Archive for the ‘Money’ Category
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
There is a great interview by Adi Ignatuis with Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks that is well worth reading.
Here are some thoughts after reading the article. Schultz and Starbucks have been fascinating to follow over the years. The original concept of community hangout, “Let’s meet at Starbucks” was a standard for so many folks; it moved to “OMG, another Starbucks, when is enough enough“?
I began to think Schultz was a reincarnation of King Midas. Remember that king? He wished to be the richest ruler in all the lands and he was kindly granted that wonderful wish. Told that whatever he touched would turn to gold, he was a happy camper. Silverware turned to gold, drinking goblets turned to gold, coffee mugs turned to gold.
The story is a “BEWARE” story. When Midas’s daughter ran to give him a hug, you guessed it, she also turned to gold. And the moral of the story is to question when is enough enough?
For a period of time it sure looked like Shultz was on a Midas mission to rule the world through lattes and the like. Then the bubble burst, and I remember thinking it serves him right. There are more important subjects to tackle, like global warming and oil spills.
Back to the interview; there is one part where I thought, hey maybe it would be worth it to meet Howard Schultz and have a dopper espresso macchiato with him. He was asked for an example of a decision he had made that Wall Street didn’t like.
His answer: health care. He just couldn’t cut the benefits, no matter how perfect it was to do so during a down economy. A shareholder complained and he stood his ground, telling the man to sell his stock, he would not budge on this issue.
This brought to mind the Schultz I first read about years ago, the man I decided to check out and follow as a leader of substance. That Howard was determined to always have full health care for his employees after growing up watching his father struggle. His dad had an accident and was laid off from his job and the family lost their health care benefits.
At a young age Schultz internalized the pain of this family crisis and vowed to be more caring if he ever made it in business. During the recent downturn for Starbucks he could have stayed in the Midas mentality. Instead he stayed true to himself.
In the interview he goes on to say that it is important for him to look in the mirror and feel he has done something that has meaning and relevancy, something people can respect. He stayed with his heart and took on “the street“.
Question: what do you see when you look in the mirror?
Tags: Authentic, Enough is Enough, Family Crisis, Father, Healthcare, Howard Schultz, Integrity, King Midas, Leaders, Leadership, Meaning, Relevance, Respect, Starbucks, Wall Street
Posted in Character, Health, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Money | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Where do you think you waste the most amount of time at work? Is it spending time gnawing on your hurt feelings about upsets with co-workers? Is it rewriting reports that have been done poorly by direct reports? Is it intervening in workplace conflict that is dragging your team down? Maybe it is in the time wasted in overly long, boring, or unnecessary meetings.
There is mental waste, emotional waste, and physical waste that can be eliminated at work that once cleaned out creates a more efficient, economical, and time saving culture.
Take meetings for example. They have been called the “black hole” of the workplace. Most people when asked, say they dread the length of time spent in meetings that are often seen as unnecessary and insignificant.
So many meetings are of the “just because” variety; just because it’s Monday, or just because we are senior leadership, or just because we are on the committee.
Take the time to evaluate routine, regularly scheduled meetings. The question to answer is “What is the key purpose?”
Once you decide the meeting has value follow the following rules and you will have waste management under control.
1. Meetings are living theater. Have a title and an outline of important issues.
2. Start and end on time. The curtain goes up, the play is the thing, and the curtain goes down. Run your meetings to stay within the structure of theater and you won’t go wrong.
3. Have a main theme: No more than two subplots or you will lose the audience.
4. Facilitator is the director. Keep the meeting lively and make sure all the “actors” know what is expected of them. Pre-rehearse with the main characters so they are prepared with reports and power points if necessary.
5. Present with panache. Pictures are truly worth a thousand words. The brain will remember one picture sprinkled with emotional words longer and better than a long dissertation with vast numbers of numbers.
6. Careful with handouts. Less is more in this overly stimulating world. Give a single page with key phrases rather than an entire presentation to follow.
7. Ask questions. Give participants space to think in new ways and have time for Q&A. The key to successful meetings is engagement and involvement.
Meetings that are structured like theater are remembered and successful. The first few you do may be like off, off Broadway. However, as you become more comfortable with plot, subplot and the emotional aspect of drawing people into the importance of what you are doing for your team and your company you will get more and more buy-in. Who knows, Broadway is always looking for great stories, maybe one of your meetings can become a major winner. So, start thinking, which star would you like to play you in the theater production?
