Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Leadership Through Sharing

No doubt you have heard "The Cookie Thief" poem by Valerie Cox from "A 3rd Serving of Chicken Soup for the Soul" Copyright 1996 by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen that goes like this:

A woman was waiting at an airport one night,
With several long hours before her flight.
She hunted for a book in the airport shop,
Bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop.

She was engrossed in her book, but happened to see,
That the man beside her, as bold as could be,
Grabbed a cookie or two from the bag between,
Which she tried to ignore, to avoid a scene.

She read, munched cookies, and watched the clock,
As the gutsy 'cookie thief' diminished her stock.
She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by,
Thinking, 'If I wasn't so nice, I'd blacken his eye!'

With each cookie she took, he took one too.
When only one was left, she wondered what he'd do.
With a smile on his face and a nervous laugh,
He took the last cookie and broke it in half.

He offered her half, as he ate the other.
She snatched it from him and thought, 'Oh brother,
This guy has some nerve, and he's also rude,
Why, he didn't even show any gratitude!'

She had never known when she has been so galled,
And sighed with relief when her flight was called.
She gathered her belongings and headed for the gate,
Refusing to look back at the 'thieving ingrate.'

She boarded the plane and sank in her seat,
Then sought her book, which was almost complete.
As she reached in her baggage, she gasped with surprise:
There was her bag of cookies in front of her eyes!

'If mine are here,' she moaned with despair,
'Then the others were his and he tried to share!'
Too late to apologize, she realized with grief,
That she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief!

The Real "Cookie" Story

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me.

I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do?

In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“Cookies” 

Leadership by Sharing Knowledge

Knowledge is power and sharing it can build even more capability for the person sharing and the organization.   Yet, this concept can be a hard sell to those who have been raised on the belief that giving away their knowledge is surrendering their power.

Today, social networks are allowing us all to share our virtual cookies with people all over the world by practicing the law of reciprocity (www.LawofReciprocity.com).

Black Monday: Ancient History Or Imminent Future?

By Guest Author Nico Isaac

The following article includes analysis from Robert Prechter’s Elliott Wave Theorist. For more insights from Robert Prechter, download the 75-page eBook Independent Investor eBook. It’s a compilation of some of the New York Times bestselling author’s writings that challenge conventional financial market assumptions. Visit Elliott Wave International to download the eBook, free.

Once upon a time, the term "Black Monday" was to Wall Street what the name "Lord Voldemort" was to Hogwarts. It turned the air freezing cold and sent traders flinching around every corner in fear of a repeat of the October 19, 1987 or October 28, 1929 meltdown.

Case in point: The 2008 "Black Monday" anniversary. At the time, the U.S. stock market was locked in a ferocious downtrend that included regular, triple-digit daily declines of 400 points and more. Needless to say, when the final two Mondays of October arrived, the least superstitious investors surrounded their portfolios with more good-luck talismans than a Bingo player. See October 19, 2008 AP headline below:

"Black Monday: Stocks Sink As Gloom Seizes Wall Street. Prolonged Economic Turmoil" is seen.

That was then. Today, the usual dread surrounding the back-to-back string of "Black Mondays" is nowhere to be found. In its place, media reports abound of a new, global bull market "shrugging off," "ignoring," and "making a distant memory" of the event.

For one, "gloom" hasn't "seized" the U.S. stock market in quite a while; from its March 2009 low, the Dow has risen more than 50% to above the psychologically important 10,000 level. For another, the mainstream experts insist that today's financial animal is unrecognizable to that of 1987, and especially 1929. In their eyes, it's a completely different -- i.e. safer, smarter, and sounder system.

We beg to differ.  

See, while the usual experts want to put as much mental distance between today's market and those that facilitated the 1987 recession and 1929-1932 Great Depression -- the physical similarities are impossible to ignore; more so, in fact, to the latter scenario.

Here, the October 2009 Elliott Wave Financial Forecast presents the following news clip from the October 25, 1929 New York Daily Investment News.

Now, take a look at these headlines from the week of October 12-17, 2009:

"The Great Recession Is Over." (Reuters) --- "80% of Economists Say The Worst Is Behind Us." (CNN Money) --- "The Bull Is Back" (AP) --- "The Economic Recovery Is Well Underway" (Wall Street Journal)

They're interchangeable -- Eighty years later.

