge.

 

Addendum on Sunday, 6 February 2011:  The Green Bay Packers went on to win the Super Bowl and thereby become the new champion of the National Football League. The Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31 to 25, after pulling out to a dramatic lead early in the game but losing some momentum in the second half. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who completed three touchdown passes, was named the game's most valuable player. For the Packers it is their thirteenth world championship; no other NFL team has nearly as many. (The Bears are in second place with nine championships. The Steelers have six championships to their credit.)

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.  

"Over the Rainbow": An Anthem for Leadership

 

We're reprinting a few of our favorite posts for two weeks while we go through a year-beginning strategic review. We will return in full force, with completely new essays, on Monday. The next day will be 1-11-11. It will be a good time to begin anew.

We published well more than a hundred essays last year. None evoked such a warm-hearted reaction as this one. If you do nothing else today, be sure you take a few minutes to listen to the sublime, ethereal voice of Eva Cassidy. Feel free to forward it to your staff and colleagues, too. They will thank you for it.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

As many of you know, I have a special place in my heart for "Over the Rainbow," the ballad made famous by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harbung.

To me, "Over the Rainbow" is a kind of anthem for leadership. It sublimely captures the power and the magic of our elusive, limitless dreams. I have actually collected more than two dozen renditions of this song in my personal iTunes file.

Of course, Judy Garland's recording of "Over the Rainbow" is iconic. It was her signature song. But some people regard her version as just a tad tinny.

I myself find another particular rendition to be both more tender and more soulful. It was recorded in the early 1990s by Eva Cassidy, a hugely talented but little-known young artist from Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, her phenomenal voice was stilled at the age of 33 by melanoma, in 1996. She left behind some poignant recordings, though, perhaps none more beautiful than this interpretation of "Over the Rainbow."

An old friend from high school, Judy (nee Kern) Kahler, who is now an ordained Episcopal minister in Florida, posted Eva Cassidy's version on Facebook today. It deserves to be heard by everyone. I promise, it will be the best five minutes of your day. Do, do, do take the time to listen.

(You'd better have a box of tissues within reach, too. It is that beautiful. Her crescendo at about three minutes forty-five seconds is just exquisite.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with Miss Eva Cassidy.

 

 

Now then. Was that sublime or what?

 

(c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Have Your Brain Waves Call My Brain Waves

 

by Thomas J. Lee

We're all familiar with the children's experiment of using two empty tin cans tied together by a string. Supposedly the tin cans can carry a conversation by vibrating in sync as they capture sound waves at one end and then reproduce the same sound waves at the other end.

It turns out that something similar happens between people. You can think of each tin can as a primitive human brain. Just as a can absorbs and produces sound through vibration, so the human brain creates and receives sound waves as brain waves. The waves are the embodiment of information—everything from facts to emotions, from observations to ideas, from names to arguments.

Researchers at Princeton University recently discovered that, in good communication, a speaker's brain waves closely resemble a listener's. MRI scans of the two brains show them to be in sync. In poor communication, the opposite is true; the brain waves are not in sync. Thus, the power of communication is the power to bring brain waves into alignment.

Interviewed in the new issue (December 2010) of Harvard Business Review, Princeton Professor Uri Hasson says the connection between two persons who are communicating well is "almost visceral." He calls it coupling, and it seems to have emotional implications. We have all experienced it, when we are able to complete someone else's sentences, or vice versa, when we feel at odds with someone we don't quite understand.

"There's nothing mystical about this," Professor Hasson told HBR. "It's not a Jedi mind trick. This is what communication is. It is what humans do best, and it's unique."

Researchers have a great deal of work ahead of them, for many questions remain to be answered: Why do some pairs of people lean more to alignment than others? Can an individual's will, or resistance, facilitate or block her from coupling with another individual? What actually occurs during miscommunication? How do children learn to communicate?

I find the research especially tantalizing, for it raises all kinds of further questions about the physics behind leadership communication: What happens during the process of influence? Of inspiration? Does anything special occur in the presence of eloquence? What does the presence or absence of credibility do to brain waves? Of repetition? Or propaganda? How does the written word or imagery or implicit communication create brain waves in the absence of sound? The good professor at Princeton cannot get back to his lab fast enough for me.

In the meantime, my brain waves thank your brain waves for reading today.

 
(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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In Honor of Work and Working

Minding Gaps is taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post, in recognition of Labor Day in the United States, is reprinted from last year’s holiday. It is on the importance of hard work.

We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday, September 27.

— Tom

 

In observance of Labor Day in the United States, we offer this poem as a paean to work. Titled To Be of Use, it was written by Marge Piercy and first published in Lunch magazine in 1972.

 

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

 

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The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint

 

Here’s a lighthearted post for a listless Friday afternoon in late summer, as the kids go back to school and our colleagues drift home from vacation. Created by Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, it is a brilliant riff on what the Gettysburg Address would have sounded like if Abraham Lincoln had used PowerPoint.

It has been on the net for years, and you may have seen it before. Frankly, I will never grow tired of it. As you view it, click the NEXT button to move through the deck of six slides.

Before anyone writes to remind us of the sanctity of Gettysburg National Cemetery, be assured we are appreciative. A few years ago we spent an afternoon at Gettysburg, and we recommend it to every American.

Trumpets, puhleeze.

 

"And now please welcome Mr. Abraham Lincoln, president of these old United States of ours."

"Good morning. I said, Good morning!

"Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute.

"Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we?

"Oh, is it ready? Okee-dokee, here we go:

 

Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication by Abraham Lincoln

 

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Side Roads: The Field of Dreams

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So last year we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari, and fondly remembered my dad on Father’s Day. Today, we share the story and a few pictures of our visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

 

Thirty-five miles west of the Mississippi River, just north and east of the Iowa community of Dyersville and nestled in a delightful dale protected by vast waves of corn, lies the venerable Field of Dreams.

This is the idyllic farm chosen by the producers of the 1989 movie starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones. Today it looks much as it did in the film, save for the addition of a souvenir stand and a gravel parking lot.

Now I often like to add a little excursion to business trips, the better to humanize the hard work of going hither and yon. So it was last week. While returning from a workshop in leadership communication for a corporate client, I took a little detour to visit the magical baseball diamond.

When I got there, I noticed that some other folks had brought bats and balls. However, they needed more people for a game. So I volunteered to pitch a while and later took a spot in the batting line-up. No one was keeping score or even counting the balls and strikes. We were just living a little dream . . . on a field made for them.

Not having thrown a baseball in probably 25 years, I was surprised to get a few pitches more or less across the plate. I hit the ball into the outfield a couple of times, too.

By far the best part of the visit was stepping into and out of the rows of corn. Just as in the movie, that was a mystical experience.

Here are some pictures.

 

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5 Reasons You Must Read (and Watch) "The Pillars of the Earth"

 

For those of you who missed my Side Roads feature on The Pillars of the Earth last November, here, once again, are the five reasons you really owe it to yourself to read the masterful epic novel by Ken Follett.

Trust me, there are plenty of leadership insights packed in this narrative. Besides, you will just flat-out love the story itself.

Don't take my word for it, though. Take Oprah's.

For those of you who already know how terrific the story is, a head’s up: the American cable channel Starz is premiering its eight-part miniseries of Pillars beginning tomorrow night. Don't miss it. Check your local listings.

An Anthem for Leaders

As many of you know, I have a special place in my heart for "Over the Rainbow," the ballad made famous by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harbung.

To me, "Over the Rainbow" is a kind of anthem for leaders. It sublimely captures the power and the magic of our elusive, limitless dreams. I have actually collected more than two dozen renditions of this song in my personal iTunes file.

Of course, Judy Garland's recording is iconic. It was her signature song. But some people regard her version as just a tad tinny.

I myself find another particular rendition to be both more tender and more soulful. It was recorded in the early 1990s by Eva Cassidy, a hugely talented but little-known young artist from Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, her phenomenal voice was stilled at the age of 33 by melanoma, in 1996. She left behind some poignant recordings, though, perhaps none more beautiful than this interpretation of "Over the Rainbow."

An old friend from high school, Judy (nee Kern) Kahler, who is now an ordained Episcopal minister in Florida, posted Eva Cassidy's version on Facebook today. It deserves to be heard by everyone. I promise, it will be the best five minutes of your day. Do, do, do take the time to listen.

(You'd better have a box of tissues within reach, too. It is that beautiful. Her crescendo at about three minutes forty-five seconds is just exquisite.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with Miss Eva Cassidy.