Tags: Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Leadership Develoment Programs, leadership programs, Leadership Strategies, Presentations, Time Management, Time Saving, Workplace, Workplace Conflict, Workplace Relationships
Posted in Accountability, Advice, Boss, Business, Character, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Decision Making, Executive Teams, Human Resources, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Leadership Strategies, Management, Money, Patterns, Reflections, Relationships, Total Leaders, Transformation, Workplace Relationships, leadership development | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
I found this very good blog about the Toyota fiasco. Please read and note my comments; I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Article by Steve Tobak, The Corner Office
Survival of the fittest requires conflict; that’s as true in the boardroom as it is in the wild. In that sense, conflict isn’t just a good thing, it’s a key ingredient in all great organizations. It’s the manner in which businesses test new ideas and up-coming leadership talent.
But there comes a point when otherwise healthy conflict turns toxic, even destructive. I’ve seen it happen too many times, and when it does, it can plunge a successful company into a tailspin from which it might never recover. Case in point: the leadership crisis festering inside Toyota.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal chronicled the long-standing feud between the founding Toyoda family and Toyota’s non-family leadership faction. For generations, the pendulum of Toyota’s corporate leadership has swung from one to the other. And that’s worked pretty well … until now.
Now, the warring factions have taken their long-standing feud to previously unseen heights of public, personal attacks on each other. The family faction is led by Akio Toyoda, current CEO and 53-year old grandson of the company founder. From the WSJ:
Mr. Toyoda and his allies have been saying openly that when he took the top job last year after a 15-year hiatus for the Toyoda clan, he inherited a company weakened by non-family predecessors who sacrificed quality for faster growth and fatter margins.
The problems arose when “some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit,” Mr. Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March. Mr. Toyoda’s opponents – former company presidents Katsuaki Watanabe and Hiroshi Okuda – have an entirely different view (also from the WSJ):
They say Toyota’s current troubles are less a quality crisis and more a management and public-relations crisis of Mr. Toyoda’s making, reflecting their longstanding warnings that he wasn’t ready to run a global corporation.
“Is Akio ducking criticism of being a beneficiary of nepotism by accusing us and trying to justify his ascendancy to the top job?” one of Mr. Watanabe’s top aides said. Hiroshi Okuda … has told at least two associates since the recalls of cars involved in sudden acceleration incidents earlier this year: “Akio needs to go.”
Asked [in 2000] about future prospects for Mr. Toyoda, then a 43-year-old general manager, Mr. Okuda said: “Nepotism just doesn’t belong in our future.” He elaborated: “Akio-class talents are rolling around all over Toyota, like so many potatoes.”
In my opinion, both parties are actually at fault for the company’s current crisis. As I said a couple of months ago in At the Heart of What’s Ailing Toyota:
Like so many big companies before, in its relentless drive to become the world’s largest auto maker, Toyota’s management took its eye off the ball. In other words, growth became its priority, while the unique aspects of its culture and operational competencies responsible for its success to this point, became secondary.
After many years of stellar leadership, last year Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company’s founder, became CEO. And while Toyota’s issues have gestated for some time before Toyoda took the reins, his spectacular mishandling of the crisis demonstrates that he wasn’t ready for the job.
Nevertheless, instead of working together to resolve critical issues facing the company, Toyota’s leadership has devolved to juvenile finger-pointing. And, if this once-great company’s leadership doesn’t get its act together, well, as I said before, “not only will its recovery be long and painful, but it may not recover at all. It happens.”
My response below:
The Toyota mess is so familiar to anyone who has spent time working with family businesses. I grew up in one and remember the tension between my father and his two brothers and then the tugging, pulling, and positioning when outsiders joined the ranks.I became a family therapist and then morphed into an executive coach with a passion for working with family firms.
I know that finger pointing is common in all companies and is compounded when the family name is being tarnished. Here is what I do know: when stress hits the hot button there is a natural tendency to revert to patterns of behavior learned in the original organization, the family, that were there for survival and security.
There is a need to create safety by blaming and judging others as a protection mechanism. I only hope that the Toyoda clan can gain some understanding of the how and the why they did not intervene to keep the brand and their name in a positive light.
Tags: Blaming, Coaching, Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Family Business, Family Conflict, family patterns, Leadership, leadership development, Patterns
Posted in Accountability, Business, Character, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Decision Making, Economy, Ethics, Executive Teams, Family Business, Family Conflict, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Management, Media, Money, Patterns, Stress, Trust, Workplace Relationships, leadership development | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
Kraft and Cadbury have not begun a most happy union. It is said that “In the beginning is everything” and that being the case, expect some unhappy times ahead.
There are so many layers to peel away. When there is a “takeover” or even a more friendly merger it is not unlike creating a step family. I have been part of several US/UK mergers and if the cultural issues stay under the surface they come out as people wearing gorilla suits….ready to fight for their own survival.
Here is my response to the BNET article about the issue of trust in this combined organization.
In the book “Don’t Bring It to Work” there are lots of examples of how we all, and that means all of us, react by replicating childhood behaviors. We ignore, deny, send the ‘little brother’ to get yelled at (as Irene did).
