The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

We Need to Make More "Jobs"

Well, maybe. But that's hardly the answer to our inability to compete on the global state.

Should we overlook the fact that almost every country in the world outperforms our students on standardized exams - we come in right behind Bangladesh? Maybe what we need is simply more students.

These are now dated statistics - but not so long ago 600,000 workers in Japanese auto companies produced 1.2 million cars per year. It took 2.5 million workers in the U. S. to produce the same number. Is it more of those kinds of "jobs" we need?

At the same time, they required one accountant to our six to do the same work. Is the answer to employ eight to one?

A "job" in America is something the average American "gets"in order to get a paycheck to buy what he or she thinks they deserve. The average Chinese saves 20 times more than the average American. Let us encourage more spending and less saving. Although how that would help the trade balance is a mystery to everyone but our Washington economists.

But, yeah, let's spend money we haven't got to make jobs we don't need. Then we can all line up for a hand-out. Every single member of Congress will gain from the bail-outs. If YOU don't, who is fooling you?

Backing Up On the "Way Forward"

I don't claim to be as clever as all of those politicians who are making a lot more money than I am. But there are a couple of things I just don't understand, even so. If the way out of the economic mess we're in is to spend enough money to get us back where we were, what kind of "change" is that?

If we sunk ourselves with a borrow-and-spend mentality, how is doing more of that going to bring us to our brave new world?

As poor as some of them are (by contrast), the Chinese save 25 times more than we do. If our government says, "Get out there and spend, spend, spend..." didn't that contribute to the hole we dug ourselves into in the first place? Americans already owe more than they make. Why, if that didn't work, do we want to bring it back?

If our government is our exemplar, and their overriding policy is to borrow more in order to spend more, and by default perhaps encourage us to do that, is that the way out?

A democracy requires fiscally-responsible citizens. Maybe big government comes about as the answer to the problem that there are no longer enough of those kinds of voters to make small government possible. The more voters there are who can't - or won't - be responsible for themselves, the more government agencies are required to do that for them. Is that what the founding fathers had in mind?

And where did our present economists go to school - if what they learned was that a consumption and service economy is more viable in this globalization world than inventing and exporting something of tangible value to the rest of the world? The answer is not "jobs". It is competence, and it is relevance. Those are not our present government's criteria.

"We're going to balance the budget" is just "woo" talk - somewhat akin to "I will lover you forever," or "Our toothpaste is better than anyone else's." Are we citizens really that dumb? Or are we voting our own personal interests - nothing beyond that? One hears very little these days about self-responsibility. Has democracy come to mean the right to buy whatever you want?

Nobody is Born to be a Racist

In a recent interview about her new book, A Mercy, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is quoted as writing in her book: "Nobody is born a racist."

I have the greatest respect and admiration for the mind of Toni Morrison, but maybe not the interviewer. But just so other readers won't be misled, it should be added that "Nobody is born to be judge of a racist."These are both cultural roles that have to be learned. Just because an anti-racist says so doesn't make "racism" a crime.

I can recall a research study back in the 50s that concluded there is evidence that racism is perpetuated as much or more by the victims of racism than by the racists who victimize them. This is along the lines that "it takes two to tango." There may have been some anti-antiracism in our recent election. Jack Welch assumed that Obama "won". One could still defend the position that Obama would not have won unless lots of voters wanted Bush to lose.

I would suppose that "Nobody is born a poet" or a celebrity either. Is a racist to be criticized for being a victim of his culture any more than a celebrity is to be celebrated for being tagged as a "celebrity?" We idolize our celebrities. We demonize (in the recent past) our racists. Fashions of mind change. if we hadn't had so many racists, Martin Luther King couldn't have been recognized for having his "dream."

Racism is not wrong because Nobel laureates or other celebrities say so. There are deeper reasons. Or is it all a war of popular opinion?

Hiring the "Bright Boys"

In his Execupundit.com blog (always worth reading) of November 19 of '08, Michael Wade observes how those "bright boys" who fail, rise again out of the ashes (so to speak). It leads one to wonder if the wrong hiring criteria are being used.

I'd bet that "education" and "experience" are two of the expedients. Still, I don't know who has nailed down precisely what education and/or experience has to do with future success in a future role.