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George Steinbrenner, a Gentleman

George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees who died today at the age of 80, will undoubtedly be remembered for his volatile management as well as for the eleven American League pennants and the seven World Series championships that his teams won. Steinbrenner was legendary for blowing his temper and then firing his managers.

I have no personal knowledge of his temperament, of course, but the one time I saw him—indeed, met him—he was a perfect gentleman.

My family was having lunch at a Ramada Inn, which Steinbrenner owned, just outside Ocala, Florida. My mother, an octogenarian whose personality was nonetheless engaging and vivacious as ever, spotted the Yankees owner with his own family at another table. As we exited, she made a point of walking over to Steinbrenner's table and introducing herself.

What stunned me was that Steinbrenner, instead of brushing her off, actually stood and greeted my mother, and then introduced her by name—he had never met her before—to his wife and two daughters. Soon all five were engaged in a conversation about a common interest, Northwestern University, where Steinbrenner once coached as a young man and where one of my mother’s granddaughters had attended college. They must have chatted like old friends for five minutes.

After we left, I imagined Mrs. Steinbrenner saying to her husband: “Now who was that again, George?” and he shaking his head and replying, “Damned if I know.”

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The Only Management Advice You Really Need

Someone else said it first, but it’s good enough to pass along, so I will. (If I knew who said it first, I would happily give credit where credit is due. I don’t, so I can’t.)

In any case, it packs a lot of wisdom in a few short words. Every manager everywhere should memorize it and let it guide their every word and deed:

As time goes by, people will forget most of what you say and much of what you do. But they will never forget how you make them feel. Give people the respect they want and the dignity they need, and do nothing to diminish either. In return, they will long remember and always regard you just as you want to be remembered and regarded, and they will go to the ends of the earth for you.

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By the Numbers: The Many Faces of Facebook

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, information overload, trust in business, strategic communication, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others. You can read any or all of those posts whenever you wish, just by scrolling down to the hundreds of short essays that follow this one.

Today we look at the phenomenal popularity of Facebook.

Behind only the Google search engine, Facebook has become the second-most-popular destination on the Web. That has far-reaching implications for any business that is alert enough to notice it—and agile enough to act on it.

According to the site’s blog:

• Facebook has more than 400 million active users, half of whom log on in any given day.
  
  
• Each user spends nearly an hour on the site per day.
  
  
• Each week, Facebook users post more than 5 billion pieces of content (comments, links, photos, YouTube videos, etc.) on the site.
  
  
• More than 3 million companies and organizations have their own pages on Facebook, and more than 20 million people become fans of these pages every day. There are now more than 5.3 billion fans of pages.

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Side Roads: On Safari in Botswana's Chobe National Park

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So last summer we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our first three Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto, recounted my hike to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, and reviewed The Pillars of the Earth, a mesmerizing novel, by Ken Follett.

Today we recapture a once-in-a-lifetime experience: going on safari in Africa. We went to Chobe National Park (and stayed at the spectacular Chobe Game Lodge) in Botswana, via Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

At the time we went, Zimbabwe was a relatively stable country. It isn't anymore, and I wouldn’t recommend visiting it until things return to some semblance of normalcy. Most of our story took place in neighboring Botswana.

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

 One of the extraordinary joys of work that takes you around the world is squeezing in a few vacation days now and then in phenomenal, exotic places. Some years ago, making the most of one of my speaking engagements, I was able to realize a lifelong dream of a safari in southern Africa. Here is the story.

I had been invited to speak to a professional association and spend a day working with the senior management team of a global conglomerate based in suburban Johannesburg, South Africa. That provided all the excuse I needed to go.

With a nod from my daughter’s middle-school principal, we took her out of school for two weeks and flew to South Africa. After my work was complete, we spent several days in Cape Town—an absolutely delightful city—and then flew north to a small airport near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to see the incredible “smoking” cataract and to embark on our big adventure.

On driving from the airport into Victoria Falls, we could only chuckle at elephant crossing signs alongside the highway: a silhouette of an elephant with X ING printed below it. Only moments later our driver slowed, and our jaws fell slack as two trumpeting, rogue elephants lifted their enormous bulk out of the jungle and crossed the road just 30 or 40 yards in front of us. We certainly weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Several school kids in uniforms, walking home on a nearby path, briefly looked up, threw a few stones at the massive beasts, and then blithely continued on their way. A few miles on, we saw weary men pushing wooden barrows loaded with the day’s harvest and a gaunt old woman leading a donkey saddled with firewood, all on a dirt street in the center of town.

Setting out on safari the next morning, we entered Botswana at a remote border crossing awash in mud puddles. Over the next few days we saw unforgettable things.

One day, only a few hundred yards from the lodge in Chobe National Park, our open-air Land Rover pulled up right alongside a muscular lion on her own morning safari.

Two or three days later, we watched in the quiet of an African dawn as a steely-eyed lion stalked her prey right in front of us. For twenty or thirty minutes she inched closer and closer—one silent, slow, half step after another—to the rear of a kudu paralyzed by fear. Then in a few graceful bounds she lunged at his flank. He leaped high, kicked his legs, and barely escaped with his breath—for the moment, anyway. Our guide said the kudu was probably killed within seconds by another lion, waiting in ambush.

Later, we got real nervous real quickly—and boy did we ever get outta there fast—when a fierce, irascible hippo, the meanest of the mean, took a bead on our river cruiser and abruptly charged. He came at us with phenomenal power and astonishing speed. We lurched back into our seats as the boat whooshed away. This time our guide explained that the hippo was just trying to frighten us; had she been serious about attacking, she would have quietly capsized our boat and then drowned us. Hippos can hold their breath for 45 minutes, and they kill people for the sport of it.

On yet another ride, we edged too close to a slumbering crocodile on a riverbank. Suddenly a blur of teeth and hide flew at us like shrapnel. For an instant this ugly beast was two feet into the air: tail whipsawing, eyes glaring, snout wide open, its rows of teeth reaching for our flesh. Plunging into the water mere inches from our boat, and now stilled, he looked up at us with contemptuous regret (top picture). The attack took no more than two or three seconds. Never so happy to be ever so drenched, we looked at him with stunned and blessed relief.

Back on land, we watched matriarchal herds of elephant swaggering across the veldt. The littlest ones, scolded by mama, scurried along like Dumbo to keep up. Then we saw dozens of grazing impala freeze up in cold fright at the scent of an unseen predator. Giraffes, zebras, monkeys, and cape buffalo completed the wild menagerie.

Once we came upon a grandfatherly lion—his regal, resplendent mane straight off a Barnum & Bailey billboard. He had condescended to watch over a half-dozen cute but impudent little cubs. They were frolicking in their den, only a couple of arm lengths from our open-air vehicle. Then that aristocratic old king yawned so wide you could literally count his glistening incisors and the bubbles of saliva on his tongue. I exaggerate not the least.

Perhaps most memorably, we stopped to chat with four young Tswana bushmen (below left) working waist-deep in a rain-swollen Zambezi River tributary, just inside Namibia. The men were fishing with spears—literally hand-chiseled out of stone and tied together with strips of animal hide—and using dug-out canoes carved from tree trunks. Honestly, it looked like a scene straight out of National Geographic. I could not believe what I was seeing. Our guide, offering cigarettes and Coca-Cola for their courtesy, did double duty as a translator. They showed off their catch of the day: a huge tiger fish, surely enough to feed several hungry families. All four men smiled with evident pride.

The next day our long journey home began in a lashing monsoon. We bumped along a muddy two-rut path in the back of a leaking, tarpaulin-sheathed pickup truck. When we finally arrived at the airport 125 miles away, the electricity was out. Not to fret, there were no computers anyway. Finally, the sky cleared. We flew south to Johannesburg, north to Germany, and home.

That night, in the discomfiting comfort of a jetliner somewhere over the Sahara Desert, we could only wonder about it all. You cannot visit Africa without drop-jawed awe for her feral beauty, diversity, romance, size, and, most especially, abject pain. Africa is her pain.

In just the two weeks we were there, 40,000 children alone in sub-Saharan Africa alone died of malaria alone. Imagine, the equivalent of seven jumbo jets slamming into Mount Kilimanjaro every single day, all year long, and the world is almost mute on the tragedy. Getting shots for yellow fever and taking weekly malaria pills—not to mention watching aboriginal tribesmen fish for dinner with Pleistocene gear—swiftly brings you face-to-face with a starkly different world, and to a real appreciation for our own largesse of civilization, sanitation, industry, literacy, and medicine.

