Feb
3
Dear readers, this is the second of a series of guest posts with folks I’ve gotten to know online, and for whom I have the greatest respect.
Bob Morris and I ‘met’ about five year ago when he wrote a wonderfully clear and supportive review of my first book. Bob is by far the most prolific and most insightful business book reviewer I know, and I’ve come to look forward to and set great store by his perspective. I think you’ll enjoy hearing what he has to say:
Q: I’ve really been enjoying your daily blog “Blogging about Business”: http://bobmorris.biz/. It’s quite a commitment on your part! What made you decide to do it?
A: During the past decade, I have reviewed more than 2,300 business books for various Amazon websites, interviewed more than 125 thought leaders, and posted at least 500 commentaries at others’ blogs. I wanted to establish a “home” for all that material as well as new material I continue to add. Also, for the first time, readers can click on individual categories: Book Reviews, Interviews, Profiles, and Commentaries.
Q: Why do you prefer to review business books?
A: Probably because I am comfortable discussing the material they provide. That is not true of fiction, especially of poetry. I read very little contemporary fiction, preferring the so-called “Great Books.” I enjoyed studying them in college and graduate school, and discussing them with professors and classmates. But I have no interest in reviewing Hamlet, although I would love to interview its author!
Oddly enough, I am very comfortable reviewing films, perhaps because I think films are especially effective when dramatizing important business lessons. On leadership, for example: Twelve O’clock High, 12 Angry Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Or how about teamwork? I’d suggest The Sting, The Great Escape, and Remember the Titans.
I am especially interested in reading and then reviewing several books that discuss the same general subject such as performance measurement or organizational transformation, but view it from significantly different perspectives.
Q: You shared with me that there was a turning point years ago that set you on your present career course. What was it?
A: At age ten, I made four decisions: To become an Episcopalian, to become financially independent while being raised by a single-parent mother, to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, and to become the first of my family (either side) to earn a high school diploma. I achieved all four — by becoming a member of St. Margaret’s Episcopal parish; obtaining various jobs (delivering newspapers, caddying, setting bowling pins, working at a paper stand, stocking grocery shelves, etc.); winning scholarships to the Art Institute; earning a high school diploma; and then – with full scholarships — adding an undergraduate and then a graduate degree.
Since earning an M.A. in comparative literature from Yale, my career path has wandered a bit; I guess the only constants have been an insatiable curiosity, an obsession with learning, and a passion to share what I’ve learned with others, hoping to enrich their lives at least as much as they assuredly enrich mine. I still don’t understand why I made those four decisions at such a young age but am glad I did.
Q: What changes in business have you seen over the past 10 or 15 years that you think are the most positive or exciting?
A: There have been so many; here are three. First, the WorldWideWeb. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision about 20 years ago, we can connect almost immediately with almost anyone else in the world or with almost any source of information. Next, the development of electronic devices that can accommodate almost all www communication applications, but can also produce, duplicate and distribute documents.
Finally, I think there have been some very important changes in how supervisors view and – more to the point – treat those entrusted to their care. The command-and-control leadership style was run off years ago but only recently have executives – in significant numbers — begun to embrace Robert Greenleaf’s concept of the servant leader and I credit Daniel Goleman and his research on emotional intelligence for helping to make that happen. I am encouraged by the fact that more executives than ever before consider it a privilege to be entrusted with supervisory responsibilities.
As you correctly suggest in your brilliant book, Growing Great Employees, all great leaders have a “green thumb.” It is no coincidence that most of the companies annually ranked as “most highly-regarded” and “best to work for” are also annually ranked among those that are most profitable and have the greatest cap value in their respective industries. They really do resemble a well-tended garden in which healthy growth is carefully nourished…and sustainable.
Q: As you look ahead, what do you believe is the biggest challenge that C-level executives will face, and how should they address it?
A: In my opinion, the biggest challenge will be to coordinate communication, cooperation, and (especially) collaboration among members of a diverse and de-centralized workforce.
