Work is Personal. The Work Matters. I'm in an EMBA program right now, but I view this journey as something that started long before that program, and which will continue long after -- continuous learning, continuous improvement, a "Perpetual MBA".
Interesting post by Tom Peters:
The tawdry behavior of Skilling and Lay, and Fannie May execs (revealed in gory detail last week), is inexcusable.
But ...
Legal—as well as illegal—forms of such behaviors are likely to persist, and perhaps increase, as we experience the full-bore arrival of an economy whose basis is almost entirely intangibles. Just as the intellectual property lawyers will be driving Maseratis for the foreseeable future, all of us in enterprise will be wrestling with value-valuations in a world where the great economies have banked their coke ovens, scrapped their material goods—and come to depend on biotech scientists, programmers, experience providers (think Nike, Starbucks—yes Nike, which several years ago Fortune declared a service company, not a manufacturer), and the like.
New rules are needed for new games—and the shakedown cruise will be long and at times painful. (Think about Microsoft's continuing tribulations, now centered on the European Union, and the RIM-Blackberry patent dispute.)
I don't know about the need for "new rules" -- let's not forget that Skilling and Lay were found guilty under the rules in place before Sarbanes-Oxley became law. I believe that even with current regulations, a debacle like Enron could be repeated -- let's not forget that no less than 16 executives and traders went down in this conspiracy, plus their "independent" accountant and four executives of one of their banks. I think the only thing SOX ensures is that the CEO will have signed each financial report indicating that they know the contents, so Mr. Lay would no longer be able to claim he didn't know what was going on.
Maybe he's not talking about new regulation, but new rules to govern ourselves -- but what would those be? Don't invest in companies if you can't understand the accounting transactions? Practice skepticism if the valuation of a company sounds too good to be true? Those sound like old rules to me.
Tags: valuation, market, regulation, Enron, corporate governance
How to re-invent a commodity business to tell a Purple Cow story.
The firm's name (478 PETE) is the phone number is the story is the guarantee. Of course Pete's not going to rip you off. He'd have to quit his great job at Metro-North to hide from you. Of course he's local, he's even got the exchange!
Bingo. Pete's set for life.
"Slow down, you move too fast,
you've got to make the morning last
Just kickin' down the cobble-stones,
lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy..."
-- Simon and Garfunkel
[Where is he going with this?]
Benton suggests you slow down your demeanor—words and actions. As you enter the office of a recruiter or a new boss, don’t rush over to the chair or meeting table, shake their hand, and spew out a string of clever ideas and observations. A sense of high energy may come across as nervousness, even fear. There are certain stereotypical characteristics that leaders possess. Embrace them. [link]
If there is one thing I admire about my boss, it is that he has learned to manage himself in this respect. I've seen him at Dave and Busters going berserker playing shoot-em-up arcade games, and I've seen him let his inner-geek out laughing at something obscure from Monty Python, but I've never seen that side of him at the office or in a professional situation. At times he can sound a little too scripted and mechanical, but most of the time it comes across as confident and that he has all his bases covered.
“I was working with a politician who was running for mayor,” explains Benton. “I asked him to imagine that he had already won and to act like the top elected official wherever he went. How would he dress? How would he conduct himself in a grocery store? How would he respond when people came up to talk with him?”
You can have all the IQ and ambition in the world, but if you can't manage yourself then you won't reach your full potential.
[btw, the referenced article seems to refer to EQ as Executive Intelligence, but anywhere else I have seen EQ it refers to Emotional Intelligence, and most of the EQ concepts they talk about seem to fit Emo-Intel.]
Tags: EQ, IQ, executive, intelligence, pmba
A year ago, our team was recognized by our client with an award from their Deputy Commissioner. We went downtown to a reception hall and received awards with a firm handshake from the CIO of this huge federal agency. Our company was mentioned three different times in front of the crowd of just under a thousand people as being fundamental to the ongoing success of the project.
Internally, our company has a web page where you can nominate people for a spot award. Well, not truly a "spot" award, they're awarded quarterly. They are cash bonus rewards and have Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels -- being the senior person in the group I nominated the other two coworkers that received the agency recognition to be considered for this spot award.
The rewards system must send an automated alert to the Partner (my boss's boss) when a nomination is made, and I received the following response from that Partner:
Subject: Beacon Award
I'll need to check with [Sr. Partner]. Normally, the sector lead decides who should submit. Will get back to you. I know, not the way the system is advertised, but the reality of it. Thanks for the input. Why her [BT] rather than you and TB?
One of the coworkers I nominated, BT, was a level below TB and I, and basically the Partner just asked me why I nominated a subordinate instead of myself -- that should have been a warning sign... My response:
I wasn't going to nominate myself… I may be a shameless self-promoter, but I have my limits :)
I nominated everyone recognized (BT and TB), and TB's nomination went to [another Manager]. He also responded that we should wait until the end of Deployments. (Will there ever be an End to deployments? Won't they potentially roll on forever?) [update: it's a year later, they still roll on with no end in sight...]