Fast forward now to 2010. A few weeks ago, I asked my daughter—now 23 and in law school—what her favorite memory was from childhood. Without hesitation, she replied the trip to Africa. “Even now,” she added, “there are times that I just can’t believe I went to Africa.”

Come to think of it, neither can I.

 

If you are in a position to take the time and spend the money to see Africa, you have my strong encouragement to do so. I can promise you that it will absolutely change your life. For now, avoid Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Congo. My choice would be Kenya or Tanzania. Be sure to consult with the U.S. Department of State or, for those of you outside the United States, your own national foreign ministry long before finalizing your plans. You will need inoculations against multiple diseases.

Query: The Intangibles of Business

Appearing irregularly but not infrequently, Query is a short, simple, and hopefully powerful feature. It consists of a single question, or perhaps two or three—or four, or five (sometimes we can’t help ourselves)—closely related questions.

That’s it. Nothing more. It is intended to ignite or reignite a flame of introspection, reflection, exploration, and reinvention.

We won’t belabor the point. We won’t build an elaborate context. We won’t try to manage your thinking. All we want to do is start or restart some deeper thinking about your role as a leader, your efforts to engage people, and the effectiveness of your communication.

As you wrestle with each particular question, also ask yourself why we're posing it and what it means for your impact, influence, and inspiration as a leader.

• How much of your day as a manager and a leader do your devote to tangible things—the stuff you can touch: equipment, machines, product, money, tools, documents, signage, vehicles, shelving, buildings, computers, telephones, furniture, and so forth?
  
  
• How much of your day as a manager and a leader do you devote to intangible things—the stuff you cannot physically feel: relationships, knowledge, culture, processes, plans, networks, communication, growth, leadership, service, punctuality, honesty, appreciation, satisfaction, ideas, creativity, needs, sincerity, camaraderie, and the engagement, teamwork, and achievements of your team?
  
  
• Which of these two broad categories consistently has the greater impact and value to your customers and therefore to your business?
  
  
• Does your ratio feel about right? How would you alter it if you could? Can you? What’s stopping you?

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The Gun Scare at Northwestern Law School

Enough of you have called and written in the last few hours to warrant an update to all.

As many of you know, my daughter, Hilary, is a first-year student at Northwestern Law School, whose campus is in the Streeterville neighborhood of downtown Chicago, a few blocks east of Michigan Avenue, and about eight miles south of the university's main campus in Evanston.

This morning someone spotted a man in the law school with what appeared to be a handgun tucked into his pants. Acting immediately, the school advised all faculty to lock and barricade their classroom and office doors. I received word on a Chicago Tribune newsfeed at 10:41 a.m. Hilary sent me an email at 10:42 a.m. saying she was in one of the classrooms. She was safe but naturally frightened.

I reacted viscerally. I personally know of four persons who have been shot. Three of them died. The fourth will go to his grave with a bullet in his head. If this is civilization, you'll have to excuse me for taking the jungle.

The law school remained on lockdown for almost three hours as swarms of police officers searched the building. Hilary and I traded emails every few minutes. As of this writing, the police have not found a gunman, and no shots have been fired. A little while ago the classrooms were reopened. Lectures will be held as scheduled this afternoon.

So everything is back to normal. Check that—not back to normal, not anymore. Not after that kind of scare. Back to an edgy, anxious routine is more like it.

 

Another Beautiful Mind

Apropos of nothing, but still fascinating, we’re passing along a short video of a human savant on a visit to Rome. It’s really quite incredible, and it will give you something to talk about with friends and family this weekend.

It appears to have been shown on British television. This is the first I have seen it.

A tip of the hat to my friend Gary Bisanz for finding it. Have a splendid weekend, everyone.

An Orchid for Google

Today we’re introducing another occasional feature. Orchids and Onions will offer encomiums for laudable decisions or noble behavior, especially in challenging circumstances, and criticism for poor decisions or untoward behavior. We’ll bestow orchids on people or organizations that are doing or trying to do the right thing, and onions on people or organizations that are doing the wrong thing or just behaving heedlessly. Today’s column marks our very first orchid.

Companies face difficult ethical issues all the time. Often, correctly resolving these issues is a matter of rereading the corporate values and looking in the mirror. The difficulty is greater when doing business in other countries, where a company naturally wants to respect local laws and cultural norms while also doing right by its own values.

China’s business environment poses a particular challenge. The world’s biggest and  fastest-growing market has an insatiable appetite for online information and connectivity, which makes it fertile ground for high-tech companies like Google. Unfortunately, the government has a reckless and even aggressive disregard for human rights that we Westerners pretty much take for granted. The inevitable collision is now occurring in cyberspace.

Some high-tech companies, most notably Yahoo, have looked the other way. They have been complicit partners in China’s oppressive cyber warfare, as when Yahoo enabled the government to imprison four dissidents.

This week, however, Google signaled it would be different. After the company learned that powerful forces within China—read: the government—were hacking the Gmail accounts of dissidents, Google declared it would not tolerate government interference in online searches and its email service. If it has to remove itself from China, the company said, it will.

That would be unfortunate, for it would leave one billion people dependent on another search engine, Baidu, that isn’t so noble. Moreover, it would be a giant step backward in the global integration of knowledge.

Still, the Chinese government’s determination to control and stifle the exchange of information and ideas is unacceptable. Google’s principled stand is refreshing and fully deserving of our first orchid.

Wanted: A Few Good Professionals

Note to Readers:

Occasionally I learn of attractive job opportunities, typically at senior levels in a corporate or consulting environment, and almost always in the general areas of organizational communication, organizational development, leadership training and development, or public relations.

If you are at or approaching a senior level in these disciplines, and you wish to be on my short list to learn of exciting opportunities, send me an email with a telephone number and a résumé. I will keep it in utmost confidence.

 

Thomas J. Lee

tom@arceil.com

Quote / Unquote: Edward M. Kennedy on Shouting

  

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

  

I just finished reading the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, and I heartily recommend it to anyone—Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal—for a fascinating look at politics and public policy through the eyes of the liberal lion.

The book is compulsively readable. Kennedy strings together story after story about his life. He spares no self-incrimination, especially around Chappaquiddick and his personal lifestyle during the 1970s and 1980s. Nor is he stinting in his praise for people he liked and respected, including some noteworthy Republicans, or in his scorn for those he didn’t, including some well-known Democrats.

Toward the end of the book, the late senator tells of a couple of speeches he gave. One of the speeches was to the students and faculty of Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia, which was founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The other was to his peers at the Senate Prayer breakfast.

In both speeches, Kennedy would be uncommonly forthright about his life—its promises, its principles, its practice, and its pain.

Prior to the Senate Prayer Breakfast speech, Kennedy reminded himself of the need to speak softly, in a quiet and temperate voice. He told himself:

  

 

The louder our voices become, the more

we grow strangers to each other and ourselves.

 

 

As you reflect on this quotation, ask yourself whether people argue too much. Ask yourself whether we actively look for common ground as much as we should. Ask yourself what the effect would be of lowering the volume of our debates, and of asking more genuine questions and making fewer tenuous assertions.

 

 

Paul A. Samuelson (1915-2009)

 

  

In my first semester at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I took the introductory survey course in macroeconomics. Our textbook was the eighth edition of Economics by Paul A. Samuelson. Its 866 pages must have weighed in at three pounds or better. Still, it was exquisitely well-written, for it explained that dismal science with clarity and even some wit.

When the semester ended, I was in need of money, so I took the text to a campus bookstore and sold it for a few dollars. Later that same day, I realized my mistake. I returned to the bookstore and bought back my old textbook at a tidy profit for the store. It was an object lesson in economics. Decades later, I still have that book, right alongside the desk in my study.

Over the years, many millions of economics students around the world would rely on the Samuelson text for their introduction to economics. By dint of Economics, which made a fortune for the professor and his family, Samuelson taught all of us a good deal of what we know about economics.

All these years later, I still remember a particular example Samuelson set forth in the book. He was explaining the concept of the “Invisible Hand,” the notion articulated by the 18th century economic theorist Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, which laid the intellectual groundwork for free enterprise.

Smith wrote that multiple purchases by individuals, each in pursuit of his own self-interest, would create a favorable public interest by automatically directing the flow of goods and services to the right places. No coordination, control, or coercion by a "visible hand" (i.e., government) is necessary or desirable.

It was Samuelson’s example that crystallized the concept for me. He pointed to New York City, whose millions of people would starve in a week were it not for the orderly flow of food into and throughout the city. Yet no one, Samuelson observed, worries much about the problem.