Along with a similar extreme in bullish sentiment, the performance of stocks between now and the 1929 situation is cut from the same cloth. After an initial plunge from August 1929 through late October 1929, the US stock market enjoyed a powerful rally well into the following year.  NOW: After a steep freefall from its October 2007 peak, the US stock market is once again enjoying the fruits of a powerful rally back to new highs for the year.

As Bob Prechter points out -- in 1930, stocks rallied to the level of the preceding year's gap. Bob then reveals that the same level has been reached now.  So, we all know how the 1930 rally ended. The question is whether the 2009 advance will experience the same fate. As Bob explains in the Theorist, the only way to know for certain is to "look at the reality of the situation."

For more information, download Robert Prechter’s free Independent Investor eBook. The 75-page resource teaches investors to think independently by challenging conventional financial market assumptions.

---

Robert Prechter, Chartered Market Technician, is the world’s foremost expert on and proponent of the deflationary scenario. Prechter is the founder and CEO of Elliott Wave International, author of Wall Street best-sellers Conquer the Crash and Elliott Wave Principle and editor of The Elliott Wave Theorist monthly market letter since 1979.

 Robert R. Prechter Jr.: Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression

 

 

Group Think Stifles Creativity

The noted physicist David Bohm used to say, "Normally, our thoughts have us rather than we having them."  That is why when we're learning something new outside the programming of our brains, we can feel awkward, incompetent, and even foolish.
 
"Group think" is the continual, albeit often subtle, censoring of honesty and authenticity in a group of people.  Groups are naturally coercive: they need shared norms and shared ways of thinking and seeing to function effectively.  But problems arise when the collective censor goes unrecognized by the
team members.
 
When an individual within the group faces the unfamiliar, s/he almost immediately encounters the "fear, judgment and chattering of the mind" that Michael Ray calls the "Voice of Judgment."  Ray, creator of highly popular Stanford Business School courses on creativity, starts with three assumptions:
 
1.  that creativity "is essential for health, happiness and success in all areas of life, including business"

2.  that "creativity is within everyone" and

3.  that even though it's within everyone, it's "covered over by the Voice of Judgment."
 
Ray believes that we can consistently bring creativity into our lives by "paying attention to it" and by building the capacity to suspend the judgments that arise in our mind ("That's a stupid idea," "You can't do that") that limit creativity.
 
When we allow ourselves a willingness not to impose preestablished frameworks or mental models on what we are seeing, fresh ways to understand a situation can eventually emerge.  Breakthroughs happen when people learn how to take the time to stop and examine their assumptions and beliefs.

Source: "Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future" by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworsk and Betty Sue Flowers

For more on creativity and developing mindfulness, check out "The Mindful Leader"

 Michael Carroll: The Mindful Leader: Awakening Your Natural Management Skills Through Mindfulness Meditation

Exposing the Myths of Working Women

Women love lists of what they have to get done.  There are too many things for her to do before she can relax. The more exhausted she feels, the more urgent it becomes for her to get everything done.

As an executive coach of working women, I know in a woman's brain there will always more to do.  It seems that Marcus Buckingham knows this also and has written a new book about what the happiest and most successful women have in common.  Here are five myths that Buckingham reports about the lives of working women:

Myth:  With better education, jobs and pay, women are happier and more fulfilled.

Surveys of more than 1.3 million men and women reveal that women are less happy compared with 40 years ago, and compared with men.

Myth:  Children want to spend more time with their working mothers.

1,000 kids were asked what they wanted from working moms.  10% said "more time."  More than a third wanted mom "less stressed and tired."

Myth:  Women are relegated to lower-level roles at work.

In fact, 37% of women hold managerial positions today, vs. 31% men.

Myth:  Flexible work options like paid leave allow women to feel happier at work.

Studies show a negative correlation between taking advantage of such options and a woman's self-reported daily happiness.

Myth:  Women would prefer to work for other women.

About 40% of women want to work for men, while 26% prefer a female boss.

 Marcus Buckingham: Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently

Worst Cities For New Jobs

Some geographical areas are being hit harder than others as we all go through a structural shift to adjust to the global economy.

Forbes.com reports that Flint, Mich., and Lincoln, Neb., have something in common: They are the two cities in the U.S. with the greatest difference between how many of their employers expect to add workers in the next quarter and how many expect to let them go.  But that's very good news in Lincoln, and very bad news in Flint.