If asked for advice about how to do that, here’s what I would recommend:
• Determine the nature and extent of the challenge for the organization and its leaders
• Focus on what must be done to respond effectively to it
• Make sure everyone understands the ultimate objective and how they can help achieve it
• Provide brief, specific progress updates (at least weekly) from CEO
• Establish a secure online information center that offers answers to questions, solutions to problems, access to resources, etc.
In addition to Growing Great Employees, here are two other sources I highly recommend to C-level executives:
Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson
Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success
Jan
27
I went out for dinner the other night with a dear friend; the food was amazing, the company even better. We covered topics both light and heavy – industry gossip and catch-up about kids and spouses, but also hopes and possibilities, new directions and how best to be open to them. Just before she dropped me back at my hotel, she said, “You’ve got watch this amazing TED video. It’s about the power of vulnerability. The speaker talks about living a life of connection and openness. It’s how you live your life, and how I’m trying to live mine.”
Flattered, of course, and intrigued, I watched it to see what she was talking about – twice – and it’s quite wonderful. The speaker, Brene Brown, is a researcher in the area of human connection. She talks about trying to find, as a researcher, the differences between people who live lives of love and belonging, and those who don’t – who struggle to connect. And she discovered that the only significant difference between the two groups was that those who were living love-and-belonging-filled lives believed they were worthy to have those lives.
So she got really intrigued, and spent the next six years investigating. She found that the key to the whole puzzle was vulnerability: the willingness to be exactly who you are, and to be fully seen in all your glorious human imperfection. She found that those who didn’t feel worthy of feeling loved and connected were terrified by such vulnerability and found it excruciating. Those who felt intrinsically worthy neither loved nor hated being so vulnerable: they simply found it necessary. They somehow knew that being open – to their own imperfections, to uncertainty, to being disappointed or hurt – was essential to being loved, to connecting deeply to others, to feeling joy.
The irony was that those who resisted being vulnerable because they were afraid of feeling rejected by or disconnected from others – were walled off by their own lack of vulnerability so that they felt rejected by and disconnected from others.
As I was watching, I realized how profoundly true I’ve experienced this to be, not only in my personal life, but professionally as well. When I’m feel loving and lovable; when I’m comfortable and confident in who I am and what I bring to a situation; when I feel willing to enter with full hope and curiosity into a new relationship – my interactions with others tend to be fun, fluid, productive, creative and joyful. And this is true whether I’m spending time with friends, cuddling on the couch with my husband, meeting a prospective client, hanging out with my kids and grandchild, working with a client group, or collaborating with a colleague…pretty much whatever.
Brown says so many true and resonant things. One idea captured me most: she spoke about the fact that people who are vulnerable, who live lives of ‘love and belonging,’ demonstrate three qualities – courage, compassion (for themselves and others) and connection. She then went on to note that the word courage comes from the French coeur – heart – and that the original definition of courage was ‘to tell the story of one’s life in a whole-hearted way.’
I love that. I want to do it every single day. So: here’s to the whole-hearted life.
Jan
20
I was truly thrilled to find out that Growing Great Employees was on the INC./800CEOREAD Business Book Bestseller List for December. I love knowing that people are still finding it valuable five years after it was first published.
It also got me curious about why certain books continue to find an audience over time and some don’t. On the INC/800CEOREAD list of 25 books, I noticed that about two-thirds are quite recent – published in the last year or two – and about a third are older. Most of those came out around the same time as Growing Great Employees – 2007 – but 1 or 2 are even older.
To put this in context: about 11,000 business books are published every year in the US. So why are some of them still selling 5, 10, or even 15 years after they arrive on the scene? And why do the vast majority fade away….even many that sold extremely well when they first came out?
Here’s my hypothesis: I think two kinds of business books continue to sell over time, for two very different reasons.