An that, in turn, makes me wonder if the organizations or institutions doing the hiring are using a forward-looking role description for such positions as the "bright boys" might be hired into. I'd guess not. In which case, the fault likes with the organizations doing the hiring.

Here's another thought: Such people as the "bright boys" are hired to "make decisions" and to carry out other such activities. They are not held accountable at the outset for the consequences of their actions.

A pity, perhaps, but entirely consistent with the drift of our pop psyc culture.

Barack Obama's Victory

On their website, Jack and Suzy Welch recently posted a short piece about Obama's "Victory" and the lessons top executives could follow to have their own victories.

You might think that someone as seasoned as Jack Welch would be well aware that all outcomes are produced by many factors beyond the person. Any one of us could have made the observation that people in large numbers wanted to change the policital leadership of this country. So they voted against the status quo - as it usually happens after two terms in office. It's likely they would have voted for anyone who promised "Change." If you happen to be standing in the right place at the right time, that would be good advice for executives. So was the "victory" his or theirs?

You might think that the era of the "great man" was over. But egomaniacs and celebrity explainers would like to keep it alive.

You might think that emulating the person who had become the president-elect would be a good idea. It's never worked in the past. But we would like to believe that there's a recipe out there somewhere just waiting to make you rich and famous. You would be wrong.

You might think that the overwhelming evidence suggests we can learn far more from failure than from success, and that the "lessons" distilled by the Welch's would be more useful if they had been derived from the losers.

You might think that Jack Welch became rich and famous by using the lessons that magically arose from Obama's campaign. Hmmm...

But knowing how anyone became "victorious" doesn't enable anyone reading the "lessons" to do it. Are we saying that Obama could have defeated Reagan at the time, in those circumstances, in the context of that zeitgeist?

It is thin broth, indeed, two parts hubris and one part greed. It must be awful to feed on one's celebrity, even when undeserved - as evidenced by the effort to identify with the "victor - indeed to pose as official explainer of success in the cauldron of politics.

The test, of course, is how many people will become wildly successful by taking the lessons to heart. Obama was "victorious." But suppose he fails in office. What would be the lesson in that.

Perversity and the Stock Market

Perversity is an obstacle to real achievement. If you look it up in the dictionary, you will find that preversity refers to the illogic of what goes on in the world. Best interpretation: if refers to the common experience of living in a world that frequently does not coincide with your expectations about it. (Hello, Wall Street.)

     Perversity refers to the fact that people are inconsistent, always improvising, changing their minds, putting a spin here and there on what they heard or what they saw. It refers to the obvious; that in the real world things are forever evolving - not randomly, in a technical sense - but with no predictable pattern. Our imaginations about the future are as flawed as our recollections of the past.

So, perversity arises in the disconnect between outcomes we believe will occur, and the realities that do occur. Our preceptions may be full of wishful thinking. Our predictions even more so. What we call perversity derives from the fact that the actualities of the world - past, present, or future - are not obligated to be consistent with our hopes, our fears, or our mental models of the way they should be.

Consider this. Perversity has three fundamental sources:

1. Neither the people nor the world you co-habit with them is obligated to be the way you think they are, or to behave in the way you expect them to.
2. The way other people see the world and think about it, and the way other people make decisions and take actions in the world, is something you can neither control nor predict with much accuracy.
3. The world you live in with lots of other people is forever generating happenings and outcomes and effects other than what you intended.

Perversity is what can be said to be at work behind every situation where your reaction is: "I can't understand how that happened!"

Clairvoyance?

Foretelling the future is probably the world's second-oldest profession.

It has always had a market. And there have always been predators--those who prey upon our need to know. Early-on, it was believed that one's fate was written by the gods, in tea leaves, cards, or the throw of the dice. We no longer believe much in fate. We believe that we can subvert fate. So now the foretelling is provided by experts who share their recipes and their secrets with the gullibles amongst us.

Every year comes a new crop of recipes for outwitting that part of the future that is not controllable. A couple of years ago, one of the celebs in this arena was How Hits Happen. This year, destined for similar popularity, is the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. Now, these brothers are very smart and equally articulate. But they must know that their own ideas will either survive or die for reasons that are beyond their ken.