That’s because the Invisible Hand is taking care of it. Apart from levying taxes or tariffs and ensuring food safety, the government plays no role in the distribution of all that food. Indeed, the professor wrote, contrary to complaints by purists, the government plays a remarkably modest role in the entire economy. That’s the beauty of the Invisible Hand and of free enterprise.

Samuelson, who was born in 1915 and died Sunday at the age of 94, lived through a period of remarkable economic growth and change. At the dawn of the Great Depression, he himself was taking a survey course in economics as a University of Chicago undergraduate. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 1970, the discipline reflected the post-Depression influence of John Maynard Keynes. For a while, the noxious concept of industrial planning was in vogue, by which government would determine what industries and products would thrive.

A few years later, the intellectual pendulum began swinging the other way, under the monetarist thinking of Milton Friedman. By the time Samuelson died, Keynesianism wasn't looking so bad anymore.

Because almost all of us supped at the trough of Samuelson's wisdom, we are all the beneficiaries of his insights and teaching, and we are all indebted to him, as we are, indeed, to all great teachers.

 

 

Whither parking meters?

Last week in this space we found ourselves discussing which companies and brands were unlikely to survive the coming year.

The list was entirely speculative, of course, but the names that made their way to the list would certainly give their owners and employees reason for pause. They included Newsweek magazine, Motorola, Palm, Borders, Blockbuster, and Eastman Kodak.

One reader offered up Tiger Woods as another possibility. That was before the famous golfer took a self-imposed sabbatical.

To the list of endangered brands, we may also wish to speculate as to what products are unlikely to survive more than a year or two more. In just the last decade, we have seen the virtual demise of camera film, the VCR machine, floppy disks, newspaper classified ads, dial-up connections, and operator-assisted telephone information. When was the last time you saw anyone using a Sony Walkman or a portable radio?

Will paper telephone books survive another couple of years? Will ordinary cell phones? How about CDs and DVDs?

And how about fax machines? I personally haven’t had a fax machine in my office for several years. Have you? I have a fax number, but the few faxes anyone sends me come straight to my computer. Come to think of it, I don’t use the post office as much as I used to, and I don’t send overnight express mail as much, either.

My local park district is removing all the pay telephones from its facilities. There’s just no need for them. All of us carry telephones in our pocket, even when we’re jogging in the park.

I live just outside Chicago, a city that has replaced its parking meters with a machine that takes credit cards and automatically sends out invoices for late parking. There was a hue and cry at first, but now people seem to like the system. You don’t need to search for quarters anymore.

What products do you see facing an uncertain future? Conversely, what products do you think are safe bets to survive innovative competition?

 

Leadership Is More Than Influence

 

There are those who say that leadership is nothing more and nothing less than influence.

Is it really? What do you think?

I believe that leadership is a great deal more than influence. It is actually nothing less than inspiration. These are not the same things. They are not even close.

After all, a fast-talking salesman can persuade you to buy a used car. That’s influence, but is it leadership?

A neighborhood bully knows how to get his way. Is that influence? Yes, I suppose. But is it leadership?

Propagandists have influence. Tyrants have influence. Are they leaders? To me, they are mere martinets.

Torture and duress and manipulation and addiction can exercise a perverse but effective kind of influence. Is any of it leadership? No, of course not.

The promise of a quick buck can influence some people. Madison Avenue can influence people. The allure of forbidden fruit has influence. None of it is leadership.

No, leadership is something more than any of that. The essential kernel of leadership is its capacity to inspire people to think for themselves, to expect more from themselves, to imagine more, to give more, and to be more. Influence can do none of that.

Leadership—true leadership, generous leadership, big leadership—is all about inspiration. Leaders don’t settle for influence, except inasmuch as they influence themselves to become inspiring examples of the change they champion. Leaders know the difference between influence and inspiration, and they know they must do the hard, sweaty work of inspiring people.

The people you would lead are asking and waiting for nothing less. They are asking and waiting to be inspired.

So give them what they want. Give them what they need. Give them what they are asking and waiting for. Give them the magic, the power of inspiration.

 

Answers to Your Questions on Social Media

 

The questions about social media just keep coming. If your CEO or chairman asked, could you confidently answer any of these questions, let alone all of them?

• How are high-performance organizations making the most of social media? What are they being sure to do, and what are they being sure to avoid?

• Is there a compelling value proposition for proactively using social media?

• Is a lot of what you hear about social media just the usual hype? Is there any real value to a company? Is it just another fad? What can anyone say of value in 140 characters, anyway?

• Are high-performance companies really using social media to connect with employees faster than ever? If so, how is it working? Exactly how are they doing it?

• How are they using social media to enhance and maintain their reputation in the marketplace? How well is it working?

• How are high-performance companies using social media to respond to rumors? To reach and attract Millennium Generation employees? To exercise more agility in the marketplace? To monitor cyberspace conversations? To troubleshoot customer complaints and issues?

• Are they just using the "old standbys" of social media: Twitter and Facebook? Or are they identifying other, lesser-known social-media sites that reach niche stakeholders?

• Are high-performance companies forbidding employees from reading any social-media sites while at work? If so, is such a ban effective? Doesn't it backfire with Millennial employees?

• Are executives of high-performing organizations blogging? Have these blogs taken the place of conventional, slower media? Do the executives write their own? Who has time to ghost them? Is ghostwriting publicly acknowledged?

• In short, what's working, and what isn't working, in the new world of social media?

We’ll get the answers to those questions—and to your own specific questions about social media—in a battery of studies in early 2010. We’ll conduct four studies on social media. Each will target a particular sector. One will look at social media for service companies such as law firms, medical practices, airlines, engineering and construction companies, consulting firms, and hospitals. Another will examine social media for the retail sector. Still another study will explore social media for manufacturing companies. Finally, yet another study will delve into social media for non-profit organizations.   

We’re enrolling corporatations and organizations as co-sponsors of these four studies now. To inquire, just send us a note (to info@arceil.com) with your name and telephone number or telephone (+1.847.247.2241), and we will follow up.

These studies will produce real-world answers for real-world questions in each of these four sectors. They will find real-world solutions for real-world problems. Each study will be broad enough to provide guidance on general strategies and policies but specific enough to be appropriate and relevant to its sector.

Only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will benefit from them. The studies will be proprietary to the co-sponsoring companies for one full year from the completion of the projects.

Each co-sponsor will help design and customize the research, so the studies will reflect every co-sponsor’s own concerns and interests. They will result in relevant findings and actionable recommendations. Best of all, because several companies will join together to sponsor it, each company's share of the total cost will be moderate.

The final reports will have a written executive summary and PowerPoint slides for presentation of findings. At the conclusion of the projects, we will host webinars for the co-sponsors that present the findings and responds to questions.

Our initial research shows a wide variety of approaches and practices, in terms of both substance and tone. Our intent is to establish a benchmark of policies that each sponsor can use for evaluation and improvement.

We will enroll co-sponsors on a first-come, first-serve basis. Only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will share the results.

The research will be managed by Thomas J. Lee, founder and president of Arceil Leadership Ltd. A subject-matter expert and frequent speaker on leadership and organizational communication, Tom has culled best practices from many major, pace-setting corporations: Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Federal Express, Harley-Davidson, Chick-fil-A, 3M, McDonald’s, DuPont, Motorola, Weyerhaeuser, Walgreens, and others.

A former journalist and speechwriter for Fortune 100 CEOs, Tom is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, where he serves as a mentor to graduate students, and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His clients have included the No. 1 or No. 2 company in such disparate industries as heavy manufacturing, finance, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, motorcycles, energy, food and beverage, and chemicals, among others. Beginning in 2010, he will teach an online course in communication and engagement for the University of California.

Please contact us at 847-247-2241 for details, including fees and procedures, or write to us at info@arceil.com. Or write to us at info@arceil.com, and we can arrange a convenient time to talk by telephone. We look forward to working with you.

Side Roads: "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few months ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our first two Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto and recounted one of the most phenomenal days of my life—the day I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.* Today we review a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. Published in 1989, the story is presently in production as a television miniseries.

 

 

My off-hour reading tends to favor non-fiction: memoirs, mainly, and books on business and public policy. A few times a year I read a novel. For the most part the novels I choose are breezy and relatively short.

The Pillars of the Earth is neither breezy nor short. It is an epic story, spanning four generations in medieval England, about the construction of a Gothic cathedral. When I noticed the sheer girth of the book—at 973 pages, it is nearly two inches thick—and felt its heft, I winced. Surely I had better things to do with my time.