It is time we really took charge of what happens when we feel attacked or betrayed and find new ways to “practice safe stress” by learning to look at and change old, outmoded behaviors that were there for security and survival yet, keep us defending, protecting, and justifying rather than move to a more adult place.
Tags: Behavior, Behavioral Patterns, Business, Don't Bring It to Work, Family, Fear, Leadership, Leadership Strategies, Merger, Safe Stress, Trust
Posted in Business, Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Executive Teams, Fear, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Leadership Strategies, Management, Money, Patterns, Trust, leadership development | No Comments »
Monday, March 1st, 2010
There is an interesting new TV program airing this Friday; “Who Do You Think You Are?” based on finding the long lost ancestors of celebrities.
This is not just for the rich and the famous. I believe we all would benefit from finding out more about where we came from, and what patterns of behavior were handed down from generation to generation.
Most of us are interested in ourselves and don’t care all that much about the stories of those who came before us. We are polite when grandparents talk about “walking miles to school on dirt roads in flimsy shoes with only an apple for lunch.” We say to ourselves that times have changed and that was then, not the way it is now. We want to stay in the present and not look back.
So, what is the value of searching for ancestors and finding out more about where we came from? Lisa Kudrow, of “Friends” fame and producer of the new series put it clearly “We always forget how important history is. It informs everything that happens after.”
In “Don’t Bring It to Work”, there is a way to begin the search for your own history, because Kudrow is right, the past does inform everything that happens after. In the book is an outline of a “Sankofa Map”. The word Sankofa comes from Ghana and means “clear the past to free the present”.
What we know we can change, what remains hidden, can haunt us. No, it is not possible to know all the details; that is not what matters. What matters is finding the themes that have tumbled through our histories. So, often with a little time and willingness to dig down, the pieces of our personal histories are available to us.
It is so important for leaders to take the concept of self awareness into the long-ago past and find out how the patterns handed down from great grandparents to grandparents to parents to children through the ages impact decisions made right now.
The stories we learn about can be fascinating and shed light on why we do what we do. Every family has its share of heroes as well as villains and we can then pull on the positive patterns and stand on the shoulders of the past rather than repeat it.
Tags: Behavioral Patterns, Communication, Conflict, Emotions, family patterns, Family-Based Patterns, Health, History, Leaders, Leadership, Media, Money, Neuroscience, pattern aware, Patterns, Power, Relationships, Sankofa
Posted in Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Diversity, Education, Employers, Ethics, Executive Teams, Health, History, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Management, Media, Money, Neuroscience, PatternAware, Patterns, Psychology, leadership development | No Comments »
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
This is a time for women to pat themselves on the back for all the successes that have come in the last 60 years. The role of women has changed dramatically, and it has been mostly a quiet revolution.
But there have been some loud bumps and bleeps along the way, like the angry wife who took action to cut off her husband’s private parts, rather than just wish she could. With the rash of cheaters now making the headlines that may be something to rethink instead of all the shame-faced public apologies. Scratch that, it was just a wandering thought!
Since, within the next several months women will become the majority of the workforce, and we know there is power in numbers, it is an important time to think about what we, both female and male, want to have as change initiative, moving forward.
I would like to underline the importance of a partnership model. Women and men need to talk in a new and more effective way. It is about how we connect and relate around the things that matter most – our relationships and how to be stewards for the future generations.
Not enough air time has been given to these priorities, and as a society I believe we are suffering and self- medicating through substances, sex, and shopping.
There is a new feminism (what about a new ‘malism’) that takes into account the differences in the way men and women are wired. We need to find a middle way that takes into account how male and female brains process information. Not good or bad, just DIFFERENT.
Even more importantly, we need to take into account the legacy we hand to the next generation. So far, we, and that means all of us, have not gotten high marks here. What are we teaching our kids about what it means to be a woman, a man, a business person, a citizen, a human being?
The workplace is the place where change can happen and happen quickly. It is the place that has changed the most in the past century. It is the place that women and men can begin a true dialogue and real partnership can occur.
Tags: Celebrity cheaters, Change initiative, Cheaters, Female vs Male thinking, Feminism, Future generations, Models, Partnership model, Pulbic apologies, Relationships, Self-medicating, Substance abuse, Women vs Men, Women's revolution, Women's success
Posted in Accountability, Avoider, Business, Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Consulting, Diversity, Education, Ethics, Executive Teams, History, Human Resources, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Management, Marital coaching, Media, Money, Neuroscience, PatternAware, Patterns, Power, Psychology, Reflections, The media, Transformation, Trust, Uncategorized, Women in the workplace, Workplace Relationships, leadership development | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
hubris: overbearing pride or presumption
The word hubris is a fascinating one. It contains a warning: When you are too sure of yourself, beware of a fall!!! It is a great lesson to learn, both on a personal and a professional level.