The first kind I call “promise of a quick fix” books. I think of them as the diet books of the business world: they propose that you can meet complex challenges with a few minutes of effort, or with one simplistic idea. I put the perennially-popular One-minute Manager into this category. We KNOW you can’t actually manage people in minute…but we sure would like it to be possible – so much so, that we’ll buy the book in the hope that it will reveal some magical secret that would make it possible.
The second kind I call “timeless usefulness” books. They’re books that provide practical insight or skills around an ever-present challenge or area of endeavor. For instance, humans will always want to know how to understand what they’re good at and what they’re capable of: books like Strengthsfinder 2.0 (also on INC/8CR’s) list and What Color Is Your Parachute (still selling after 40 years) fulfill that need.
And as long as people work together toward common goals, they will want to understand how to make their organizations work well (Good to Great), how to manage people (Growing Great Employees) and how to lead (Love Leadership – also on the list this month).
I like to think that I’m writing books that fall into the second category: those that offer useful skills and insight to address the challenges that face people in business now, next year, and into the future.
Jan
10
Today I’m starting a series of guest posts featuring folks I’ve come to know and respect online over the past few years; people whose blogs in the leadership and business arena I find especially useful and inspiring.
Allow me to introduce my first guest blogger, Mary Jo Asmus. Her blog is a continuous pulse of warm insight about leadership, and her company, Aspire Collaborative Services, works with organizations to help their leaders be truly effective. This post is a bit longer than my usual posts, but I think you’ll find it well worth reading:
Q. You talk about “working at the intersection of leadership and relationships.” I’d love to get your sense of why that intersection is so important, and what ‘lives’ there.
For some reason, the leaders who need to balance their head-thinking (the logical and rational) with more of their heart-feeling (emotions and relationships) seem to gravitate toward the work I do. There aren’t a lot of leaders who model what it’s like to have this balance, and having this balance creates relationship. After all, you aren’t a leader if you don’t have followers, and people follow you because you’ve created a bond with them through relationship.
What resides at this intersection – of leadership and relationship – are corporate environments that reward “doing”, but rarely reward (and often disrespect) “being.” Yet it is “being” more human – working from the right brain and the heart – that creates the foundation for the results organizations seek. As human beings, we’re meant to relate to others in a way that is kind, respectful, open, inclusive, and loving. You wouldn’t see most of these words in a set of leadership competencies; yet they are the very characteristics that create great relationships and great leaders. When leaders demonstrate the opposite of these characteristics (unkind, disrespectful, closed, exclusive, and hateful), they tear people and organizations down.
So I help leaders to genuinely express more of these ‘being’ characteristics into their leadership in order to create the kind of relationships that will help them – and their organizations – to thrive.
Q. What can leaders do differently on a day-to-day basis to create stronger relationships with those they lead?
Since I primarily coach leaders in the middle of the management ladder in large, complex organizations, I often find that not only are they overwhelmed, but they’ve put developing relationships at the bottom of their “to-do” list. The first things they need to do is to prioritize, delegate, and stop doing the things that aren’t adding value in order to make space for the relationships that will support them in being and doing their best.
My advice to them at this point is to get out of the office and be as strategic about building relationships with your stakeholders as you are about meeting your bottom-line goals! I’ve always thought it was odd that strategic plans rarely include anything about reaching out to the people who can help to make the plan a success. We can all be more strategic in this arena.
Also, so many leaders are neglecting themselves in order to do their jobs. Eventually, they burn out. They must find ways to support themselves on a regular basis in the arenas of their emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical health. Almost every leader can improve in one of these areas, and when they put attention to it, they find that they become better leaders in the bargain because they feel more balanced.
Q. What advice do you have for leaders about how to take best advantage of having an executive coach?
I can only speak for myself – other coaches may find other things important. Success in a coaching engagement is as much – or more – about the effort a leader puts into it as it is about my coaching ability. Leaders I work with make progress in coaching when they are honest and open in their sessions, willing to take risks, intentional about practicing their “fieldwork”, and when they reflect and prepare for our meetings. In short, those leaders who are most fully engaged are the ones who make the most progress.