All I know is that the [agency] Commissioner and CIO sat there and heard three times that [our firm] was fundamental to a project that was being recognized. And it gave us the opportunity to have you meet the Commissioner. If that's not a good example of direct marketing, and worth a few dollars, I don't know what is.
If our sector leads make these decisions, who lets them know what's going on with projects (day-to-day and recognitions)? I thought that's what the nomination form was for, so they could be made aware. I'd rather have the nomination submitted and have them decide it's unworthy than have the nomination stop at our local office. [cw]
Yes, the Partner I was writing to attended the awards ceremony and met the Commissioner and CIO face-to-face, so the event was good for him as well. And despite his final reply, I'm pretty sure this nomination never got beyond the local level:
I've already sent a note to [Sr Partner] to see if we can get a nomination approved through our process. MDs normally make the decisions based upon input from the folks, then we go beg for a slot. It's nice to see someone recognized that people should be rewarded.
Yeah, it's nice to see that I could recognize people that should be rewarded. Unfortunately it seems the system was
BT left the company about two months later -- not due to this, but it certainly didn't give her an incentive to stick around. TB moved on to another project within the firm. Our Partner has since retired. And just recently, TB's manager (that declined TB's nomination) was given the Gold-level reward for renewal of the same project, while the rest of the team was recognized with email congratulations.
If you were the rest of the team, how would you interpret that?
Tags: reward+system, bonus, compensation, pmba, shafted
There is no need to convince me that slacking is a good idea, but here are some quotes for the skeptical:
"Companies need to respect the time it takes to do strategic thinking," he says. "Task-oriented thinking is important too, of course. But bigger thinking is slow."
The late Peter Drucker agreed. He wrote in The Effective Executive (an eerily prescient 40 years ago), "All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done." Gulp.
Fortune: Be smarter at work, slack off
AdPulp: Cut yourself some slack
cool site: The Slacker Manager
Tags: slack, slacker, slacking, multitasking, innovation, pmba
Motivation is getting a hold of an idea and carrying it out. Inspiration is the exact opposite, when an idea gets a hold of you and takes you where you were originally intended to go in the first place.
Tags: inspiration, motivation, pmba
I'm thinking of renaming this blog to "management-issues redirect" since that's all I seem to be doing lately, but they consistently have interesting articles.
Finding an organisation worth working for is a great resources of questions to ask and tactics to use if you're looking for an organization that won't flunk a "spiritual audit".
Hidden behind the endless talk of organizational values are profit-driven, high-pressure labor camps trading paychecks - and diminishing perks – for your soul. All of which means that uncovering a company's corporate culture is a critical task for today's job searcher. As important as the job itself.
The first step is to identify your own cultural values, then research what you can from the company website and objective (potentially hostile) 3rd party sites such as WetFeet or Vault. Finally, arrive early for interviews to gauge the company culture yourself and ask culture-based questions in the interview. The linked article has a long categorized list of useful questions.
Tags: corporate+culture, spritual+audit, values, job+search, mission
Once upon a time, I was quite a fan of Robert Kiyosaki's 'RichDad philosophy' (not so much anymore, but that's a topic for another post). I was introduced to the books by a coworker who refers to his day job, working for somebody else, as Plan B. Kiyosaki called Plan B 'the rat race' and the goal is to get through the end of each month; Plan A has a goal of financial independence and abundance.
For different people Plan A might be investing in real estate, starting or buying a business, developing an invention/product, or even writing a book and becoming a self-proclaimed financial guru so that you can live off speaking engagements and book royalties (but as I said, more on that in another post). The key thing is to remember that Plan B is Plan B -- you're doing it because you have bills to pay. But if you ever want to get beyond Plan B, you need to keep working on Plan A.
Signal vs. Noise observes the safety of developing Plan A quietly, aka Embracing Obscurity:
The beauty of starting a side business is that you can fail in obscurity. Many people worry that they’ll languish in obscurity. Don’t worry about having a great idea that no one knows about. Worry about having a bad idea that everyone knows about.
Some Plan As that started off small and fairly obscure: Yahoo, eBay, Craigslist, Google. Perhaps you've heard of them.
[Via AdPulp: A Little Action On The Side]
Tags: side+business, startup, obscurity
management-issues has a special section dedicated to employee engagement. It begins with a warning: "employee disengagement is a global epidemic, organisations still clearly have much work to do to ensure that their workforce can be properly inspired and motivated."
In their roadmap for employee engagement, they give the following advice on leadership:
It's all about communication. Much much more in their special section.Business journals are brim full with articles about leadership. Ignore them – they are all far too complicated. Effective organisational leadership is simple
have a vision of where you want to get to,
Tags: employee+engagement, leadership