My daughter insisted otherwise. Now a law student, she had read Pillars during spring break on her junior year abroad. The college she was attending required courses in classical philosophy and literature, and she had explored Gothic cathedrals across Europe. With a week off between semesters, she tore through the book even as she was traipsing around the ruins of ancient Athens. She promised it would be the fastest 973-page book I would ever read; I knew it would be the only 973-page book I would ever read.

It took me appreciably more than a week—four is closer to the truth—and I could not claim the Acropolis as a distraction. Yet night after night, I curled up with this book and hours later fell asleep with it on my lap. In short, I loved it.

Pillars appeals on no fewer than five levels. First, like any other Ken Follett book, it is a spellbinding thriller. As he explains in a preface to a recent edition, he has written a series of melodramas, one on the heels of another. No sooner do you find the resolution of one crisis, and you are in the thick of another. All of them link together in a bigger picture. Well into the book, you think it is about a particular character, but that man dies with 400-odd pages to go, and life goes on.

Second, it offers an incredible tapestry of fully realized characters, all of whom are vulnerable to weaknesses of one sort or another, and most of whom ultimately have redeeming features that render them intensely human. The worst of the lot is William Hamleigh (above, being appointed an earl by King Stephen, in a scene from the TV production) and his parents, but a bishop by the name of Waleran Bigod and a monk known as Brother Remigius aren’t far behind. Even the saintly Prior Philip commits the sin of pride. At the other end of the spectrum are the beautiful Lady Aliena and Jack, the man she patiently loves. He is the son of Ellen, a mysterious woman who lives in the forest and whom Prior Philip regards as a witch.

Third, Pillars is a fascinating primer on the architecture and construction of cathedrals. These huge buildings were built with none of the tools that modern architects take for granted, and yet today they stand as testament to the power of religious faith and discipline. All medieval cathedrals took decades to build; in many cases, the men who finished them were the grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who started them. The story of their construction is absorbing—itself a moral lesson in dedication and perseverance.

Fourth, it transports the reader to a time and place that most of us know little about. It is filled with accurate details on the quotidian lives of Twelfth Century people: their housing, their clothing, their nutrition and health, their community, their traditions and customs, their farming, their fears and superstitions, their economy, their laws and government, their technology, and their passions and rivalries. Follett devoted the necessary time and effort to working with medieval scholars who provided him with extensive and colorful detail on the subsistence of our ancestors. It shows.

Fifth, and finally, The Pillars of the Earth reveals enduring truths about organizations and leadership. Depending on the culture of your own organization, the politics of governance can be brutal and dehumanizing, or it can be collaborative and ennobling. In all cases, the way people relate to one another has an enormous impact on their capacity to come together and work to everyone’s advantage.

All in all, Pillars is a rip-roaring good read, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

_________________________

* N.B. You can read the post on my pesto recipe here, and you can read about my hike to the summit of Half Dome here.

 

Minding Gaps Minds a Little Milestone

We’re taking a little bow, to you—our readers.

As of today, ten thousand of you have perused these pages. We’re honored and humbled.

Thank you for reading. If there’s anything we can do for you, please speak up.

— TJL    

 

What Do You Have in Common with Riccardo Muti?

Riccardo Muti, the newly designated music director of the acclaimed Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was drawing one analogy in an interview yesterday morning, and it was a good one. I would like to borrow his analogy and apply it differently, to make a parallel point.

 

In an interview published in the Chicago Tribune, the Italian maestro was addressing a cultural barrier between much of working-class Chicago and the city’s symphony, which has garnered praise and honors around the globe. Then he observed that a symphony must function as a model of civic cooperation.

“Each section of the orchestra plays a different and independent part,” said Muti, referring to the strings and the horns and so forth. “But they put their parts together without killing what their colleagues are doing, so as to achieve a finished performance. They perform together to reach a superior goal—a unity of sound and expression—through cooperation.” He said this broad cooperation was instructive for any community and indeed any society.

A business of any appreciable size has a similar challenge. For sake of example, let’s think of a manufacturer, though the analogy would be equally valid for a service provider or a retail store or a distributor—any organization with divisions and departments. In our example, the sales department, the manufacturing division, and the accounting office are like the strings and the horns of an orchestra. They must work together for everyone’s benefit. If instead they choose to elevate their own interest over the whole organization’s interest, they will wind up with noise, not music. Their “audience”—the customer, after all—will not be happy.

Unfortunately for the business, each division and department does not have its own musical score, its own formal part of the composition to play, note for note. In this respect, the business enterprise is perhaps more like a jazz combo, performing from a theme but with individual instruments playing harmonic riffs of their own, all within the overall framework of the piece. Still, the analogy holds.

Muti’s comment reminded me of a remark that his predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, once made in an interview with Chicago’s classical music radio station, WFMT. Barenboim observed that, as a conductor, it was essential for him to step back and let each performer contribute to the best of her ability. If he ignored that vital principle, if he instead played with a heavy baton that controlled and stifled the individual musicians, the orchestra's music would be heard as oppressed and lifeless.

In both cases, we have tensions that, if managed well, ultimately work to the advantage of the whole, and ultimately to the benefit of the customer. And in both cases, the role of the leader is more to coalesce than to control, more to draw forth than to draw tight, more to inspire than to influence. 

 

In Praise of Mentoring

I haven’t been a full-time student in twenty years, and my daughter, now in law school, has long since ceased to ask her old man's advice on anything academic. Nevertheless, each autumn I look forward to the start of the school year, for a special reason: It’s mentoring time again.

For more than a decade now, I have been mentoring public-policy graduate students at The University of Chicago, where I earned my own master’s degree. I have found mentoring to be as satisfying and rewarding for me as it is intended to be for the student.

For any of you who are not presently involved in a formal mentoring program, I have two words of free advice: Get involved. Mentoring is a powerful opportunity to cultivate another generation of leaders. It is also a wonderful way to give back to the greater community, even if it's just within your company.

If your business already has a mentoring program for younger staff but you’re not involved in it, see if you can become involved. If it doesn’t have a program, take the initiative of establishing one, or at least get the conversation going in that direction. If you are a mentor but you haven’t been putting your heart into it, pause to reflect on the opportunity you are missing.

Alternatively, seek out a college or university that may have a need for someone like you, or find an organization for youth in your community that needs adult role models.

Each year, I am assigned a University of Chicago graduate student who has requested a mentor. We meet several times during the school year for lunch or coffee, and we exchange emails and take time for telephone conversations whenever the need arises.

Our conversations cover the landscape. Sometimes I find myself offering advice on job interviewing and résumés. Because of my own professional expertise, I have worked on a student's skills in expository writing and public speaking. Other times I have just listened as a student vents about a professor whose grading curve is harsh. Still other times I have pushed a student to think more creatively and broadly about his or her future or values or commitment. The students assigned to me are typically new to Chicago, so I have even offered advice on how to enjoy the city on weekends.

The university’s roster of mentors consists of established leaders in metropolitan Chicago. Some are corporate executives. Others are elected or appointed officials of government. Still others are entrepreneurs, or attorneys, or physicians, or administrators of non-profit associations. They all have jam-packed schedules, but they all make time for these high-potential young people.

Just last week, we gathered for our annual mentoring reception and dinner, and I met the young woman with whom I will work this year. Like all the students who have been assigned to me over the years, she is bright, reflective, and articulate. I look forward to working with her.

I have found mentoring to be a constant wellspring of insight and ideas. It keeps me young and continuously invigorated. You will benefit, too. Do give it a try, if not in your place of business then in the greater community. Someone out there needs you, and you have more to offer than you realize now.

Managing and Leading with Intentionality, or Not

I happen to belong to a men’s group that meets for dinner every few weeks and discusses—well, life. We try to take things deep. Apart from a little chit-chat at the beginning, we avoid talking about sports, investments, business, the weather, women, vacations, music, food, wine, books, politics, movies, religion, cars, or hobbies. You may ask what else there is. Actually, lots.

We take turns setting the agenda. For our next meeting, it’s my turn. The theme for this meeting will be intentionality and purpose. I sent out the agenda couple of days ago. We will apply a series of questions to the course of our lives, past and future, in the hope of gaining insight to our own intentionality.

It occurs to me that the same—or similar, anyway—questions can shed light on the degree to which we manage and lead our teams and organizations with intentionality and purpose.