In Lincoln, 21% of employers plan to hire soon, and only 4% plan to fire---a net difference of 17 percentage points. Pretty much the opposite is true in Flint, where 26% of employers are planning cuts to payroll and 9% are expecting to hire. That's according to employment services firm Manpower's latest United States Employment Outlook Survey.

Detroit, Mich., Dayton, Ohio, and Salinas, Calif., follow Flint, Michigan's end of the spectrum, all at -14% to -15% (exceeded only by Flint's, at -17%).

Those cities helped the U.S. as a whole achieve its lowest net employment outlook since 1962. This coming quarter, 12% of employers in the U.S. plan to hire and 14% plan to fire, for a national net employment outlook down 2%.  The Northeast is the hardest-hit region, at -4%.

The ranks of the discontented are swelling. 

As the economy continues its downward spiral, many able men and women are facing an involuntary retirement, as well as having difficulty in finding a new job. That is why a number of job coaching tip options have been created to help job seekers move from where they are now to where they want to be in today's tough times.

Here in Michigan, the epicenter of joblessness in the U.S. with a 15% unemployment rate, Wayne State University's School of Business Administration is sponsoring workshops and a new book, "Yes! You Can Land a Job; (even) in a Crummy Economy" authored by Therese Marie Boldt, a successful recruiter and career coach.  Wayne Business School Dean David L. Williams says, "Our main goal is to prepare students for their professions.  That entails not only theory and practice, but also the concepts Therese so aptly discusses [in her book] such as a positive, realistic attitude; self-knowledge; preparation; and perseverance.  In today's uncertain economy, our students are finding it more and more challenging to cross the commencement stage and step into their dream jobs."

Other universities and alumni associations are steping up to assist their graduates in landing jobs in today's tough economy.  Our suggestion is that the college graduate job seeker put together an action plan with the emotional and financial support of their Baby Boomer parents:

First, buy the book, "Yes, You Can Land a Job" which is the recipe you need to follow.  However, you can't land a job just by reading the book; you much follow the recipe with the support and guidance of career counselor or coach. 

All college grads seeking jobs should consider contacting their university's career services office or alumni association for career coaching assistance...or...search the Internet for a personal career coach to put the book's recipe into practice.  

For all job seekers and those unhappy in their profession (without the slightest clue on how to seek a new opportunity), you can access a range of job coaching services from personal coaching to job coaching tips that can be purchased online.  Now is the time to custom tailor your approach to what's next for you.  Consider purchasing the low-cost 21 Career Transition Tips or sign up for a year's subscription to weekly email Job Seeking Coaching Tips to guide you through your career transition.

For joining a free social network connecting job seekers, recruiters and career coaches ready to share actionable knowledge for those making a career move, go to: www.CareerTips.us.com

Leadership by Example

The Washington Post interviews Captain ‘Sully Sullenberger, who piloted his disabled USAirways flight to the Hudson River in January 2009, in this On Leadership video series.  Sullenberger talks about how he drew on a lifetime of experiences in those critical moments and why leadership is a choice made daily.

Green Things

Here are a few thoughts for determining your company’s green opportunities taken from the September 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review and two books: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman, and Green Recovery, by Andrew S. Winston.

Green Recovery

In Green Recovery, Winston proposes four key focus areas for staying healthy today and getting ready for the inevitable upturn:

· Get lean: How can you economize your organization’s energy and resource efficiency?

· Get smart: What environmental data about products and value chains will save you money, help you innovate new solutions and create competitive advantages?

· Get creative: Rejuvenate your innovation efforts by asking challenging questions, such as “Can we run our business with no fossil fuels?”

· Get people engaged: How can you stimulate your people to solve the company’s environmental challenges?

Green Engagement

When difficult economic conditions increase stress, people seek more meaning at work.

New ways of thinking challenge and engage people. Employees will work harder if they understand why going green is good for business.

Training must focus not only on what employees do, but on how they think. Going green should not be presented as an idealistic idea, but as a stark and urgent reality, regardless of individuals’ political or scientific beliefs.

Green Thinking

Green is not merely a cost center, but a profitable path to growth. People at all corporate levels must focus on the following keys:

· Understand what climate change means for business (which is very different from everyone agreeing on the science).

· See the long-term constraints in natural resources and nonrenewable energy.

· View the business in the context of the full value chain, from suppliers to customers and beyond.

Some of these areas touch on people’s belief systems, so leaders must send a strong message. Throwing some basic information about the environment into internal training modules isn’t enough. Top executives must make strong statements about the harsh realities, current and future constraints and challenges, and the organization’s commitment to action.