Remember Enron; weren’t they called “the smartest guys in the room?” Whatever happened to Atari? How about Fannie Mae? Those who work, or used to work, on Wall Street have had to, or should look up the word hubris.
And Toyota. What do we say about that icon of excellence? A key to looking at what goes wrong with great companies is detailed in a book written by Jim Collins “How the Mighty Fall”. It is an important analysis of what he calls “the arc of tragedy” that can happen to the best of companies when hubris comes calling.
Collins outlines five key points to pay attention to. So, if your company is having a high-time, even in this still wobbly economy, pay attention. At the first stage, where hubris is magnified, there is a sense of invincibility; nothing can change the trajectory of success. The pattern of denial enters front and center and everyone is so busy congratulating each other that there are no checks and balances, no little kid saying that maybe the emperor is naked.
Next is the “more is better” mindset. As anthropologist Gregory Bateson pointed out, “At some point more, including even oxygen, becomes toxic”. This seems to be the curse of our modern society, and perhaps the present economy is helping to create a course correction. Core values become greed and over- expansion.
Then denial becomes pathological. Bad news is ignored and distorted rose-colored glasses are worn by everyone in the company (or the country). This is where the proverbial deck chairs are rearranged, i.e.: reorganized without being able to admit what is not working and make basic changes.
Next phase is common in companies, as well as personal relationships. Maybe an acquisition will make it all better, or for a couple it’s time to have a baby to solve the difficulties. There is a sense of desperation and none of the core issues are targeted. More denial and salve, with no medicinal value.
Finally, the great have fallen, and as we have seen all too often in the past several years, there is the death of a company, a last gasp before patterns of denial and avoidance offer the final blow?
Is it time we look hubris in the face, own our own shadow behaviors, and learn a new way to transform companies, transform ourselves, when we get so far off track? The next few months should be great learning times for all of us.
Tags: Accountability, Behavioral Patterns, Book, Business, Communication, Economy, Executive Teams, hubris, Jim Collins, Leadership, Patterns, self-reflection, Toyota, Workplace Relationships
Posted in Accountability, Avoider, Boss, Business, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Economy, Employers, Ethics, Executive Teams, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Management, Media, Money, Patterns, Super Achiever, The media, Trust, leadership development | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Recently Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of General Electric Co’s NBC Universal Entertainment, told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose: “It’s the sign of a leader to step up and say you know when something’s not working, and have the guts to reverse it”.
By the end of the interview, it was questionable whether Zucker, like Conan O’Brien, would be fired. That is the way we work. Take risks, win and get the equivalent of an Oscar. Lose, and get the boot!
Is there a better way? Can there be a middle ground where what is learned when risk- taking fails gets dissected, and gives those in the loop a chance to reform their thoughts and actions in a more positive way?
What is so often the case is that the “loser” is so busy defending what has happened and is feeling the heatwaves of being under constant attack, there is no time to learn from what has been going on.
As a culture, we are so addicted to winning, and accept that as the only way. We lose, yes – lose both sight of the value of the down side of risk taking, as well as the human cost of defending, explaining and justifying behavior.
Jeff Zucker may be in a stagnant time in his career. He may be used up in his CEO role. On the other hand, he may well be in a fertile time of learning from the mess and come up with some real and juicy ideas that will get NBC out of the doldrums. If he is fired, he will lose and so will whoever replaces him. There is always backlash where the pendulum often swings to the opposite side. Thus, conservative, risk adverse individuals often follow the risk takers and progress is paralyzed.
So, NBC, a paraphrase from the song “Give peace a chance”, think about it and “Give Jeff a chance”.
Tags: Accountability, Behavioral Patterns, Business, Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Consulting, Economy, Education, Emotions, Ethics, Executive Teams, Family-Based Patterns, Leadership, Management, Media, Money, pattern aware, Politics, Power, Stress, Transformation, Workplace Relationships
Posted in Accountability, Avoider, Boss, Business, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, Consulting, Diversity, Economy, Education, Employers, Ethics, Executive Teams, Human Resources, Integrity, Leaders, Leadership, Management, Media, Money, PatternAware, Patterns, Power, Psychology, Super Achiever, Team Building, The media, leadership development | No Comments »
Sometimes I think we are looking at little tidbits of information hoping that will give us easy answers. Partly we all have been trained to sort and judge, sort and judge, sort and judge. It is initially more complex to look at the whole enchilada, the whole system for answers.
It was not your typical speech by the Federal Reserve chairman; then again, this was a commencement address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, about a two-hour drive from Dillon, where Ben Bernanke spent much of his childhood.