Working with an executive coach takes time and effort. I call it “short term pain for long term gain,” and most good leaders understand that this is what it will take for them to be great. In the end, coaching tends to be the most popular of their leadership development options because it is confidential and customized to their specific needs.
Q. What do you enjoy most about the work you do?
I can look back and see that my whole life has led up to this “calling.” Everything I’ve ever done was preparing me for this work. I enjoy being able to apply my own past experiences and learning to this work. I enjoy working hard to get better at what I do.
More importantly it is such a pleasure and an honor to work with great leaders who are interested and invested in being even better. Watching leaders get excited about their progress, achieve their goals, and observing the effect it can have on their life and that of others is pure joy. I know that I am blessed to be a small part of the lives of leaders in this way.
I will likely be doing less coaching in the future, but I won’t give it up. I’ve wanted to make an impact on larger numbers of leaders, and am just beginning to manage some large-scale coaching engagements for Fortune 500’s. With this new aspect of my business, I have more interactions with coaches than with individual organizational leaders. That’s pretty exciting stuff too, because I find executive coaches to be quite amazing people, who model great leadership themselves.
Jan
5
Just over a year ago, I posted about working with the team at Tikatok to clarify their core values. Tikatok is a cool little entrepreneurial company that lives within Barnes & Noble. Tikatok describes itself on their website as “a fun world where kids create and share their own books.”
At the time, I noted that the five core values the team identified seemed powerful for a couple of reasons – they applied equally to relationships with customers and with each other, and they seemed like clarifications of an already-existing culture on the team, vs. something contrived or overly aspirational. Their values are:
1) (TRUST) We believe in our customers and each other.
2) (EMPATHY) We care and we build communities that care.
3) (PERSONAL IDENTITY) We encourage self-expression.
4) (ACHIEVING FULL POTENTIAL) We inspire everyone to achieve their full potential.
5) (HAPPINESS) We invite people to do what makes them happy.
I remember leaving the session feeling Sharon and her group had a great foundation for success.
Just today, Sharon sent me a link to an article in this month’s edition of Hemispheres, United Airlines inflight magazine. She and five other entrepreneurs are profiled as “innovators who promise to change the way we live.” I’m thrilled to see that Tikatok continues to thrive and grow – it reinforces my belief that people can do well by doing good.
Jan
2
OK, I know that the “new year” is a purely human construct, and has no real meaning beyond that which we give to it. (If we actually cared about the concept of the new year having some connection to physical reality, I imagine we’d celebrate it at the winter solstice.)
But – too bad. I still like to think of January 1st as a time to start fresh. It’s interesting – 
my business partner Jeff pointed out me last week that two of my recent January 1sts have come with huge changes that, at the time, seemed only difficult and negative.
Four years ago on January 1st, my first marriage broke up. And while it was devastating at the time, it opened the way for wonderful things that never would have happened otherwise. As most of you know, it gave me the freedom to meet, fall in love with, and marry my beloved Patrick – and I literally can’t imagine a better life partner, love, friend and companion. And leaving my former marriage freed me to be more fully myself on many other levels, too. I believe this is not only true for me, but for my ex-husband, as well.
Then last January 1st, my long-time assistant suddenly announced that she was leaving Proteus. We were already in the midst of big transition – planning to move our East coast offices to New York, focusing on creating significant growth – so it was especially destabilizing. But now, a year later, I see that it catalyzed us to make a whole variety of needed changes, and has been a very good thing for the organization overall, and for me personally. My assistant Dan is simply stellar, and it’s great to have our own lovely NYC office (a ten-minute walk from my apartment!)
Here’s why I’m sharing these events in my own life: hitting the reset button isn’t necessarily easy or fun…especially when it’s not your idea. But even though change may not be your choice, it’s your choice how to respond. You can either sink into feeling helpless, bitter, overwhelmed, out of control — or you can say, “This is chance to make a fresh start. This is a chance to take what I’ve learned and improve. This is a chance to create the future I most want.”
To new beginnings, however they may arise.