To begin thinking about it, grapple with these questions:

• What significant elements in the course of your organization now appear, with 20/20 hindsight in your rear-view mirror, to have occurred unintentionally—without much or careful forethought and deliberate planning, but rather as one thing “sort of” leading to another?

• What were the surprising benefits of this meandering path?

• Conversely, what price did you pay?

• What disconnects do you observe in retrospect between your values, pholosophy, or vision and a largely unintentional path, if that is what you have taken?

• What events and developments in the course of your business now appear as the product of deliberate planning?

• To what extent has a more deliberate course, if that is what you have taken, truly affirmed your value structure, your philosophy, or your vision?

• If your course has been more deliberately planned—call it “buttoned down”—what surprising costs did you pay from following a straight and narrow path? What were the benefits? Were they the conventional benefits you expected?

• What was a hybrid, and of which was it more?

• How and how not are the two paths mutually exclusive?

• In what ways are you now managing and leading with greater deliberate intentionality? Or with greater agility, so as to exploit unforeseen opportunities? If there is a change, why?

• On balance, do you wish for more intentionality and purpose? Or more serendipity and unanticipated opportunity?

Side Roads: Hiking to the Summit of Half Dome in Yosemite Park

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a couple of months ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! and Our Philosophy posts.

In our inaugural Side Roads column on August 15, I shared my recipe for pesto. If you haven’t yet tried it, be sure to do so soon, before fresh basil becomes difficult to find for the winter.

Today, in the second installment of Side Roads, we will revisit one of the most phenomenal days of my life—the day I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada of eastern California. If you have ever climbed Half Dome, you already know just how exhilarating, just how incredible, a hike can be. If you haven't, take a few minutes to come along with me. 

 

That’s me. In the navy blue shirt, waving to you. From the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. It was ten years ago today. Look closely, and you will notice the orange date in the lower right corner.

The view from the summit of Half Dome is spectacular, as you can see for yourself. That little bluff a couple of miles behind my arm is the legendary El Capitan—its own face so very intimidating.

From where I am sitting to the valley floor below is just about one mile, straight up and down. Starting from the valley floor, I climbed Half Dome in a single day, and I took the long way. My route was closer to twenty miles, plus the vertical mile on the ascent and the vertical mile on the descent.

It was pitch dark when I started around six o’clock in the morning, and it was pitch dark when I finished around eight in the evening. (The trail itself is only about eight miles horizontal and one mile vertical, each way. But without an overnight camping permit you cannot park close to the trailhead, and if you are embarking before dawn there are no shuttles to the trailhead. So you walk.)

By comparison, running the Chicago Marathon was easy and brief. I was in pretty good shape for this climb, and yet it was so debilitating that I couldn’t walk for three days afterward. I could scarcely stand. Even sleeping was painful, even with prescription-strength doses of ibuprofen.

Because I was hiking in the autumn, when the waterfalls are comparative trickles, I was able to climb right alongside the Vernal and Nevada falls. In springtime, thunderous cataracts prevent anything of the sort. It was straight up, rock upon rock, each a foot-high step. When I got to the top of each waterfall, I expected to see the bald head of Half Dome ahead of me. But the trail kept going and going.

At times, I thought I was lost. It was nearly noon before the rocky promontory showed itself, and I still had two more hours to the top. The last mile of the climb (from where I am in this picture) is extremely strenuous. Multiple switchbacks lead upward to the shoulder. There you discover a pair of iron cables draping down the final 150 meters of bare granite at a slope of maybe 40 to 55 degrees. To reach the summit, you pull yourself up hand-over-hand, and you hold on tightly. If you let go, you die.

When I finally stepped onto the peak, I had an odd feeling of disappointment that the climbing had ended. The journey was so exhilarating; now I would just turn around? Then I looked out across the valley. Oh. My. Gosh. Under a pure, cerulean sky, I could see probably fifty or sixty miles. A mile below, Yosemite Valley looked like a child's playset. Maybe, I thought, this is how we appear to God.

I noticed a little cairn of rocks in the middle of the summit. Each climber could contribute a stone or a rock to it as the only evidence of his presence. I placed mine alongside the others. In parks, as you know, you leave nothing behind but your footprints, and you take nothing out but your pictures.

Naturally I took quite a few pictures. Though climbing alone that day, I traded cameras with other climbers so that we all had photographic proof of our success. For the picture of me on the summit, I ventured daringly close to the sheer cliff. I felt eerily invulnerable. Below, I could see nothing smaller than a shed.

Though the hike would take fourteen hours, I could remain on the summit for only thirty minutes at midday. The descent would be long and grueling. Fortunately, the most frightening moments were the initial return down the granite slope to the shoulder. It took more upper body strength to go down the cables than up, and it was scarier—owing to the fact I was looking at where my body would land if I fell. 

The sun set an hour or so before I got all the way down to the valley floor. Fortunately, I had brought a halogen flashlight. The last few miles were excruciatingly painful. My quads and hamstrings were piercing with pain. Neither leg wanted to move. I needed both, and I forced myself to keep walking.

Only after my descent did I learn that an early explorer of the High Sierra had once confidently predicted that no one would ever reach the summit of Half Dome. The bald head of steep granite was just too forbidding. Eventually someone did summit, of course. Today, hundreds of climbers reach the peak every year.

A few weeks after this adventure, I was flying back to San Francisco on business, and the pilot took us right over Yosemite National Park. By then it had already snowed. But I could clearly make out Half Dome and the Vernal and Nevada falls. The memory of agony and of ecstacy they had given me that day in October brought a satisfying smile.

What a day it was. What a day.

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Quote / Unquote: Benjamin Disraeli on the Paradox of Leadership

 

Last week we introduced another new feature, which will appear irregularly but frequently. To be known as Quote/Unquote, it will offer a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we will also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation will stand alone.

Our inaugural feature quoted the British novelist Charles Dickens, who presciently imagined some of the difficulties with email—140 years ago. (Scroll down to the September 11 post.) Today we quote another Brit from the same era, Benjamin Disraeli, who was both an author and a Conservative Party political leader. Not incidentally, he was also a wit; scores of his incisive quotations have survived the decades and are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century.

Benjamin Disraeli was twice the prime minister of England during the reign of Queen Victoria. An intimate friend of the monarch, and the only person of Jewish heritage ever to serve as prime minister, Disraeli intuitively knew that compelling leadership is a kind of spiritual transaction between the leader and the led. Moreover, he understood and appreciated a paradox of leadership: that leaders must follow, and followers must lead.

In one of his most famous remarks, Disraeli said:

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

 

Take a moment to think about that. Now, ask yourself these questions:

• What exactly do you think Disraeli is driving at?

• Is he suggesting that leaders should abdicate the responsibility of leading?

• Is he calling for anarchy or a kind of mob rule?

• What relevance, if any, does Disraeli's remark have for leadership in business generally? For leadership at your level (enterprise, division, department, team) more particularly?

• Should leaders be more humble than prideful? Why or why not?

• Why should, if at all, leaders follow the people they are nominally leading?

• Doesn’t that undermine the leader's role?

• In a modern organization—a large business enterprise, or one of its divisions, or one of its operating teams—what would this look like and sound like?

• What would be its practical impact?

Quote / Unquote: Charles Dickens on Face-to-Face Communication

 

Today we introduce another feature of the Minding Gaps blog. It will appear frequently but irregularly. To be known as Quote/Unquote, the feature will offer a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In some cases we will also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion; in other instances, the quotation will stand alone. We begin with a prescient quotation from a famous 19th century British author.

Charles Dickens, perhaps best known for his Victorian novels A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and A Christmas Carol, must have been thinking of only the telegraph when he remarked:

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone

who with his soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Dickens, who died in 1870, could have known only of the theoretical basis for the telephone, which wouldn’t be developed and patented until 1876. The generations of technology since—from the telephone to tubes and transistors to teletype to television to Telex to texting to Twitter (honest, the alliteration wasn't intentional)—have brought us ever greater speed and access to information, while steadily reducing the intimacy and touch between and among us, and perhaps raising shields behind which we cower and quiver, as Dickens seems to have been predicting.

What would Dickens think of today's communication? We pass more data back and forth, to be sure, but whether we understand one another even an iota more is questionable. Today, many of us take peculiar pride in cramming indecipherable and impromptu abbreviations into 140 characters and quickly pressing SEND, often disseminating the shorthand to people we have never met and never will meet.

Let’s ponder:

• Was Dickens exaggerating the social or psychic cost of electronic communication?