They imperiously set forth the six "principles" of sticky ideas, viz., Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. One can immediately call to mind ideas that may have been confabulated with these principles in mind, but which did not stick.

Or, ideas that violated one or most of these principles, but still survived. Darwin's hypothesis comes to mind. Maybe Wallace's version just wasn't based on these principles.

Why don't Bush's ideas stick? Why do certain terrorist ideas stick?

The lesson for leaders seems to be that prophecy is a far less dependable route to success than are their own actions against the inevitable.

The Leader as Artist

In the May Knowledge @ Wharton there is an interview with Dana Gioia. (subscription required for some content)

In the article, Gioia lays claim to being "the only person in history who went to business school to be a poet."  

Well, he's not the first poet who had a job in business. Those who knew his of poetic bent were therefore skeptical of his ability with numbers. But he had a stint as a VP of General Foods. While the whole article may interest you, he had two important things to say to the readers of this blog.

One is that managers and executives do not generally handle metaphors very well. They want to close things down, not open them up.

The other is that one way of describing the affinity between poetry and leadership (he uses entrepreneurs as the example) is that both are makers. The poet makes new worlds by how he says what he says. The leader makes new worlds by what she accomplishes.

It is a matter of transforming imagination into reality. Of creating something that would otherwise not exist. Both are creators.

We remember them to the extent that their creations enhance our lives.

Semantic Fads and Fashions

There are always fads and fashions involved in what people talk about, and how they do so. Within occupational groups or networks of regular participants, such fads or fashions move faster. They are more contagious—mental proximity.

Managers and executives seem to be particularly susceptible. They want to say and do whatever their peers are saying and doing. The “loafers” of the 50s were almost extinct before they were resurrected as part of the executive uniform. If you listened carefully to what executives are talking about this month—and how they do so—you would have the basis for deconstructing the executive mind-of-the-month.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset put it most succinctly: “People say what is said.” Increasingly, over the last few years, mangers and people in general have been talking a lot about “teams.” If you happen to be in a certain department, you are a member of that “team.” If a manager has subordinates, they are his “team.” If people in different parts of the world are working on the same project, they are often referred to as a “team.”

Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, except that it begins to feel like magical incantation. By calling a mixed batch of people a “team,” maybe that’s supposed to make them think they are more responsible to one another than they actually are. Team-work is a good thing. You know, all-for one, and one-for-all. Lurking therein also is reinforcement for the belief that the absence of hierarchy somehow inspires any rag-tag bunch to turn in a better group performance. There are no leaders or followers. We’re all equal in a “team.” Also lurking in the shadows of that semantic legerdemain is the belief that the more people involved in a decision, the better that decision is going to be.

There may be something to be said for group prayer. And of course words can be used to mean whatever we want them to mean, as Humpty Dumpty said. But there is no evidence I know of that could be mustered to support the claim that the more people there are who are incanting the word “team,” the more likely it is that there will be a rise in those person’s individual or collective performances. People who don’t know, or don’t care, what is required for team performance, won’t perform better if they are referred to as a “team.” Rudyard Kipling suggested that “Words are…the most powerful drug used by mankind.” Drugs may make their users feel like they perform better. But in actuality, their performance may be diminished.

So the widespread(ing) use of the term “team” may actually be an evasion of reality just as much as it is often an evasion of accountability. This is consistent with the semantic magic surrounding the use of the term “leader.” One might guess that such a label is supposed to make leaders out of whomever is so labeled.

Word magic is more fashionable today than it was in the Dark Ages. Maybe there are other similarities. I'm open to your thoughts on the matter...

Guest Post: Tom Collins on Change

Lee and I had some fun in the comments to his earlier post, Do we test CEOs for greed? around the topic of how leaders deal with change. Lee brought up the Chinese admonition that "decisions should be good for 7 generations" and when I saw this little six-minute video I was reminded of that and began pondering, again, the problem of accelerating change (social, technological, environmental) ... and whether we all need to start learning more about how the Chinese think:

glumbert.com - Shift Happens

What do you think? How will the changes noted in the video affect you? your organization?

Or, like global warming, are the changes described exaggerations pushed by Al Gore to sell his next book?