Dec
22
Here’s a wonderful quote a friend sent me yesterday:
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
- Henry David Thoreau
I have definitely found this to be true in my life. There is such power in envisioning a hoped-for future and then moving in that direction: the universe does somehow reward a clear intention. Which is not to say that there won’t be bumps along the way, or that it will always be easy. “Advancing confidently in the direction of [one's] dreams” requires focus, self-reflection, honesty, hard work and resilience, among other things. But if you do those things, it seems to create a kind of momentum; you can “live with the license of a higher order of beings.”
Here’s how I experience that license: I feel unconstrained. On a daily basis, I feel able to be happy, loving, productive and inventive. When something happens that upsets me or that presents a challenge or difficulty, I can first feel however I feel about it (sad, frustrated, demoralized, angry) and then move through that feeling, back into joy, hopefulness about finding a solution, and effort toward that solution.
So: endeavor to live the life you have imagined, and circumstances will conspire to support you in fulfilling your intention.
Dec
16
Generous seems to be the word of the day. I just wrote a blog post at forbes.com about it, and I’ve been thinking about the fact that generosity is a core characteristic of all my favorite relationships.
My partner Jeff and I are in the midst of having our year-end review/bonus conversations with all the Proteus employees and consultants, and I’m struck by how much I enjoy both being generous and being the recipient of others’ generosity. I really like being able to give bonuses to our team at the end of the year: it’s great to have the capacity to acknowledge their hard work and thoughtfulness by literally ‘sharing the wealth’ – we give bonuses out of the company’s profits.
And I’m humbled by the generosity of spirit of those who work with me: not only do they consistently give deeply of themselves – their time, focus, and expertise – to serve our clients, they are tremendously generous in their support of Jeff and me and our vision for the company.
Maybe the best thing: I think we all mostly assume positive intent of one another. That is, if one of our colleagues does something that gets in our way, or seems like the wrong thing to have done – we generally assume that there’s been a misunderstanding, or that they’re not seeing their impact on us…rather than assuming that they’re trying to make our life difficult, or that they don’t care.
Generosity of spirit is, I think, the lubricant for teams: it makes everything work much more smoothly.
Dec
6
Just got back from the 2011 Authors’ Pow-wow in Austin, Hosted this year by 800CEOREAD, Cave Henricks Communications/Shelton Interactive and Greenleaf Books. It’s a conference for business book authors (and aspiring authors) that really pulls back the curtain on the process of writing and publishing a book. We had great, fully interactive discussions with traditional and digital publishers, agents, publicists, social media folks, book sales and marketing folks, speakers (who gave great insight into how to be a more effective speaker) – and a powerful key note from Tim Sanders.
It was wonderful from start to finish. I learned so much; met so many lovely, smart, funny, thoughtful, irreverent people; re-connected with a bunch of other people for whom I have great affection and respect; got important practical advice about my new book; had a tremendous amount of fun and some really excellent barbeque.
The only thing I don’t understand is why business authors and aspiring business authors aren’t lining up around the block to attend this conference. If they knew the amount of useful information, practical support and profound inspiration that would pour through them and bear them up over a two-day period…
What can I say; no matter what anyone else does or doesn’t do, I’ll show up every year I can. And if you’re seriously thinking about writing a business book (or have and want to get it published, or have been published and want your next book to be more successful), GO! They hold it every year in December.
Thank you so much, you guys…
You can get a a little bit of a feeling for it on twitter – the hashtag is #powwow11.
Dec
1
I’m convinced that work and business the whole world over are more similar than they are different. It’s grounded in my belief that core human nature is more powerful, for the most part, than culture or demographics. I was recently interviewed for a magazine called the Asia-Pacific Business and Technology Report, about career strategies – and the questions were not much different than those I would have gotten if the interviewer were in Kansas rather than Korea.
In any case, take a look and see what you think…you may see subtle differences I missed. In any case, I love the idea that I might be helping people in Seoul or Beijing have a more successful career.