• Do you think he was just a Luddite at heart?

• What have we lost through technology? What role does email play in that?

• Is the rush to social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging) problematic for you?

• Beyond speed and access, what have we gained through technology?

• What is Dickens implying by references to “soul” and “brave and true”?

• Are we less soulful, brave, and true than our parents and grandparents? If so, what exactly is the nature and cost of that? 

• How do we best cope with the implications of all this on human understanding and social cohesion?

Stop the Web 2.0, I Want to Get Off

Not really. But sometimes, I’m telling you.

For the uninitiated, Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the Internet, a two-way street. It is what the Internet is today.

Initially, in the 1990s, the Web was a waterfall or a cataract of information, all of it cascading downward. It was static, an online catalogue and newspaper and encyclopedia: interactive only insofar as you might use it to make purchases or reservations in a secure transaction or to search for data that could help you make better decisions. In retrospect, we now refer to that as Web 1.0.

Beginning five or six years ago, the Web evolved into a riverway or a canal, with barge traffic flowing in both directions. More to the point, it became dynamic, a community and a conversation: not merely transactional but broadly participative and transformative. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia, not to mention this very blog, embody the virtual public square of the Internet today. This new generation of technology is known as Web 2.0.

Now in virtually every respect, I find Web 2.0 exhilarating and energizing. It is a big part of my life, as it is of yours, for sure. Much of our work life plays out on Web 2.0.

But in one prominent respect, I find Web 2.0 most unfortunate, even at times repugnant. I speak of the comments section that often follows an essay or video or other feature posted to an Internet site, often a newspaper or a political site. Some of these comments are so revolting, so vile, so profane, that decent people can only shudder. I myself want nothing to do with them. I want to turn off the comments sections permanently.

Take a look at this fascinating series of iconic photographs, and then, if you stomach it, read the exchange of comments that follows. In particular, look at comments numbered 4, 16, 30, 53, 54. Mind you, this is relatively tame stuff. It is easy to find sites where the comments are far more vitriolic and scornful. But this is sufficient to illustrate the point I am making.

I’d like to see an option at the end of any site with comments that allows the reader or viewer to choose whether to see any comments at all. Nine times out of ten, I would choose not to.

I’d also like to see a requirement for real names to be entered with any comment, and a strict prohibition on verbal abuse and profanity. Yes, I know the argument that the Federalist Papers were anonymous, and I am not a fan of political correctness in the least.

It’s just that we’re living in an era when transparency, authenticity, and civility need to be restored to public discourse. As the comments on so many sites indicate, we’re not there yet. We’re not close to it, and we seem to be moving in the wrong direction.

Side Roads: An Occasional Diversion

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So we’re beginning an irregular, occasional feature here at the Minding Gaps blog to be known as Side Roads. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. Think of it as a photo album of life’s joys, little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only occasionally and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post and the Our Philosophy post, both of which you can usually find among the first dozen or so posts.

For our inaugural Side Roads column, we’ll begin with a recipe—yes, a recipe.

 

I happen to enjoy cooking, and my favorite dish is a summertime joy: fresh, aromatic pesto. I cannot stop eating it. To my thinking, it’s better than chocolate.

The main ingredient in pesto is, of course, basil. Thanks to hydroponic growers, you can now buy fresh basil year round at the green grocer, and it is much less expensive than it used to be. That enables you to prepare pesto year round, which is a very good thing.

Still, I prefer to make pesto with only the freshest of basil. I don’t have an herb garden any more, so I typically obtain basil as gifts from generous friends or in bulk purchase from summertime farmers markets here in suburban Chicago. Either way, it is just hours from the garden.

Last weekend, after purchasing quite a bit of basil at an outdoor market, I made the emulsion described below and then froze it. Now I can thaw it and use it gradually for several weeks.

Almost any pesto is delicious. Some few are excellent. One or two are extraordinary. Mine? I personally think it is phenomenal. But you be the judge. If you disagree—well, that's silly. You won't.

Now I am happy to share it with you. Please, please; there's no need to nominate me for a Nobel Prize. Just don’t say I never give you anything.

To begin, have these ingredients at hand:

• 1 big bag (one pound) freshly harvested basil
• 2 cups virgin imported olive oil
• 1 stick unsalted, unsweetened butter, softened
• 4 teaspoons Kosher salt
• 8 tablespoons fresh pignolia nuts (pine nuts)
• 12 cloves peeled and crushed fresh garlic (or more, I won’t complain)
• 2 cups freshly grated, imported Romano pecorino cheese
• 8 tablespoons freshly grated, imported parmesan cheese

Now proceed as follows:

• Rinse the basil.
• Strip the basil leaves from their stems, and discard the stems.
• Combine the basil with the olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, and salt in a food processor (in several batches, and in equal proportion to the amount of basil you can fit).
• Mix by pulse for 30-45 seconds. That's enough to chop the basil and pignolia nuts finely and blend everything nicely. Do not blend excessively. You should have a textured emulsion. Combine the batches and gently stir. 

You can freeze the emulsion, as I did last weekend. It will also keep several weeks in the refrigerator. I cover it with a thin layer of olive oil to prevent oxidation.

When you are ready to finish it, proceed as follows:

• Fold the pecorino and the parmesan gently into the basil emulsion. Stir.
• Introduce the softened butter to the mix. Blend gently.
• Add a tablespoon or two of hot water to melt the ingredients together.
• Blend gently but completely. 

Serve over freshly made, al dente linguini or fettuccini.

That’s it, folks. Let me know how it tastes.

Have a great weekend, and see you Monday.

Remember: Monday will be the second installment of our new regular feature on data. We'll start each week with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Monday, we will present the data on nonverbal communication that so many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.

How to Be a Mensch of a Leader

I found pearls of insight in this interview with Bruna Martinuzzi, a Canadian consultant and expert in emotional intelligence. Her thinking on these issues is consistent with my own.

Ms. Martinuzzi is the author of The Leader as a Mensch: Become the Kind of Person Others Want to Follow. In this interview, conducted by Guy Kawasaki, she explains how to be a mensch in business.

 

Question: What qualities define a mensch?

Answer: A mensch is an individual who is decent and honorable in all of his undertakings—he or she is the same person privately and publicly. This is a person of high integrity, someone that you would feel totally comfortable doing business with. A mensch’s word is as good as his signature. One of the hallmarks of a mensch is empathy and compassion, a genuine caring for his fellow man. A mensch will always look for an opportunity to do good in life, to be of help to the community. When you are in the presence of a mensch, you feel good about you—you sense a total absence of artifice, you know that you are in the presence of a genuine human being, one who will not deceive you, undermine you or try to diminish you in any way.

Question: Are mensches born or made?

Answer: Some individuals have a natural capacity for being a mensch. They learned this at their mother’s knee—they cannot be anything else because the seed for menschhood was planted and nurtured early on in life. They may be catapulted into menschhood by some significant life experiences like experiencing a loss, surviving an illness, going through a betrayal by a business partner—all events that become a healthy trauma, that awaken one to the need to be a better human being, to function on a higher evolutionary plane. Still for others becoming a mensch evolves from a motivation to be a good leader, to do well while doing good. All of us have in us the capacity to act as mensches—it’s a part of being human. We just need to raise our awareness of how we show up in our dealings with others and ask ourselves, "Am I proud of who I am or who I have become as a person? Do I strive to do the right thing?" Self-awareness precedes self-management.

Question: What is the acid test to separate the true mensches from the smooth pretenders?

Answer: There are two things at play here. The first is: Consistency. While some people can succeed at counterfeiting who they are for some of the time, if you spend enough time with them, you start to see some cracks in the veneer. You get a glimpse of the person behind the mask. It is very difficult to go through life, in all circumstances, trying to keep the mask in place. It will slip at some point. The other thought that comes to mind is that, deep down, most of us have a well-developed gut feel that sends signals to us that not everything we see is at it seems. But many choose to ignore the whispers for a variety of reasons. As Goethe put it: “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” It may not be convenient or in our self-interest to believe otherwise, and, therefore, we ignore the small integrity slips, the little things we see that tell us all is not right with that person.

Question: Who are some examples of mensches in business?

Answer: There are many. One, for example, was mentioned last month, by President Obama at his Address to the Joint Session of Congress. He spoke about Leonard Abess, a bank president in Florida who took his $60 million cash out bonus, and distributed it to all 399 people who worked for his bank, and not only that, he tracked down another 72 who used to work for him. When he was asked why he did it, he said: “I knew some of these people since I was seven years old. I didn’t feel right getting the money myself.”