Green Hiring

Recent research suggests three-fourths of U.S. workforce entrants regard social responsibility and environmental commitment as important criteria in selecting employers.

People who are happy about their employers’ positions on these issues also enjoy working for them. 

Thus, companies that try to become sustainable may well find it easier to hire and retain “green” talent.

 

Five Stages of Becoming Sustainable

The Harvard Business Review article “Why Sustainability Is the Key Driver of Innovation,” by authors Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad and M.R. Rangaswami lays out the five stages companies will go through on their path toward becoming sustainable:

Stage 1: Viewing Compliance as Opportunity

The smart response to government regulations is to go beyond the norms everyone else follows.

Of course, it’s helpful if an organization can anticipate and shape the rules. This is why consumer participation is necessary, so leaders may stay abreast of customers’ issues and environmental impact.

Leaders, managers and their staffs must have the requisite skills to work with customers, activist groups, lobbyists and other companies (including rivals) to explore and develop creative solutions.

Stage 2: Making Value Chains Sustainable

Pay attention to, and foresee, the redesign of operations so you can use less energy and water, produce fewer emissions and generate less waste.

Your value-chain oversight should ensure that suppliers and retailers also make their operations eco-friendly.

There are groundbreaking opportunities to develop sustainable sources of raw materials and components, increasing the use of clean energy sources (wind, solar) and finding new uses for returned products.

Stage 3: Designing Sustainable Products and Services

You have to know which products or services are most unfriendly to the environment.  Chances are, your organization hasn’t yet devoted much thinking to this.

Don’t fall into the trap of “green-washing,” where companies advertise products and services that claim be to eco-friendly, yet fail to meet well-accepted environmental criteria.  New skills may be required, such as biomimicry (emulating nature to solve human problems) to develop products and compact, eco-friendly packaging.

Stage 4: Developing New Business Models

Companies fail when their leaders misunderstand what consumers want and how to meet their demands. Today’s opportunities lie in developing new delivery technologies that change value-chain relationships in significant ways.

Monetization models may emphasize services over products.  Look at ways to combine digital and physical infrastructures.

Stage 5: Creating Next-Practice Platforms

Many leaders lack knowledge of how renewable and nonrenewable resources affect business ecosystems and industries.  Smart companies will invest time, energy and people in finding these answers.

Look at ways to build business platforms that enable customers and suppliers to manage energy in radically different ways.  How can technologies be designed that allow industries to use energy produced as a by-product?

 

Corporate Social Responsibility vs. The Bottom Line

Some executives think they must choose between the largely social benefits of developing sustainable products and processes vs. the financial costs of doing so. This is a myth.

Consumer support for sustainable products and practices is growing worldwide. Going green will soon be a necessary cost of doing business.

It’s no longer enough to meet minimum legal compliance for environmental standards. A true competitive advantage lies in influencing economic recovery with forward-thinking sustainability practices.

This posting and the following two posts present a few thoughts for determining your company’s green opportunities---taken from the September 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) and two books: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman, and Green Recovery, by Andrew S. Winston.

In the HBR article “Why Sustainability Is the Key Driver of Innovation,” authors Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad and M.R. Rangaswami report that research with 30 large corporations reveals sustainability to be a significant source of organizational and technological innovations, yielding both bottom- and top-line returns.

Becoming eco-friendly lowers costs because companies end up reducing the inputs they use.  In addition, the process generates additional revenues from better products and/or enables companies to create new businesses.

 

The State of Email Today

Applying technology to provide easy access for societal dialog has the promise of peer-to-peer co-creation of knowledge and rapid consensus solution-building.  Today's technology holds the promise of quickly connecting problem solvers with problems, converting actionable knowledge into value that transforms the world.

Back in October 1971 (long after we graduated from a small high school in Upstate New York during the late 1950s), an engineer named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email.   At the time, it must not have seemed very important because Ray didn't bother to save that first message or even record the exact date. Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of email because he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers.  Ray made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans.  At the time, he was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern Internet.

Now, almost 40 years later, email messages are a large part of our lives in today's network society and I bet you can't remember the first email message you ever sent either?   Recently at his 50-year high school reunion, I had an opportunity to talk with Ray about how his invention became the bedrock of communication.   And since less is more, I also told Ray that I forgave him for allowing strangers to fill my email inbox everyday.