Another example is Ted Forstsmann, CEO of IMG and the senior founding partner of Forstmann Little & Co, a leveraged buyout firm. Forstsmann co-founded The Children’s Scholarship Fund, the U.S.’s largest charity devoted to helping parents send their children to the schools of their choice. He continues to do work to improve the lives of children both here and abroad. Peter Peterson is another one. He is senior Chairman of the Blackstone Group, an alternative asset management and financial services company. Peterson gave $1 billion to his new foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, to help solve some of the U.S.’s biggest economic problems.

But it doesn’t just have to be about giving money: Christoper Avery, an international lawyer, founded Business & Human Rights Centre to track the positive and negative impact of over 4,000 companies worldwide. Chris Harrop, a marketing director for Marshalls, a UK stone company. He devoted his time for energetic campaigning to reduce child labor in the quarrying of Indian sandstone. Daphne E. Jones, Vice President, Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Johnson & Johnson, is committed to helping women succeed and works to increase the number of women who work in science and technology. Linda Hunt, the Chief Administrative Officer at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix is a strong advocate for diversity, and the elimination of racism and discrimination. She has devoted herself to a hospital where she has an opportunity to also serve the poor and underserved in a part of the city with an ethnically diverse population. And, of course, we all know about Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their mantra is: "Don’t be evil," which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. As Page put it: “So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.” A wonderful thing, indeed, if every businessperson approached their work with this mind-set.

Question: Many business people are very successful and rich and the antithesis of mensches, so why should we aspire to be mensches?

Answer: First, let’s define what the antithesis of a mensch is. This would be someone who lacks empathy, compassion and integrity—an individual who is self-serving, focused only on his own needs to succeed and acquire wealth. One would argue that those who accomplish their goals despite this way of doing business, might find success, but not significance. I love Peter Drucker’s exhortation to make your life your end-game, to ask yourself frequently: “What do you want to be remembered for?” Significance is making a positive difference in the world. Success without significance is hollow. Rabbi Hillel’s beautiful words say it best: “…if I am only for myself, then what am I?”

Question: In tough times like these, is menschhood possible in businesses?

Answer: It’s not only possible, it is essential. People are increasingly more anxious about job security and the effect that the slumping economy will have on them. It’s much easier to run a business or lead teams when the economy is thriving but it is in these tough times that business people have a golden opportunity to rise above the din of the crowd as a true mensch and show leadership and ask themselves: “How can I make a difference?”

Question: Can a young person, say under forty, be a mensch or does it only come with age?

Answer: Absolutely, anyone at any age can be a mensch—even a child can be taught to grow up as a mensch. And if you are a young entrepreneur for whom this concept has not been foremost on your mind, you can start right now. Develop a framework of principles and strong values that can help steer you in your daily choices and the decisions you make, a moral compass to guide you in your efforts to be a good human being, to use your many gifts to give something back to society.

Question: Suppose that a person wants to become a mensch, what are the steps to take?

Answer: Here are eleven quick tips:

1.   Consistently act with honesty. Watch the small integrity slips.

2.   When someone has wronged you, continue to treat them with civility.

3.   Are you in the habit of making hasty promises that you know, from experience, you are unable to keep? Think back on what promises you made, to whom, and see if you can fulfill some of these.

4.   Help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.

5.   The next time something goes wrong on a project, suspend blame and ask: “What can we learn?”

6.   Hire people who are as smart or smarter than you are—whose talents surpass you—and give them opportunities for growth. Not only is it the smart thing to do but it is also a sign of high personal humility.

7.   Improve the way you communicate with people: don’t interrupt people; don’t dismiss their concerns offhand; don’t rush to give advice; don’t change the subject. Allow people their moment.

8.   Resolve to do no harm in anything you undertake. If you are certain that you don’t have the competence to take on something that is offered, consider that you might be doing harm to someone by accepting it anyway.

9.   Become aware of your stance at business meetings. Are you known as the devil’s advocate—the one who is quick to shoot down others’ ideas? Jumping in too quickly to negate an idea can derail the creative process for others. Often, valuable ideas are the result of the initial “crazy” thought.

10. Resolve to become a philanthropist of know-how. What knowledge, expertise or best practices can you share with colleagues, customers and other stakeholders as a way to enrich them?

11. At the end of each day, when you clear your desk before you head home, take a few minutes to mentally go over your day. Think about significant conversations you had, meetings you attended, emails you sent, and other actions you undertook. Are you proud? Could you have done better? Getting into this habit of introspection will pay dividends in the long run.

Question: Would a mensch ever refer to himself or herself as being a mensch?

Answer: A mensch doesn’t normally refer to himself or herself as being a mensch. Generally, it is others who notice that quality about a person and might be inclined to say: “You are a mensch” or “That was a mensch thing to do.” in which case, this is humbly acknowledged. For example, last year, I was reading a tribute to Sam Sane, a distinguished businessman in Australia, celebrating his 90th birthday, during which he was referred to by those assembled as being a mensch to which he replied: “I’ve always believed I was born on this earth to be a mensch. And I’ve tried to be one.”

So the $64,000 question for all of us is, “What do you want to be remembered for?”

_______________________________________

Bruna Martinuzzi is a certified leadership, emotional intelligence and presentation-skills facilitator and consultant. Her articles have appeared in The Leader’s Edge, Human Resources Management, The H.R. Reporter, H.R. Online, The Personnel Journal and Business Ethics Magazine. Ms. Martinuzzi's web site is here. This interview initially appeared on the web site of American Express Open.

 

Everything You Know About Nonverbal Communication Is Wrong

Everything you know about nonverbal communication is wrong.

How can I be so sure? Simple.

Most people know only one thing about nonverbal communication. They “know” that only 7 percent of meaning comes from words, while 55 percent of meaning comes from body language and posture, and the remaining 38 percent of meaning comes from tone of voice.

That is bunk.

For clarity, let me repeat: That is bunk.

Those numbers were indeed the product of legitimate academic research, but they don’t mean what everyone believes they mean. Their application is very, very narrow. Even then, the nonverbal component is subject to manipulation just as words are.

Please take just just a few minutes to watch this YouTube video, produced by Martin Shovel of Creativityworks in the UK. In addition to demolishing the myth of nonverbal communication, he demonstrates the unique power of creative animation.

Here it is:

Let me know what you think

In the future, I will have more to say about the kind of nonverbal communication that really does matter.

"You Are What You Think About"

Earl Nightingale died twenty years ago, and yet the wisdom of his message is as relevant and timely today as ever.

Nightingale created the art of motivational speaking and, in the golden years of radio, brought it to the masses. His commentary was broadcast regularly on WGN Radio, Chicago, whose signal was (and is) strong enough to reach two-thirds of the nation. Millions of people read his books, listened to his broadcasts, and took his advice.

Here is an excerpt from perhaps his most famous talk. Set aside eleven minutes and view it in its entirety. Then devote some more time to thinking rigorously about its message, and apply it to yourself. I am doing just that for myself.

Why Is Life Like This?

Ever since the spring thaw in the Upper Midwest, when the nearby park began calling my name for leisurely 3-mile jogs or brisk 5-mile walks, I have been searching for the black fanny pack that holds a water bottle and my cellular phone.

I searched this house from top to bottom, from north to south, from east to west, from inside out--all to no avail. It was nowhere. All told, I must have devoted five or six hours to this hapless endeavor. Probably more than that. It became an obsession, and a futile obsession at that.

I searched through all my closets. I searched in all my luggage, all my backpacks, all the nooks and crannies of this place. I looked through all the boxes that hold stuff I should have thrown out years ago. I even looked in the refrigerator.

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

I was fanny packless. There was no fanny pack to be found. No where. No how. No why.

I could only assume that I tossed it out last summer or fall. Maybe it got moldy in all the rain last year. Or maybe I left it somewhere. Although I didn't remember doing either of those things, there was no other explanation. Whatever. I would just have to buy a new one.

Today, some errands brought me past the local Sports Authority store. So I stopped in and examined the array of fanny packs, and I settled on a snazzy number that set me back $20.32. Before leaving the store, I used the sales clerk's scissors to remove all the tags and plastic marketing straps. One less thing to do at home.

Now, finally, I could once again go for a run or a walk without having to carry a water bottle and telephone in my hand.

I came directly home. I pressed the button on the garage opener. The door opened up. I pulled into the garage.

You guessed it. There, on the handlebars of an old triathlon bike, lay not one but two fanny packs.